From what I understand, Five Doors North is so named for the restaurant it used to neighbour, Gio’s, five doors south. One could be forgiven for believing the name followed from the sign, though:
I’d heard of Gio’s (the Nose) and had Gio’s recommended to me, but after many confused patrols up and down Yonge, I’ve since discovered that Gio’s has moved elsewhere. Thus Five Doors North, offspring of Gio’s, seemed an adequate consolation for my failed search.
Dining on one’s own is rare it seems, although it seems natural to me when choosing a restaurant is in large part whimsy. I had quite a difficult time trying to get the waitress’ attention to inform her that I wasn’t reading a magazine to pass time waiting for someone. An understandable misapprehension, so the tip was normal, but it was getting rather frustrating after about the fifth flyby.
For starters, there was prosciutto, wrapped around some greens, with an interesting sweetly drizzled “dressing”, IIRC:
For followup, linguine with mussels:
The linguine and the sauce was quite good, the latter full of taste, the former possessing good texture; the mussels were the usual smallish breed.
Then along comes the entree, mushrooms a la mushroom – roasted portabello mushroom in a mushroom sauce:
I’m not sure what to make of this one. Vegetarian dishes often are unusual to me, since I’m predominantly a meat-eater. The roasted mushroom cap underneath was quite salty, as if it was fumbled into a salt bag and fished out for the roast. The mushroom cubes and sauce were fine by me (I like mushrooms). Aside from the much larger mushroom chunks, it reminds me of a mushroom soup. I might pass on it in the future though, or at least ask that they use sea salt instead.
Dinner’s finale was an unusually plain, but still tasty dessert, a flaky pastry with a lot of custard sauce and strawberries:
I was a little bit bemused when I got the dish, as it doesn’t look like much. As they say, though, it all ends up in the same place, and my tongue had no complaints about how it looked.
Overall, not what I had been hoping for. Perhaps it was the wrong menu items, but I think I’d really rather go to Gio’s first so I have a point of reference.
I also think I’d better start taking pictures of the menu at these restaurants, too. My memory is a fickle mistress at the best of times, and it doesn’t help that the pertinent blog entry sometimes appears a week or two later. ^_^
