Harvest Room Reopens With a Seafood Splash

Nine months ago, an icicle the size of your average sword pierced the roof of the Macdonald Hotel’s Harvest Room. Water flowed into the restaurant — and the repairs forced its closure.

This week, the Harvest Room reopens, six months later than expected, and executive chef Andrew Ihasz gave the media a preview of what hotel guests and enthusiastic Edmonton diners can expect to find on the redesigned menu.

Before coming to Edmonton, Ihasz cooked in San Francisco. And he’s brought that love of seafood with him to the Capital. Of all the dishes presented during the preview evening, the most-talked about was the lobster ravioli. Basically, Ihasz recognizes that you can’t have too much of a good thing. So, the main? Lobster. Side dish? Lobster.

A butter-poached lobster tail rests on a sea of ravioli served with a lobster butter sauce. Inside the ravioli? Yup, you guessed right. Some green fava beans add a little crunch, but the buttery goodness of the dish is sheer decadence on a plate.

Keeping with the seafood theme, Ihasz scores high marks for the Dungeness crab salad; the crab is made into a patty and placed atop a bed of sweet roasted tomatoes. The salad is served with a liberal helping of smoothy, creamy avocado sauce.

But it’s not all about seafood. Instead of a tiny amuse-bouche, diners were treated to a chicken and cognac parfait. It has the same colour and texture of a liver pâté, but the sweetness of the cognac and the fatty richness of the chicken come together very well. You need to have this with crisp toast and something acidic — or else the richness just might overtake you.

Overlooking the river valley, the Harvest Room offers some of the best panoramic views of the city. It’s back just in time for the holiday dining rush. Barring, of course, another freak icicle incident.