I don’t usually stoop to writing restaurant reviews, but the Short Cellar will make an exception this week for Marc Thuet’s flagship restaurant, Conviction (609 King Street West). The exception is amply merited since Conviction is Toronto’s only law-themed restaurant (besides, of course, the excellent Law Society).
Conviction is law-themed because its kitchen and wait staff are composed entirely of recently paroled ex-cons. If this weren’t gimmicky enough, the restaurant also is the subject of a reality T.V. program called Conviction Kitchen (view the histrionic trailer here).
The website for the show exclaims, “What do you get when you take one of the country’s top chefs, throw in 24 ex-cons with no culinary experience and give them just three weeks to open a high-end restaurant from scratch?” After eating at Conviction, I can definitively answer this question: You get bad food, high prices and an extortionate wine list.
Marc Thuet is celebrated as one of Toronto’s culinary superstars, especially when he plays to his strengths: baking and Alsatian cuisine. But he is also accused of being inconsistent and Conviction takes this failing to a new low. For instance, I ordered a pairing of tenderloin and beef short ribs for $45. It sounded delicious but arrived overdone and gristly — two pieces of meat which should be so different in character where baked into indistinguishable grey pucks.
My companion’s entrée was similarly disappointing: a heavy and slightly dry pheasant unadorned by any flight of fancy. I was aghast at Conviction’s poor quality given the elevated price point; service was slow though the floor was sedate, meals arrived at staggered times and the presentation of the plate was thoughtless (everything was an unappetizing dark brown without a spash of colour or garnish). If prisons served pheasant, this is how it would be offered.
But, it was the wine list that dealt the death blow to my appetite. It was not large or particularly creative and there were bottles going for over four times their listed price at the liquor store. For example, their cheapest red was Finca Flichman’s “Misterio” Malbec ($8.95, LCBO #28803), a very popular pizza-wine on the LCBO’s general list. It’s a decent value at eight bucks, but Conviction listed it for $45! Ouch. My advice to restauranteurs: if you are going to sell wine with an almost 600 percent markup, at least do your customers the courtesy of doing it with a bottle that no one has heard of.
I admire Thuet for working with convicts with no cooking skills, but I don’t see how he can justify his inflated prices when the quality is simply not there. Where will it lead? On the Friday night that I was there, Conviction was nearly empty. But Thuet doesn’t seem deterred — he is opening a new Conviction in Vancouver, and there is talk of expanding into the U.S. There will always be an appetite for gimmickery.
Matthew Sullivan is a civil litigator in Toronto. He blogs weekly here on lawandstyle.ca. The Short Cellar column also appears in the print edition of Precedent. Matthew can be reached at matthew@lawandstyle.beta-site.ca. Follow along on Twitter: @shortcellar.
Photo by Tim Pearce