The food: light lunches at Farmshop
The story:
The summer heat and humidity in Toronto are already making me want to hole up in my air conditioned home office and not come out till September. What would I want to eat during my fantasy two month confinement? Lovely light meals (prepared by someone else) like the ones served at lunch at Farmshop, a groovy farm to table restaurant in the Brentwood neighbourhood of L.A. that I visited some months back.
Don’t be fooled by the deceiving appearance of the exterior of Farmshop, which is located in the quaint Brentwood Country Mart.
Inside, the two-storey space – that I was too intimidated to photograph – is large, airy, modern and bright, and was peopled during my visit with mostly women, lunching in pairs.
Farmshop is the kind of restaurant that charges $10.50 for a side dish (okay, a biggish side dish) of farm name checked fried fingerling potatoes, served with house made ketchup and aioli and sprinkled with wild herbs. Tame herbs being too tame, apparently.
They were pretty damn good, though my husband E’s home version of supermarket fingerling potatoes roasted in olive oil and sprinkled with oregano-spiked Mallorcan sea salt are, dare I say, just as tasty.
To go with the potatoes, we split a Farm Egg Salad ($14.50) that came with mixed greens, heirloom beets & brioche toast, pictured at top, and Potted Fresh & Smoked Salmon Rillettes ($17.50) with toasted rye bread, caper berries, pickled vegetables & butter lettuce.
Both dishes presented refined, delicate takes on commonplace lunch salads. The artisanal breads were freshly baked and pleasingly textured and flavoured, and the high end complements were clean-tasting and light – the kind of food I could eat all summer long.
The Hungry Novelist 