Deseo Bistro

Great intimate local place with no tourists!!! Good food that combines different flavors that really work. To me, it has French fusion in tapas. The pork belly was my favorite, as well as the Pot de Crème. Friendly staff, excellent service.

Great food! Easier to share with a group of four. The menu will have you at first sight. Loved the zucchini fritters. Funny how when I first walked up, downstairs were completely empty, I got hesitant, then decided to go in anyway. Turns out they seated everyone upstairs.

Exceptional food and service! ‘L’ was an outstanding server who knew how to accommodate specific ingredient requests. Good friends who shared most dishes. The eggplant, crunch salad, gnocchi, beef tenderloin and flourless chocolate cake were our favourites. The salmon and tuna were just fine. It was a first and second visit for our party and we will definitely return!

This is one of the best restaurants around. Period. The interior is fun and cozy. The service is fantastic. It is so nice to eat in a place that actually understands the importance of solid front end staff. The food is so good it makes me want to weep. I crave the crunch salad and it haunts my dreams. The fried chicken is so good it borders on dirty. The gnocchi should be illegal and don’t get me started on that goat cheesecake. If this place every closed, a piece of my heart would die.

Great little restaurant. Reservations are highly suggested. The menu was small but yet so many mouth watering choices that it made it difficult to pick. Portions were shareable so we were able to taste a few of the dishes. I highly suggest the beet salad if it’s on the menu. We had sweet breads, the gnocchi and the eggplant dish and two desserts and it was reasonably priced split between three people. The goat cheesecake was surprisingly light tasting. Can’t wait to go back to try some of the other dishes.

My husband ate here pretty much as a favor for me (I’m definitely the foodie in the family) but even he was won over by the food. We had the gnocchi, chorizo & figs, crunch salad, and short rib to share between the two of us. Everything was delicious, but the gnocchi (with black boar bacon, black quinoa, black garlic, black truffle) was AH-​MAZING!

Walking into Deseo from from the cold of a Winnipeg winter is a pleasure. The restaurant is cozy without being crowded. Their services is extraordinary, their choice of art is interesting, and their willingness to accommodate vegetarians a real pleasure. Reserving a table online was convenient. I cannot say enough good things about this place. Very clearly one of the best restaurants in the city.
We ordered:
Goat Cheese Cheese Cake (amazing)
Crisp Cauliflower
Black Truffel Gnocchi (amazing)
Crunch Salad (amazing)
Faro as Risotto
The goat cheese cheese cake changed my wife’s life. The crunch salad very nearly changed mine. The rest of the food wasn’t as good but how could it have been? Those two dishes were everything I look for in professional cooking: well balanced flavors, rich but not heavy, perfectly portioned, and nice to look at. Deseo charges exactly the price I would expect for food of the quality they offer. I also happen to know that they source their ingredients locally as often as possible. What more could you want? Bring a date, bring friends, bring anyone you can. This place is worth eating at.
Until next time,

We made reservations here for Valentine’s day using Open Table, and got a confirmation message from the restaurant through Open Table’s interface.
A week and a half before the day, I contacted Deseo to double confirm. They said they had no record of the reservation and had no availability, and that our only option was to go on their wait list. Tech glitches happen. What I didn’t like was their unapologetic attitude. Both people I spoke to took the position «it’s not our problem, why should we apologize or try to make it right? You should call Open Table and take it up with them».
I asked him if he really thought it was right that we, the customer, should be asked to troubleshoot their own reservation system — and pointed out that it would be nice if they at least could say «sorry about the inconvenience». He got angry and tried to make us out to be the bad guys somehow. Not very professional.
I should point out that it’s not like we used some shady third party service to do the reservation. Open Table’s UI is integrated into Deseo’s actual website, and is the only method of making reservations listed on the reservations section of their site.

I’ve just moved back to Winnipeg and was so excited to try this place. I love the atmoshphere and the service was really good. We all shared around 8 plates and the sweet breads were a stand out… And that is saying a lot because I’m generally not a fan of sweet breads. I will absolutely go back to Deseo again and again and again. I can’t wait to try their brunch menu.

The black truffle gnocchi is absolutely TO DIE FOR. I don’t even normally enjoy gnocchi and can honestly say that this was one of the best dishes I have had in a long time. We also enjoyed the shortrib with barley risotto, overall amazing!

totally amazingly fantastically greatly delicious
the food was a perfect combination of ingenuity and tradition, the flavors and presentation at exactly right degree of complexity and farm. The service, interested and caring. Really a terrific meal on par with the best.

Brunch — duck fat potatoes with spicy aioli was delicious!

Creative tasty food and cocktails. We decided to do tapas for dinner, the waiter made some wonderful recommendations. There was a group of us so we pretty much ordered every small plate Deseo offers. There wasn’t a disappointing dish, you can tell the chef has put alot of thought into the flavors he incorporates into his food. The food was magnificant but the cocktails were even better.

Finally made it to the new location on Osborne for a late lunch found it to be decorated up very well. the service was top notch, we shared the sweet bread appetizer and the crunch salad and then on the the main course of cazuella. Overall it was all really good, the only issue I had was the large tasteless cubes in the crunch salad although they added to the crunch part I would have preferred flavor over filler. We topped it off with a chocolate cake that went very well with the wine we where drinking. Yes it was all was all very good, the bill end up at just over $ 90. I can see us coming back here again but for diner next time.

Gone from the Royal Albert location (due to the ongoing water main break issue that occurred in early summer ’11) Deseo finally relocated in a new spot since early September. They’ve taken over the space that was home to the short lived Champa Bistro and before that, Vesuvios. The two-​story bistro is now in south Osborne near a little hub of restaurants like Bistro 7 & ¼ and Monticchio.
The downstairs space is a cool dimly lit space with a beautifully restored tin ceiling with tons of dangling clear light bulbs, dark wooden tables and chairs. The top floor is light and airy and decorated with restraint where the bar/​lounge and alternate dining space resides. The lounge portion opens till 2 am on Fridays and Saturdays after the lower restaurant portion closes around 10 pm or so. The lower level dining room is intimate but gets quite noisy as well on the weekend — very lively feel. It gave off a great night life vibe that lacks in many of the city’s restaurants.
Service is knowledgeable and attentive. The menu has mostly stayed the same but the bistro has expanded though many old faves have stayed. They have a larger alcohol menu and they even accept credit now! This is a huge improvement from the cash only system at the previous location.
Now this place has always built itself on a Latin inspired small plates concept. They changed a section in the menu to «mains» which has items that average $ 20 so in my mind they moved towards an entrée style menu in the traditional sense. But really, it’s just like the former «big bites» or whatever they called it so it’s just a pricier protein in a slightly larger small plate portion size. Definitely NOT a «main» that will satiate you unless you order a bunch of other plates too. Case in point, we ordered a lamb loin ($ 22) great spices used and paired with a small portion of yogurt and pureed lentils. Now if this dish had been served in other restaurants, you’d likely get a similar sized lamb portion but you’d also get lots of veg and a starch and it’d cost you about $ 32. Well here, they charge you for the protein essentially so I can see why some people feel they are getting «ripped off». But it’s really more «a la carte» like 529 Wellington where you have to order a bunch of things to add onto your protein dish.
Anyways, I digress, dishes were very tasty, well executed and had great flavours such as the spicy prawns dish ($ 10) and the super yummy sweet breads ($ 12) that were a play on chicken wings and blue cheese dip. The seafood stew ($ 22) had perfectly cooked scallops, mussels and prawns in a flavourful tomato sauce. The lamb loin as mentioned before has exceptional flavour. The shortribs ($ 20) was a little disappointing as the beef was a bit dry — even the wonderful sauce didn’t help moisten it.
To me this is more like Segovia — you linger over drinks with a smattering of dishes and great conversation. It’s not the traditional starter, entrée, dessert place so I can see the disappointment from people expecting that. But remember, small plates doesn’t mean small prices — I’d say that’s it’s pretty easy to spend about $ 40 to $ 50 for a drink and 2 – 3 plates. It’s not that pricey when you think that a chain restaurant like Earls will end up the same if I order a starter, entrée and drink. So to me, I’d rather support a local business that expands Winnipeg’s dining scene as opposed to pandering to mediocrity.