Back to Toronto

Bishop met me at the train station and we transported enough cidre for our needs by cab back to his house, where-in I was informed they'd made reservations at
Gamelle and showed me it's menu they'd printed out. Looking good.
Of course, appearance is not what one goes to a restaurant for.

Bishop and Deb were happy with their ordered red, I with my sparkling, as we dawdled on bits of bread and olive tapenade. I'm going with the grilled calamari. Squid has to go out of its way not to taste delicious. Miso is part of its ingredients, and whenever I see the word "miso" on the menu, I know it'll be pretty good.
The squid is indeed excellent, but the thing it's on tastes like coleslaw with pretentions, stolen from a better salad. I tell the waiter, who says he'll inform the chef. Yet the squid itself is so good I don't want to add the smallest sip of wine to it. I'm enjoying a spectacular bite of squid, and then when I sample its celery base, it's as if I've fallen to a newly mined circle of taste hell.
I go with the vegie entree as once more the ingredients Sound delicious, in the sense that something you read "sounds" rather than smells or elicits taste memories.
Deb's quail tastes like really good steak, cooked over alderwood or some very fragrant wood, mmm, more cow than bird about that flesh. An animal from our forgotten past, our creative future?
I order my vegie thingie with some prawns, and they arrive still armoured. If I wanted Kagemusha, I would have dug up Kurosawa. My mouth reels with delayed taste.
My food looks like a taco ufo with some snakey orange innards in search of Miro. Tastes like well-cured cardboard. Wine helps. The lentil thing is intense only in its starchiness. The wine pairing is at best, haphazard.
Deb's caribou tastes like a cow would taste if it were drenched in herbs and good wines all its life and then devoured by people who worshiped what they ate. Strong meaty aftertaste though.
If the Inca had not been counquered and their empire existed to the present day, perhaps this is what you'd get in one of their restaurants. Interesting uses of beans. Too high altitude for my tastes. And what would Inca wine taste like?
A secret forever gone? Where would our guardian llamas take us? Memory lives in tastes longer than any other place, so where do we go with that knowledge?

All in all, I've eaten as well in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal as I could eat in Vancouver, and that's a high standard. They're also splendid cities to stroll around, even in the absence of memories, historial contexts or comprehension of direction.