Savoy Brasserie

I can't believe how quickly E is changing.  At 9.5 months, she has now learned to army crawl her way around, showing us all of the ways our house is not sufficiently baby-friendly.  I'm guessing she'll be walking before fully crawling.  She has started cruising this week and that's all she wants to do...  Well..cruising and using the phone to call 911.  Seriously!  What are the chances of a baby pressing the talk button and then 9-1-1?  Apparently, pretty good.  Oops.

Good thing she doesn't make strange (yet?) -- we were able to get out a second night out during Grandma and Grandpa's recent visit.

This second night we went to Westboro. The corner of Churchill and Richmond has changed a lot this year.  First Gezellig moved in on the north-west corner and now Savoy Brasserie has taken over the space previously occupied by Newport Restaurant on the south-east corner. 

The Savoy has a lot of things going for it (location, space, design, concept).  At the same time, there are new restaurant kinks to work out (food consistency, staff training, flow of restaurant, equipment functioning).  

We met up with a couple of friends for dinner about two weeks after Savoy Brasserie opened. For an appetizer, R and I ordered the Savoy salad.  The salad was a bit underwhelming, but I'd attribute it to forgotten ingredients.  I didn't realize until after I finished the salad and saw the neighbouring table's order that our salad didn't include chick peas.  I did, however, notice that there wasn't a drop of dressing (grapefruit vinaigrette) on the salad.  Our friends order the escargot and enjoyed it.

For my main, I ordered steak frites.  The steak was done to my specifications (medium), but I debated askng for steak sauce.  Generally, I hope for a steak to have enough flavour on its own, without needing some sort of sauce.

My friend ordered a bouillabaisse, which she enjoyed.  

R ordered veal scallopine and said it was "just okay."  Not pictured is the duck confit, which our friend really enjoyed (though I think he felt like his serving size was smaller than ours).

Although the staff all seemed polite, I found the number of waiters a bit dizzying.  I know R got really tired of his chair being bumped by passing waiters.  Hopefully they can find a way to widen the aisles for the waiters to pass through.  Below, you can see see the amount of space between the two chairs, which is a main artery of the restaurant.  

Of course, the elephant in the room is the firemen.  Again, I'll give the restaurant slack because it recently opened.  But, the smell of smoke, followed by blaring smoke detectors and entry of firemen kind of broke up the evening.  We took it as our cue to leave and headed down the street for some dessert.

So -- the big question.  Will I return?  Sure -- I'd like to see how they're doing in a couple of months.  Aside from the lack of space between tables, I think all of the bumps we experienced can be easily ironed out with time.