The 10-course dinner is to feature a half-pound of Perigord truffles per person, Japanese A5 Wagyu beef, sea urchin, Japanese Kurabota pork, caviar and more.
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Ottawa’s celebrated Atelier restaurant is offering an exclusive, over-the-top New Year’s Eve feast for four celebrants for whom money is no object. Chef-owner Marc Lepine is proposing an evening of luxurious delicacies and rare wines that will cost $20,000 plus tax.
In an email, Lepine says he “just got the urge to put together a crazy dinner for just one table.” Atelier had stopped serving New Year’s Eve dinners a few years before the pandemic, he adds, because he wanted to give staff at his Rochester Street restaurant the night off.
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“Good for him (Lepine) for trying,” says Jacob Richler, editor of Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants magazine. “I hope he sells it, and if he does, I’d like to know what he serves.”
On Friday, Lepine posted details of Atelier’s New Year’s Eve dinner on an Instagram story. The 10-course dinner is to feature a half-pound of Perigord truffles per person, Japanese A5 Wagyu beef, sea urchin, Japanese Kurabota pork, caviar and more. The courses are to be paired with top-tier wines including Krug champagne and bottles from Château Lafite and Château d’Yquem, among others.
For Lepine, the lavish dinner will be stretch because Atelier’s style of fine dining, which it calls “modernist Canadian cuisine,” is less about extreme luxury and more about creative leaps in the kitchen and contemporary, cutting-edge culinary techniques. Atelier’s usual tasting menu consists of 44 tiny courses and costs $225 per person.
Lepine says his special dinner’s ingredients and wine will cost well over $10,000, singling out the truffles and first-growth wines from Bordeaux. Gourmet Food World, an online seller of truffles, charges just under $500 U.S. for a half-pound of fresh black Perigord winter truffles from Italy. A bottle of Krug champagne can range in price from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars.
The $20,000 price for dinner includes a tip, Lepine says.
Richler says that while $20,000 is indeed a small fortune, for Lepine’s ideal, deep-pocketed customers, it could be “just another banal expenditure … like picking up a few bottles of Richebourg Domaine de la Romanée-Conti or having your front brakes serviced on your Lamborghini Urus.”
He adds: “There are Food Network chefs, famous but notoriously hopeless in the kitchen, who are charging $20,000 and more just to show up at their own catered events. With Lepine, at least, you’ll instead be getting the undivided attention of a culinary dynamo. The meal should be superb and the associated bragging rights exceptional.”
Lepine is the only Canadian chef to have won the Canadian Culinary Championship twice. In 2018, he was named Canada’s most innovative chef by Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants.
Opened in late 2008, Atelier has consistently ranked among Canada’s top restaurants. On this year’s Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants list, Atelier came in 56th.
phum@postmedia.com
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