It’s helmed by an exciting new chef, but feels like a small neighbourhood restaurant trapped in an airport lounge.
13.5/20
Contemporary$$
The most important thing to know about Molli, in its current iteration, is that chef Caitlin Koether is an incredibly exciting new talent. Koether, who grew up in New York and then spent stints working in California (at San Francisco’s Bar Tartine) and Copenhagen (at fine diner Relae) is a fermentation geek, something you might clock as soon as you walk into the large glassed-in room that sits underneath a new-ish office development. Jars of pickled vegetables line the shelves that frame the entrance, and there’s a pleasant vinegar-heavy scent coming from the kitchen.
The second thing you should know is that Molli, from the group behind Hazel, Lilac and Square One, is a project still trying to find its feet. After opening in mid-2024 with a more formal approach and a different chef (Aleksis Kalnins), Mulberry Group creative director Nathan Toleman admitted this April that the venue’s direction wasn’t working for the neighbourhood. A new approach and a quick refresh of the space saw Molli reopening later that month, with Koether and an all-female management team in place.
There’s now an all-day menu with breakfast, sandwiches and salads, and the dinner options are more casual and snacky. Tuesday nights have been branded “locals night” with a $30 pasta and bread special.
At its best, Molli can feel like a neighbourhood canteen but with food worthy of an inner-city hotspot. The large space has comfy couches for lounging with cocktails, bar seating, pendant lights that cast a warm glow, and a semi-open gleaming kitchen that would be the envy of any chef. And some of the things coming out of that kitchen are fantastic.
I’m a little obsessed with the preserved tomato and charred bread dip, all tangy and rich and bursting with umami, topped with smoked mussels. You’ll need an order of bread to go with it, but the spelt fry bread in particular is oily in all the best ways.
Charred yellow beetroot comes with a bright sunflower tahini underneath and gobs of lemon, and the yellow on yellow on yellow tastes like sunlight and earth. (Most of the produce used here is from the Mulberry Group’s Common Ground Project regenerative farm.)
A jumble of sweetbreads and ember-cooked onions has something of an old-school lamb’s fry vibe about it, the offal richness ramped up with bone marrow for a dish that’s both modern and nostalgic.
But there are things about Molli that still come across as discordant. Something about it feels like a small restaurant trying to work in a very large space. The service team is fantastic when you have them at the table, but they can get easily overwhelmed. I got the sense that some nights are slow and some nights are far busier than anticipated, but it’s hard to run a restaurant with a large capacity without the staff to manage that capacity.
And dishes engineered for volume tend to fall flat. The $30 pasta special, for instance, featured a ragu that was cooked down to the point of being salty and somewhat dry – it reminded me of the rushed staff meals made from leftovers that I used to get when I worked in restaurants.
Grilled trout, advertised as being part of a “green fisherman’s stew,” is less stew and more fish in green sauce with vegetables. (Although the baby pink confit radishes on the plate were ace.)
Molli is one of those places that may just be a little ahead of its time in this location, but I also think it needs to exert its personality more if it wants to attract repeat customers. The best of the food here has a genuine point of view, but everything else is trying too hard to fit too many briefs.
“The equation doesn’t add up right now, but something great is going to come of Molli.”
The wine program is pretty impressive, with a list that covers way more than your average neighbourhood bistro, but it’s likely you’d never know – I was only ever given the much less interesting by-the-glass menu.
The room has the potential to feel too bland, too much like an airport lounge, and when the soundtrack is safe ’80s pop – which seems engineered to appeal to everyone and, while inoffensive, probably appeals to no one – it does little to help that blandness.
A vanilla cake dessert, dressed up and reconfigured to include dehydrated pieces of sponge and whey butterscotch, is maybe an apt metaphor for the overall issue here. Be a vanilla cake or don’t, but a vanilla cake taken apart and made weird and put back together? It doesn’t really appeal to those with vanilla cake tastes or those who want something wilder.
The equation doesn’t add up right now, but something great is going to come of Molli. It might be this chef, and it might happen in this space, and it could signal a new chapter for dining in Abbotsford. I hope it gets weirder and bolder and more confident – it might be the only way it will make sense in this neighbourhood and this city.
The low-down
Atmosphere: Like the best-designed airport lounge ever
Go-to dishes: Tomato and charred bread dip with mussels ($12); onions and fried sweetbreads ($16); charred yellow beetroot with sunflower tahini ($23)
Drinks: Extensive by-the-bottle list with lots of exciting finds; short by-the-glass list. Creative cocktail and non-alcoholic drinks program
Cost: About $130 for two before drinks
Good Food reviews are booked anonymously and paid independently. A restaurant can’t pay for a review or inclusion in the Good Food Guide.
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