Best New Restaurants 2015: #17, America
Best New Restaurants 2015: #17, America
The view from the surrounding office towers into this 31st-floor restaurant in the Trump Hotel must be distracting. At night, it’s a Vegas-style club with theme parties, bottle service, micro-skirted beauties and randy brokers. Midday it’s another story: tables of Brooks Brothers suits, quiet talk of serious deals, prevailing calm. It’s the best time to appreciate the stellar menu, which is overseen by the Oliver and Bonacini group’s exec chef Anthony Walsh and takes you on a culinary tour of the U.S.: chowder with sassafras, an andouille sausage jambalaya, and a gorgeous salad of tuna sashimi, macadamia nuts, nori and puckery pineapple.
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- The Hawaiian-style salad features sugary pineapple, toasted coconut, nori and ruby-red petals of yellowfin tuna.
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- America's buckwheat flapjacks with seared foie gras.
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- The ham-and-pickles plate includes bracingly sour chow chow, peppery salami and country-thick slices of Louisiana-style tasso ham ribboned with smoky fat.
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- For the fat-cat version of lobster Rockefeller, lobes of snowy tail and claw are blanketed in a silky hollandaise and laid on a bed of braised spinach with airy deep-fried Idaho potato puffs.
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- Meet the Clusterphuck: a foot-long slab of Valrhona chocolate bark studded with marshmallows and nougat, and laced with Pop Rocks, which make for a fizzing equivalent of Proust’s madeleine.
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- Toronto firm II by IV Design remade the restaurant’s formerly stuffy décor by adding dove gray banquettes and pops of pastel pink.
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- America is run by the restaurant group Oliver and Bonacini and the nightclub impresario Charles Khabouth. By day, it’s <em>the</em> place for power lunching (the food is terrific). At night, waitresses wear platinum wigs and deliver Champagne and Grey Goose, holding lit sparklers over their heads, a Khabouth bottle service signature.
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- Chef de cuisine Bill Osborne executes the glam dishes conceived by O&B’s executive chef Anthony Walsh.
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![](http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https://torontolife.com/food/best-new-restaurants-2015-america/&title=Best New Restaurants 2015: #17, America&picture=https://torontolife.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/best-new-restaurants-2015-america-intro.jpg&description=By Mark Pupo | Photography by Dave Gillespie
The view from the surrounding office towers into this 31st-floor restaurant in the Trump Hotel must be distracting. At night, it’s a Vegas-style club with theme parties, bottle service, micro-skirted beauties and randy brokers. Midday it’s another story: tables of Brooks Brothers suits, quiet talk of serious deals, prevailing calm. It’s the best time to appreciate the stellar menu, which is overseen by the Oliver and Bonacini group’s exec chef Anthony Walsh and takes you on a culinary tour of the U.S.: chowder with sassafras, an andouille sausage jambalaya, and a gorgeous salad of tuna sashimi, macadamia nuts, nori and puckery pineapple.
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Someone doesn’t read the Toronto Star…
Who paid whom? The idea that this place is mildly palatable is a weak attempt at humour.
West: 48
East: 3
Someone tell Chris Nutall Smith, maybe he’ll realize his mistake. America is one of the best in the city.
Chris Nutall-Smith loved the food. It was the awful service and sleazy ambiance that he didn’t like.
Correct, though it seemed that he couldn’t help but take personal jabs at the restaurant which were completely unnecessary. The fact that he slammed the entire restaurant so hard yet praised the food so much demonstrates the efforts of a weak writer who just wanted something to blow up, which it did.
Given what he experienced, the jabs seemed completely reasonable and well-deserved. I expect a restaurant critic to distinguish between the service, the ambience and the food, and to rate them separately. The first two (the service and the ambience) sounded appalling. All the best, and most respected, restaurant critics are fair and no-holds-barred. His review was both. A restaurant critic who tempers his or her criticism of the service or ambience simply because (s)he liked the food would be a poor critic.
And, for what it’s worth, explain to me why he is a weak writer. Can you point to some examples?
ETA: I notice that in your only other Disqus comment, you commented on an interview with Nutall-Smith with the following: “Probably the biggest dick in the toronto restaurant scene, and this definitely shows it.” It’s easy to leave anonymous insults in comment sections. What precisely in the interview makes him a dick? I’ve never met the man, so I am curious.