Asian cuisine the inspiration for Bagshaw’s impressive new spot Máquè

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This article was published 30/03/2016 (3504 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The past eight months must have been frenetic and nerve-racking for Scott Bagshaw, one of Winnipeg’s best-known chefs.

His first restaurant, Deseo, was shuttered for three days in August after the province nailed the five-year-old Riverview bistro with environmental-health violations. His second spot, Enoteca in River Heights, cracked EnRoute magazine’s prestigious list of Canada’s best new restaurants in October, making the grade at No. 9. (It was the first time a Winnipeg restaurant appeared on the main EnRoute list.)

Then in January, Bagshaw opened restaurant No. 3, a 30-seat McMillan-neighbourhood cubbyhole he dubbed Máquè. The name, he says, is a transliteration of the Chinese word for sparrow, “a small and often overlooked” bird that nonetheless possesses great power.

Is this a metaphor for Winnipeg? I hope not, given this city already suffers from a surfeit of similar tropes.

Máquè the place, not the idea, is a lot more simple. It’s an upscale but not overly haughty small-plates restaurant with a menu of meticulously constructed and easily shareable dishes. It lists menu items in descending order from lighter bites to heavier dishes. It pours wine by three-, six- or nine-ounce glasses; the smallest pours are convenient for patrons who want to sample multiple wines without maxing out their credit cards or getting intoxicated (see box for Free Presswine writer Ben MacPhee-Sigurdson’s recommendation). And the menu changes every few months.

In other words, Máquè is very similar to Enoteca, with the primary difference being the Iberian and Italian influences have been replaced by ingredients and dishes inspired by Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Vietnamese cuisine.

The only small bites on the menu are a pair of bao, the taco-like steamed-bun snacks made famous by David Chang’s Momofuku restaurant empire. Bagshaw’s pork-belly version makes no pretense of pushing the culinary envelope; it’s a sweet-and-savoury morsel lifted straight from the Momofuku playbook, down to the textural interplay between crunchy pickles, soft white dough and satisfyingly chewy pork.

Máquè’s veggies are even better, even if they are unfriendly to vegetarians. Pan-fried greens in XO sauce, the most outstanding dish on the menu, get an amazing dose of umami from dried scallops and Chinese ham. Brussels sprouts receive a similar treatment, as they’re tossed with a crumble of Chinese sausage and a truffle-wine reduction. Even asparagus topped with a poached egg rises above bistro-menu cliché with the help of a lemon aoili dressing and a drape of tofu skin that’s supposed to be shattered and mixed in with the runny yolk.

There are a few dishes that reference Bagshaw’s other restaurants. Pan-fried sweetbreads, served at Deseo from the beginning, show up here with a shmear of black-garlic paste, crispy bits of dehydrated orange, a small dice of pickled turnip and roasted hazelnuts. The raw scallops that often adorn Enoteca’s menu serve as a topping for a custard inspired by Japanese egg dish chawanmushi, flavoured with truffles and chicken stock. Ditto the beef-tenderloin tartare, another Enoteca staple, rendered smoky with tamari sauce and crunchy with jerusalem-artichoke chips.

Dim sum inspires the menu, as well. Small dumplings with daikon wrappers instead of dough are on the regular menu, while utterly brilliant pork dumplings, swimming in a sesame sauce, showed up as one night’s special.

The best of the heavier dishes is “Mongolian lamb” with house-made al dente egg noodles and a chili-carrot butter; this outshines a similar but sweeter dish of duck confit tossed with the same excellent noodles. A brick of perfectly cooked pork belly — cripsy on the outside, with a molten interior — is dressed with a brussels-sprout kimchi.

The fried rice is another great textural combination, thanks to more of that tofu skin, a runny egg and shiitake mushrooms, but doesn’t burst with the bold flavours prevalent on the rest of the menu. Squid-ink noodles are also slightly disappointing; they’re perfectly chewy but suffer from a too-sweet peanut-sauce dressing. The only real miss on the menu, however, is a dish of delectable blue-crab body meat in a far-too-salty brown butter. Crustacean flesh of this quality should never be seasoned so heavily.

For dessert, there was only one item on offer: a pleasant little coconut pot du crème, with passion-fruit gelée and roasted hazelnuts. Thickened with agar, it’s the only vegan item on Máquè’s menu — and it was offered as a special.

The use of those hazelnuts — as well as the dehydrated orange flecks, sunchoke chips and tofu skin — in more than one of Máquè’s dishes could disappoint diners who make their way through the entire menu over several visits. But this is a nitpick about another excellent Bagshaw effort.

If you like Enoteca, you’ll enjoy Máquè. Deseo, meanwhile, is slated to close in September.

bartley.kives@freepress.mb.ca