The Hoof Café

Eventually (maybe this weekend), I will have to come up with a blog layout similar to The Big Picture‘s so that I can share with you all the pictures in a not-so-cramped space. I suppose most people that keep tabs on me probably read this through their RSS reader of choice, so you’ll get the full effect of these pictures anyways.

These pictures were taken while having brunch at The Hoof Café, located at 923 Dundas Street West, in what Alice and I learned to be the area of Little Portugal. I had been dying to try this place since I saw the picture Canice tweeted. The Hoof Café is a spin-off of the restaurant literally across the street, The Black Hoof, which apparently is also very good. We tossed around the idea of going for brunch at The Hoof Café and then trot over (ha ha) to The Black Hoof for dinner, but that would’ve been too much meat even for us. Food comas… and stuff to do. You know.

The restaurant itself is tiny, probably seating a maximum of around 30 people, with probably 10 of those sitting at the bar. The décor is worn and tacky, but it’s charming at the same time. The silver ceiling (don’t know the term for the style) is a nice, old touch, while the black-brown tabletops stand out in contrast. I didn’t take that many photos and not wanting to seem like a tourist and snap photos of the interior, I just decided to snap photos of the important stuff – the food. However, if you’re curious of my description, you can thank others for taking some photos.

The first shot above is of blueberry buckwheat pancakes, topped with ricotta cheese(?), rabbit, and the lightest little bacon curls I’ve ever had. There was also some green sweet candied something you can see in the top-right. I was intrigued by this because of the rabbit, which I find gets off far too easy in North America due to its cuteness. More rabbit for all! The rabbit was excellently cooked and very mild in flavor though.

The pancakes? I’m not the biggest fan. In hindsight the mixing of sweet and savory was probably not a good idea. Each element was good on its own, but together, it just tasted a little funny. The bacon curls though were delish. They were light and crunchy and were almost like chips. I could eat a whole bowl of those.

These are fresh donuts with some pork marrow in the middle? I think that’s what it was. Not having the most discerning palate when it comes to bone marrow, I just thought that the donuts were a great way to start off a meal. Warm, sweet, and it had a sweet little nugget in each of them. I guess that was the marrow?

Alice’s "Benny". It was good but I don’t remember much of it. Something tells me that if I ate any more than the sample I took from her plate, her fork would be in my hand rather than through the heaping piles of pork on top of the English muffin. Her dish was also served with some pork rinds which didn’t necessarily compliment the gooeyness of everything else with its crunch, but you can never say no to more pork on a plate.

Finally to end off the meal, fresh tagliatelle pasta with a spinach Bolognese sauce, topped with shavings of some sort of cheese. I really rock at these descriptions, eh? It’s really hard to go wrong with a pasta dish, especially a fresh pasta dish, and this didn’t disappoint. Just a very thick and warming plate of pasta that, if eaten on its own as a dish, would probably leave you with that warm feeling in your stomach for several hours after digesting.

On a technical note, all photos were taken with my Canon SD870IS, show with no flash and macro focus for the most part. Cropped, resized, curves applied, and sharpened in Adobe Photoshop. It’s unbelievable how much better the pictures look with a single pass of radius 300, amount 0.3 unmask sharpening. Just as it is with a DSLR, it’s all about making sure you have ample lighting and trying to isolate the subject. I wouldn’t mind doing casual food photography with a manual digicam now, seeing as how much we can actually push these photos in Photoshop afterwards. These weren’t even RAW!