As I sat in the bar staring at the back of Bruce Springsteen’s head and nibbling on some blue cheese and mussels, I realized that Trio left me a little confused.
I’m not normally one for hotel restaurants but the buzz, combined with the fact that I kept running into the chef de cuisine, Todd Duplechan, at the local markets had me really wanting to check out Trio, the downstairs restaurant at the Four Seasons.
Unfortunately, times is tough, as they say. Trio doesn’t exactly fit in the budget category so I hadn’t yet had a chance to explore the place. Luckily for me, the good folks there have rolled out a brand new, shiny happy hour and they invited me and some other media folk over to poke around.
What I found was a series of compromises, but not necessarily in a bad way.
On the one hand you have a young chef who’s passionate about local food, who wants to serve simple but innovative, even challenging dishes to people who seek it out and appreciate it.
On the other, you have a large corporation that has built its very successful world brand on consistentcy and meeting a certain degree of expectations. They have established a clientele who are loyal to them because they know what kind of amenities and experience they can expect when they show up at a Four Seasons Hotel.
That’s a big boat to rock.
However, Todd and his staff are making some admirable inroads.
Like most good evenings, this one started off with a glass of bubbly.
For instance, the first thing he wanted to talk about was how he had bought a pig from Richardson Farms while it was still teetering around on its little trotters in its pasture just outside of town. Then he bought it all the pecans it could handle and let it finish out its days feasting on the sweet, plump nuts.
