Len's News, Notes, and Stuff

Restaurant Review: Chez Laurent @ Yonge & Sheppard

I’ve seen Chez Laurent on Yonge St just north of Sheppard for years. I lived in the area 15 years ago and saw the restaurant there. I figure something that’s been around for that long should be pretty good. Besides, I favor small restaurants and this one has a family-run feel to it. So, I booked a reservation for a party of 6 at Chez Laurent last night and had a uniquely slow experience with lackluster food.

Service was exceedingly slow. The 2 servers on-staff were polite and pleasant, but they had their hands full with the 9 or 10 tables in the place. I have a feeling they were helping out in the kitchen from time to time, because there was (from what I was told) only one cook working in the kitchen yesterday night. Yesterday night was a Saturday night, and I should mention there’s a reasonably well-attended live theatre right near this restaurant. All told, it took us 2 hours from when we ordered 1 shared appetizer and 6 entrees until we finished our meal. No bread came along with the double-platter of escargots, so we had to ask for some bread.  15 minutes later, we got a basket with 4 thick slices of bread. Remember how I mentioned there were 6 of us at the table? We got 4 slices of bread which we split amongst ourselves. Asking for water resulted in a similar test of patience. The servers apologized several times throughout the evening, but for whatever reason the restaurant’s operations were terribly inefficient.

How was the food? The escargots were good. They started us off nicely and reassured me that I’d made a good restaurant choice for this group gathering. Unfortunately, the entrees were disappointing. My lasagna, indicated in the menu as “North America’s best” was okay but not fantastic. I’ve had better, and on menus where no such hyperbole was included. Two of my friends had the pasta special – penne with italian sausage – that looked positively pedestrian. Someone else ordered the fish special with red snapper. It, too, looked astoundingly pedestrian. The osso bucco looked nice, but I didn’t notice any comments about how good it was – that’s unusual for osso bucco because usually when someone tries the dish for the first time, I see some sort of reaction about how meltingly soft, rich, and enjoyable the dish is. No such reaction here at Chez Laurent.

Most damning, I think, was the chicken breast in paprika rose sauce. Thankfully the person who ordered it enjoyed the dish, but I was not so keen on the end result on the plate. The chicken breast was moist, yes, but it was boiled and not properly sauteed. The rose sauce was nice, but there was no noticeable paprika character in it. The pasta side, which the server had said was going to be linguine or fettucine, turned out to be the same penne that the others at the table were having, just minus the italian sausage. The dish lacked flavor and certainly had no character or personality.

Given how long it had taken us to work our way through the meal, and how lackluster everything after the escargots had been, we didn’t stay for dessert. It wasn’t just our table, either – a large table of 9 near us had to get the menus for themselves and I heard them suggest they’d ask for a jug of water rather than risk asking for individual glasses of water. Their meals arrived at the same time as ours, though they ordered around 10-15 minutes later, so something was definitely going on in the kitchen.

I won’t be going back to Chez Laurent, and I recommend against anyone else going there, either. Nice folks there, but unless the food is improved and things sped up dramatically, I’d say stay away. At least from the diners’ perspective, Chez Laurent reminds me of some of the don’t-know-what-they’re-doing restaurants I’ve seen on Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares television show. If you’ve ever seen the show, then you know that’s a damning comparison to make.