Gourmet Garden Brunch and Update

Since my previous review of Gourmet Garden International Cuisine, there have been a whole lot of new developments, I'm sorry to say. That's why you need to go there - to tell them to stop, and to experience the amazing Pakistani food before it's too late.

When I first went to Gourmet Garden I noticed the menu was trying to combine traditional Pakistani dishes with pasta, panini, and a whole host of items that were very much not South Asian. I was okay with that because I could ignore all the junk and focus on the stellar Pakistani selection. Now I want to cry. Apparently the owner's son is taking over the restaurant and is responsible for re-vamping the menu with a North American 'healthy' food slant. All skepticism of 'healthy' lasagna aside, I'm pretty heart-broken that the manager feels that a piece of bread with some salty, sliced, grocery store meat and cheese is more desirable to the St. John's lunch crowd than a stew of tender lamb combined with the perfect blend of spices. These two meals come from very different traditions and I know which one is better. Don't you dare try to tell me that panin are Italian. Yes, good panini are beautiful, simple and a good lunch, but that is not what Gourmet Garden is offering. If the bread is not made in-house with the highest quality flour, the meat is not hand-sliced from the top quality meat, and the cheese is not made with care locally or imported, in essence, carefully chosen, then all you have is an over-priced sandwich. Why should anyone spend their money on a lunchbox they could replicate at home for less money? Heck, a lunchbox that you make yourself can even come with a yogurt, a snack or a compartment for a juice box. Ironically, one of the only things that the new menu of Gourmet Garden and the old have in common are the fresh juices and smoothies, since both North America and Pakistan can agree that mangos are delicious. But how many mango trees grow in North American backyards? Yeah, exactly. So, again, Pakistan wins.

I found out that Gourmet Garden now offers brunch and I nearly died from joy. I had dreams of Pakistani brunch of biryani and lentil crepes and chutneys in place of jams!!! Naan and chapatti to make toast commit suicide because it would have no reason to live. Unfortunately, there is again a menu transition in effect. I got to the restaurant and there's a new chef. Seems like a nice guy, but definitely not Pakistani. 4 standard breakfast options on the menu, like steak and eggs, or crepes. Okay, here's the first of my complaints. If you're trying to do brunch a la North America, you need to do it right. Even fancy restaurants suffer at brunch. You need a perfect hollandaise, and you need croissants, home-made, not bought from Sobeys. Maybe some challah, some waffles, real maple syrup, fresh whipped cream, fresh-baked scones. You need sauces that are made of more than sugar and some sort of tasteless fruit.

The brunch saving grace was the Pakistani menu option - beautifully spiced ground lamb patty in home-made flaky wrap. Sobeys stayed out of this one. The chapatti bread was absolutely to die for. This Pakistani woman knows what she's doing. No offense, new non-Pakistani crepe-making chef, but this bread is the equivalent of the most amazing French brioche, but savoury and done so much better than you could ever do a brioche. I'm sorry. Why try to change what you're so good at, restaurant? I feel like I'm lecturing an adolescent! Love yourself for who you are! Don't try to change yourself to make a boy like you. Certainly don't let a child take control of your life. Family is family, but sometimes family is wrong. Okay, fine, the market for Pakistani food is not huge in St. John's, and that was his argument, but it's all about marketing. If people don't know how good your food is, what reason do they have to try it? Getting bums in chairs is the key. More shmucks like me writing reviews about you.

The brunch buffet was all Pakistani...except the store-bought muffins on the side...gross.

Four beef dishes swimming in fat and oil. Cow's feet! Where else can you get that? A big table of South Asians came in and gobbled it down. Fresh huge pans of beef biryani were brought in. The same daal and frozen vegetables from the buffet...the daal was better this time, actually, and the vegetables were decent, just like lunch. So it's fine, but oh God, the lamb in chapatti a la carte was so much better than everything, including my crepe with bananas and orange sauce, which was made completely with strawberry and I felt I had to try just to be fair to the new menu. Last time I checked orange was very much a different fruit, and a different colour.

Finally, a peace offering. The brunch buffet had dessert. Well kind of. You should come just for the halwa. Not to be confused with the Middle Eastern sesame paste dessert, this is more like a cream of wheat breakfast cereal, sweetened slightly and served with puri, a fried lentil bread. Completely traditional and warm and filling and comforting. So fried lentils don't sound amazing, but that's where you need to give this place's Pakistani food a second chance. Three 6" round and thin wraps came to the table, hot and so flavourful that you could eat them on their own, and I did, not knowing until later that you're supposed to scoop up the halwa with them. No harm done. They certainly did not go to waste. I couldn't stop myself, and that very rarely happens to me. So many things I have yet to learn about this cuisine. Imagine what all of St. John's could learn if you decided not to force them to eat horrible panini!!

If this restaurant changes over to all-American (read pasta, sandwiches and, God forbid, quiche) it will be a sad, sad day in the culinary development of downtown St. John's. As it stands, the American-style menu will be served everyday for lunch, and the Indian buffet will be served for lunch on Thursdays and Fridays, with maybe some Pakistani foods sticking around on the same American-style evening menu.

Please, please, please, St. John's eaters, go to this restaurant and beg for the Pakistani food to stay. Even be so bold as to ask that the American-style food leave. There are times when you should respect your elders, and try to support the business they started, menu-changing son. First and foremost it's all about a good product, and you already have that in the Pakistani food. If the pasta took over you wouldn't have that anymore, and even with incredible marketing you just can't compete in that market in St. John's, what with newish upstarts like the Pantry and the Hungry Heart Cafe, who have much stronger "local", "organic", and socially-conscious mandates. "Niche" is the right word here, and the niche of fast lunches of so-so food into which the restaurant will fall is not one in which you will thrive.

Here is my advice in the form of gustatory flattery: If I could eat your puri every week for the rest of my life I would die a happy, slightly overweight, happy person. If you can offer me the best Pakistani food in St. John's at even higher prices than the ridiculously low ones that you currently charge, I would pay it. I have developed an addiction to your food in three visits. I crave it. My mouth salivates at the possibility of lamb from your mother's deft hands. Fennel and coriander appear in my dreams. I wake up Saturday morning and feel sorry for the poor saps who get excited over eggs benedict because they just don't know what Pakistan and Gourmet Garden have to offer.

Here's my practical advice. You can't be just a casual, inexpensive Pakistani or North American spot or you'll never make any money. Your Pakistani food is fancy by North American standards. Your buffet is casual. India Gate does the buffet/fancy dining establishment gimmick well. If you go that route, you can do it better. Your American food, however, is a cop-out, without any kind of reward in sight. That's just self-loathing and foolish. I'm sorry, but this is how sad your restaurant makes me. I love your food and you're taking it away from me and everyone else in St. John's who would love your food as much as I do. More people should love your food! This is how good it is, that I complain so fervently about its soon demise.

Save this restaurant from generic food!!!

Gourmet Garden International Cuisine

Gourmet Garden International Cuisine

377 Duckworth Street
St. John's, NL
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8 out of 10

Pakistani

This marks my first St. John's restaurant review! The city is a burgeoning culinary scene of both fine-dining and ethnic eateries. Where once food quality topped out at fi' and chi' (nothing wrong with it), now the city boasts a handful of prestigious restaurants that any food snob would enjoy, as well as your neighbour, his sisters, their second cousin twice-removed, her four kids, and their Poppie.

Now there are the city's newcomers - locales like Sun Sushi, International Flavours, A Taste of Thai, India Gate, City Lights, Asian Taste, and the Multi-Ethnic Eatery in the Torbay Road mall that are all helping make St. John's a global city. What's the attraction to these new restaurants? They're exotic and affordable. As much as Newfoundlanders are skeptical of raw fish, there were enough adventurous folk and returnees from Toronto to convince the city that Sun Sushi, the original St. John's sushi spot, was worth a try. Years later they're still going strong.
The newest addition to the downtown restaurant scene is Gourmet Garden. It's what most would call Indian, but the owner, Iftikhar Ahmed, is actually Pakistani and while the food in both India and Pakistan is different from region to region, what most people think of as 'Indian' food makes up the majority of the menu. A few big differences include the abundance of kebabs (skewers of meats like beef, lamb and chicken), which constitute the most popular food business in Pakistan. Newfoundland has fish and chips places, Pakistan has kebab houses. We have Ches's, they have Al-Hamra Restaurant. Now we have Gourmet Garden, so I maybe don't need to justify a trans-Atlantic journey.

No kebab is created equal, though, in the same way you'd argue over your favourite chips. Pakistani kebabs are also closely related to Afghan kebabs, the country's neighbour to the west, so a good way to get accustomed to these snacks would be to try the ones at Goumet Garden and their neighbour to the east, the Afghan Restaurant, to compare their versions. Despite the proximity of the countries, the two countries' food, and the two St. John's restaurants, are very different, yet delicious experiences.

Be warned, the kebabs don't come in the ridiculously reasonably priced lunch buffet ($11, tax included), so you'll want to make a few trips. You probably won't mind. The buffet is a great introduction to the restaurant and the cuisine, so before word gets out on how great this place is you might even get the whole place to yourself. A lunch buffet where you're the only guests could be a recipe for disaster - visions of un-eaten, lukewarm, over-cooked meat and vegetables sitting in chafing dishes full of oil. Not so here. Since the amount of guests was expected to be low, only a handful of dishes were served in the buffet itself. Extra complimentary items that couldn't sit and wait to be eaten, like home-made samosas, a beautifully rich stewed lamb dish, coriander, tomato and onion chutney, and naan came directly to the table without a pit stop in the buffet.
The options in the buffet itself included a beef biryani, a chicken leg biryani, a spiced potato dish with red peppers, spinach and carrots, a soup-like lentil dal, salad with lettuce, tomatoes, croutons and cheese (I don't think Caesar ever quite made it to Pakistan...but England did), and a simple boiled and fried potato dish in a spice blend masala. My only complaint was that the beef and chicken in the two biryanis was dry. Biryani is a very hard dish to make and the two at Gourmet Garden would have been great if they hadn't been waiting for customers to arrive, which was proven to me on a return visit for dinner where the seafood biryani was incredible. Biryani takes an age to make and boasts a list of ingredients longer than the grocery list you take to Sobeys on a given Saturday. It's a baked rice dish often served at celebrations, but it can be a meal in itself. Saffron is soaked in warm milk to give the rice its traditional orange flavour, though it can be replaced by food colouring. I'm pretty sure this version used saffron, and they definitely didn't skimp on meat. For all the spices in the dish, it actually tastes very mild, so if you're not a fan of spicy food and what you would normally think of as Indian and Pakistani cuisine, you'll probably like this dish when it's made-to-order, or fresh into the buffet.

As it was, the buffet biryanis just couldn't compare to the incredibly tender and fresh lamb brought hot to the table (pictured above). The fresh spices of fennel and mustard seeds made for succulent, savoury mouthfuls to highlight the lamb's natural flavour.

When the samosas came, I knew this as going to be a good meal. They were made of a surprisingly thin hand-shaped dough surrounding a very mild potato filling. With the salty cilantro chutney, the flavour popped out of its dough comfort zone. The dough itself was also refreshingly crisp since it hadn't been left cooking in the hot oil too long.

The dal dish and the potato dish with red peppers in the buffet competed for top vegetarian marks. The dal was a mildly sweet, nicely chewy, and very salty blend of mouth-calming comfort after a bit too much of the cilantro chutney. The potato tasted like cheese, so I suspect creamy yogurt was added, like it is in biryani, to coat and thicken the dish. It's a small point, but care was put into how every potato was chopped. This was not a quickly-thrown together side dish. There was precision and expertise involved. The chef later explained to me that she used organic yogurt and fresh spices, which I believed since I tasted every whole cumin, fennel and coriander seed in the dish. The flavour did not come from pre-ground spices or commercial spice blends, and obvious effort was made to make the dish as fresh as possible. I'm also very happy to say that none of the buffet items had my nightmare pools of grease. That's not to say that this is low-fat food, but the health benefits of the spices (turmeric, cinnamon, and fennel for digestion, ginger for the immune system) were not out-balanced by the amount of oil, as is often the case with South Asian restaurants.
There was a lot of potato, and there was a lot of rice. Add the naan and more potato in the samosas, and this was a starch-heavy meal. That's not to say that there was a lack of meat. Pakistani cuisine actually involves more meat than most Indian cuisine (perhaps because of the abundance of kebabs and fewer dietary restrictions?), and with the additional lamb dish and dal, there was more than enough protein on the plate. It would have been a struggle to go back for seconds. I certainly felt like I had gotten my money's worth, even though the buffet was relatively small. Only two other dishes would complement the buffet - another vegetable dish without potato, and a yogurt dish to cool the palate. Once lunch business picks up expect the buffet to grow, but if the lamb is any indication, dinner and a la carte ordering will be your best bets. Also, at dinner, the chef makes fresh naan bread, and you won't be disappointed that gulab jamun (deep-fried dough soaked in sweet syrup) and home-made, honey-drenched baklawa doesn't come with the buffet.

St. John's is lucky, indeed. So often a new Pakistani take-away in Toronto's Little India sells the cheapest food it can to make a profit. Vietnamese places in Montreal mostly will use MSG to flavour the food instead of relying on fresh spices and home-made broths. The city sets the standard and new restaurants need to adapt to compete in a tough marketplace. St. John's may not have the variety of larger cities, but what we have is quality. Gourmet Garden International Cuisine is a great example of why we can be proud of this city.

Expect to Pay: $12.50 lunch buffet, including tax and tip; $15-$25 for supper
Hours: 11am-10pm daily, lunch buffet everyday
(709) 237-7861