The Plateau de Fruits de Mer

In French it means, roughly, a platter of the fruits of the sea. You see it in brasseries from Paris to the Brittany coast: a wide tray, often raised on a stand, carrying whatever shellfish and fish the house is proud of that day. Bread, butter and a sauce or two come with it.

It arrives in the middle of the table and everything else stops. Nobody has their own plate in the usual sense. You reach, you pass, you ask what that one was.

What I took from it

I met French country cooking properly at Centro in Toronto. What stayed with me was the generosity of it. A meal was meant to be plenty first, and elegant second.

The plateau is that idea at its plainest. Variety is the point. Six small things, each done properly, give a table more to talk about than one large one.

Our version

Ours is a warm platter. Each fish is cooked the way that suits it: cod wrapped in pancetta, a monkfish and shrimp roulade, wild salmon poached in butter, garlic prawns turned into croquettes. There is a golden fish sauce to pass around, and bread with lobster butter.

Beside the fish sit the things that grow here: potato gratins, zucchini, carrots we ferment ourselves. A French cook would recognise the shape of it. The details belong to northern Alberta.

We serve it on Fridays, for the whole table, ordered by Monday for that Friday. The details are on our Seafood Platter page.