In the darkening dusk of a hot summer night, we went down to Amuse-Bouche, tucked away on Tecumseth Street—the same little building that used to be Susur Lee’s first restaurant, Lotus. The new owners had mended the fountain and set out tables in the small front patio—every seat taken that night. Inside, the room was darkly romantic: candlelight glimmering on white linen; walls the colour of a Chinese persimmon, hung with heavily textured abstract paintings. We were shown to our table by Sarah Lyons, formerly chef de service at The Fifth and recently returned from a sojourn in France—rather a high-powered maître d’ for a side-street boîte, but she is an old friend of the two young chefs-patrons, Jason Inniss (for years The Fifth’s sous) and Bertrand Alépée (once The Fifth’s pastry chef), embarking here on their first adventure in ownership.

Menus appeared. They read well—modern French dishes, sparked here and there by exotic ingredients: chorizo emulsion, for instance, to spike banyuls-glazed dorade; jalapeño mojito sorbet to cool a black cod ceviche. Cheeses were sourced from the incomparable Cheese Boutique, and the desserts looked unusually delicious. Could it be that Amuse-Bouche was one of those places restaurant-goers dream about but so rarely find in Toronto—a charming and unpretentious hideaway with impeccable service and excellent food? Every element up to that point suggested as much: it only remained to taste something from the kitchen.

Right on cue, Lyons appeared at the table with a gift from the chefs—some mysterious dainty hidden beneath a tiny glass cloche. There was just enough ceremony in her manner to compel our attention, just enough of an explanation to pique curiosity. If you’re going to call your restaurant Amuse-Bouche, you had better take the actual amuse-bouches seriously—unless, I suppose, you decide not to do them at all, as some kind of counterintuitive intellectual statement. We lifted our cloches and out wafted the earthy, funky aroma of truffle. When I tasted, the truffle was just a suggestion, one flavour in a white asparagus cream thick enough to support a thin slice of loose, meaty pig’s trotter terrine, just starting to dissolve in the heat. The hint of vegetal bitterness from the asparagus was the cunning catalyst, nicely offsetting both the pervasive richness of the soup and the sweetness of the meat. Upsized as an appetizer, it would have been overwhelming, but as a teasing, unexpected, palate-rousing freebie, it was a classic.

That night, I watched other customers raising their cloches, saw a smile come to their lips, an effect that could almost be a translation of amuse-bouche. Or of amuse-gueule, a nearly synonymous term, and one heard much more often in France. Your gueule is your gob, or yap—a slang word, part of the merry patois of the Parisian streets, though an amuse-gueule is no more jaunty or coarse than its genteel cousin: it’s just those playful French being ironique. Either way, an amuse is like a stand-up comic’s all-important first joke: if it works, it leaves the audience eager for more; if not, the whole evening may be doomed. Occasionally over the years, I have ended up wishing the chef had not felt compelled to offer an edible greeting—a sliver of dried-out smoked salmon, perhaps, set on a wet, flaccid slice of cucumber, like yesterday’s canapé, or some fantasy on a theme of ratatouille so charged with garlic that the flavour stayed with me for the rest of the meal, ruining the wine and even polluting dessert. You want to mutter, “Better for us all, amigo, if you had never been born.” But an amuse is a gift, and good manners compel you to eat it.

In the past, when amuses were new, that obligation was not always understood. Avalon’s chef-patron, Chris McDonald, recalls an evening in 1983 when he was an apprentice at Michael Stadtländer’s eponymous restaurant on John Street. “It was my first experience with doing an amuse, long before they were commonplace in the city. We sent out some prosciutto with Michael’s compliments. To our amazement, the table sent it back, asking for something else. So we sent each one a marinated mussel. They sent them back, too. Finally, we fried up some rams’ testicles the butcher had put in the order that morning. The waiter didn’t say what they were. Those they ate.”