The Mill

What you want as a young Chef is to have your customers eat your food, and come away from the experience having learned something new. You want surprised looks on their faces as they bring fork to mouth, and you want the chatter around the table and in the car on the way home to be, at least in part, about how exceptional your food was. The cherry on the cake is when part of the conversation includes: «Do you believe our bill was only a hundred bucks (for two)!!!
Anyone who has eaten at even one really exceptional restaurant knows that this does happen. And even very simply prepared food can be truly exceptional.
But this did not happen after a recent visit to The Mill in New Glasgow.
Clearly, being passionate about healthy local food and ethical food production doesn’t necessarily make one an exceptional chef, at least not yet.
First the good–
My wife liked her seafood chowder very much. That’s good. We are on PEI; if the seafood chowder is bad, you are in very serious trouble.
Now the not so good–
I find it surprising that young chefs on this island, in fact restaurants in general on PEI, don’t seem to hesitate to charge New York prices for their food. The problem is that many lack a world class approach to their cooking. Are these PEI Canadian Culinary Institute graduates doing what every chef should do? Getting off the island immediately and seeing how exceptional the world of food can be??? Because they should be.
Charging $ 18 for a Lobster and Shrimp Gratinee appetizer which comes in a 3 inch circumference bowl and consists primarily of bland mashed potatoes (way too much of them) a bland cream interior with gouda cheese (couldn’t taste it) a few peas and lumps of lobster, is patently ridiculous. Whatever fresh herbs were in the dish were likely destroyed in the oven. Hugely disappointing start.
My Pad Thai ($ 28) main course was more substantial, but again, it was unexceptional. Why reinvent Pad Thai unless you are going to truly reinvent it? And if it’s devoid of tamarind (where was the addition of ginger noted on the menu?) as it seemed to be, why even call it Pad Thai?
Other guests around the table were similarly unimpressed with their choices. There were mumbles of disappointment about the tiny portion of shrimp on the appetizer-​of– the-​day, rumbles of discontent about too much sauce and breading on the lamb (why disguise good lamb?) and the chef dining with us at the table was not at all impressed with his Seafood Cioppino.
The coffee was really very good. And who can go wrong with Banoffee Cheese Cake?
Fortunately, we were being hosted, so I was not the one to be shocked by the bill. If I had been, this review might have been positively nasty.
A visit to Central Provisions in Portland Maine might be a good idea for Chef Emily Wells. There she will meet a young chef who dispenses with pretension and high prices (by that I mean the pretension inherent in charging high prices), and yet serves food which is incredibly inventive, satisfying, reasonably priced, served in an egalitarian atmosphere, and yet occupies the conversation for days to come. When we dined there last year we walked away with a bill slightly above a hundred, which included more than enough food to satisfy, and a few fabulous craft beer. And we talked about his food all the way home. I guess that’s why he has been described as one of the top ten emerging chefs in the USA in 2014.