Beyond the Pale brews up good food and drink in the ByWard

Approximately nine months ago, Beyond the Pale Brewing landed a prime location in the Byward Market thus marking their second location.

The enclosed courtyard is an attractive historic location and for a few moments while socializing you can allow your imagination to whisk you away to Europe or at the very least, Montreal or Quebec City.

Perhaps best known for their Pink Fuzz beer, a largely wheat-based brew loaded with zest of grapefruit. It has some of that IPA bitterness but not too much. 

I opted for their Clean Cut which is described as a Kölsch, a beer specialty from Cologne, Germany. Kölsch is sometimes described as a lagered ale, although the reality is that it uses a special German yeast strain that ferments best at lower temperatures than the common ale yeasts.

It was a fresh and light-tasting brew with hints of sun-drenched hay giving off some cereal notes. A delicious and less hopped option for hot days.

Deep-fried cauliflower florets have been the rage for about a decade now and are commonly and erroneously described as “cauliflower wings”. For reasons that don’t require much elucidation, this drives me nuts. It’s a vegetable.

But this lazy shortcut is used on menus to signal that a diner can expect “buffalo hot sauce” on their cauliflower. In my experience, this has only worked once. I was still living in Vancouver, and I had this at a vegetarian restaurant on Main Street. Come to think of it, it may have been my first time having this appie.

At Beyond the Pale, they don’t refer to this as “wings” but simply as crispy cauliflower. That’s all that’s required. It was the best version yet and one of the most surprisingly delicious things I’ve had this year.

The seasoned batter was super crisp with steaming, perfectly rendered cauliflower at the core. These bites came glazed in a sweet Halifax donair sauce spiked with jerk seasoning. Such a simple idea but one that worked very well, making this vegan appetizer a winner.

For a main dish I ordered a cabbage roll filled with basmati rice and dressed in a smoked tomato sauce. 

On the side were oven-dried oyster mushrooms that, interestingly, vaporized in a plume of dust as soon as I bit down on them. I’m unclear as to the seasoning as the mushrooms were so bitter, they were inedible.

The roll itself was stuffed with toothsome basmati rice done in that delicious smoked tomato sauce and robed with Ermite, a Quebec blue cheese. Ermite is a beautiful blue cheese, but too strong for this dish and it would have benefited from either a Gorgonzola or a German Cambozola. Cheeses that are creamier and milder.

I was informed that the menu was created by well-known Beckta chef/co-owner Richard Wilson and frankly, based on the little I had, I’m not surprised by the talent behind the recipes.

With dishes like fried green tomatoes with pimento cheese, shishito peppers, roast potatoes and beet ketchup or kielbasa with buttermilk spaetzle and king eryngii mushrooms, there’s enough that’s intriguing to lure me back.