They were giving out ” I Love Offal” stickers for the Chris Cosentino head to tail dinner at DNA. Apparently, he loves offal. So do I, but I didn’t love this meal. We got started off on the wrong foot with a horse and horse heart tartar with an oyster folded into it. The dish looked like it had been plated in the dark: a lump of meat, smear of aoili, big slices of brioche toasts and a handful of fries thrown on a plate. The horse tartar itself was complex and well seasoned, really good actually. We were instructed to make a sandwich out of it, but the brioche was rock hard like it had been toasted last week and the horse fat fries tasted like a day old offering from McDonald’s. The central piece of the dish was well done but poor execution of the peripheral items really killed it for me.

The next dish, described as “Eel, Blood, Egg” was  quite good. It consisted of seared applewood smoked eel, served with a Hervé This-style slow cooked egg and a dollop of pig blood foam on a bread polenta. The component parts were all very interesting. The  foam was reminiscent of an airy boudin, the bread polenta packed tons of flavor and the eel was perfect. My attempt to make a slow roasted egg following Mr. This’ instructions had been less than a roaring success due to a temperamental oven and I appreciated the texture. My only complaint in fact was that there was no real textural counterpoint in the dish. The fish was firm but the portion was tiny, and the rest of the elements on the plate were fairly soft. Still, a very good dish in more than one respect.  It was followed up by “Lamb Pluck Fra Diavolo” which I thought was the highlight of the evening. Cubes of heart, liver, kidney and lung sauteed with onion and garlic and served with a mint puree and a modern looking smear of chili heavy pan drippings. I loved the contrast of the different meats, like a little offal mixed grill, and the drippings provided the deep pleasure of scraping of the caramelized and carbonised bits out of a cast iron pan after a heavy roasting. I could easily have eaten two of these.

The downward spiral started immediately afterwards with the cleverly named “Big Brain, Little Brain”, sheep brain and testicles served with a radish and watercress salad. Traditionally, brain is served in relatively small portions reflecting the fact that it is quite fatty and rich. I think my lobe, which was bigger than the ones my dining companions were served, was at least 10 ounces and it was  undercooked in the center so it didn’t have that nice creamy texture throughout. The edges were quite nice, but the ratio of salad to brain inadequate and with nothing else on the plate but a couple slices of fishy tasting sheep balls, it turned into a tiresome dish pretty quickly. The amount of cholesterol I consumed could be measured in grams. This probably would have been the worst course if it hadn’t been for a dessert which featured candied chicken fries (ie testicles), a candied cockscomb and chocolate n’duja ice cream. The ice cream was actually pretty good and the cockscomb makes sense in a dessert because its of its gelatinous texture and relatively neutral flavor, but chicken fries tasted meaty, cold and gloppy: exactly the sort of thing you wouldn’t serve with ice cream if you had given it much thought.

The ability to transform ordinary and even unwanted products into something desirable is the hallmark of a great chef. But more importantly, a great chef knows how to create plates that are balanced and make sense. It is wonderful to be surprised by a dish that doesn’t taste like you thought it would, and it is equally painful to order something and find out that it is exactly as bad as it sounded. This dinner had its high points, but more than its fair share of technical letdowns and more disappointingly, the conception of a lot of these dishes just wasn’t very good. It was like Cosentino came to Montreal with a mandate to serve up a dare instead of a meal. Judging from the feedback on Twitter and elsewhere, it looks like a lot of Montrealers didn’t get that the joke was on them.

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