Citrus Restaurant, Toronto Ontario

Located in The Grand Hotel & Suites.  Citrus has a beautiful atmosphere, nice light dinning room and lounge, lots of windows and comfy seats.  The service is hit and miss, some of the servers are great others not so much.

Lunch was good, pizza, pasta, club sandwiches.  Everything was fresh and well presented, flavors were alright.

Our conference dinner was a different story, we started with an Arugula, spinach & mixed greens salad, with sweet roasted peppers, strawberries and grapefruit, with a citrus herb vinaigrette, phew, lots to say.  So it came out wrapped in a cucumber ribbon, which to me ive done and seen too many times, but to those who dont work in the industry im sure appreciate it very much.  Im not a fan of mesculin mixed greens, i just dont like the really bitter leafs with the really sweet ones, i prefer a lettuce with a crisp crunch.  The fruit was nice, dressing was good. Missed the forgotten peppers
Next for our entrée we were served broiled chive jumbo tiger shrimp...umm how does one over cook shrimp to chewy and tough but still manage to have some raw grey bits on the shrimp...hmm i think that they were originally undercooked, and then sat in a warm place for a while, hence the crunchy yet brown asparagus.
Grilled beef tenderloin, "natural reduction" with citrus roasted potato and asparagus spears.  The tenderloin wasnt too bad, just a bit gamy, citrus roasted potato was not citrus but came with half a lemon beside it...please dont tell me natural juices when they clearly are not, it was definitely helped along with some box mixture.
Be careful when creating these Table D'Haute menus, the salad and main all contained citrus, take it easy on the same flavorings, it becomes too much. Also i suggest starting with some small and savoury to induce the appetite, then have citrus to cleanse the palate.

The dessert, mini Dulce de leche cheesecake with espresso syrup. The cheesecake was store bought but still tasty, the Dulce needed some more caramelizing, the syrup was nice, however the presentation was brown and unpleasant, not to mention the real daisy shoved into the cake, thats gross so many bugs in the centre of those flowers. All items on a plate must be edible.

So after that dinner we left the conference room and went to the restaurant.  My appetite wasn't satisfied and i was curious about the menu.  So i ordered crab cakes with aioli and Le Haut-Richelieu Quebec goat cheese, melted with tomato relish and crostinis. This was more like it.  
We ordered a bottle of red wine from Spain and two desserts to go, the brown butter banana tart with toasted marshmallow was divine, along with the warm chocolate cake with creme fraiche ice cream.


So quite the experiences, all so different from the same kitchen. Just one thought, please please please, do not advertise and offer 24hr room service and then tell us the kithcen is close when we phone....




Natasha:)