Last Train to Delhi
103 Fourth Ave., 613-882-0035, lasttraintodelhi.com
Open: Tuesday to Sunday 5:30 to 9:30 p.m., closed Monday
Prices: starters $10 to $15, mains $16 to $25
Access: steps to front door

During my two dinners at Last Train To Delhi, the question I’d expected to hear just never came up.

At other Indian restaurants, and generally at eateries where the chilli-based heat of dishes might range from mild to tongue-searing, I’m used to servers asking: “How spicy would you like it?” But at this tiny five-month-old place in the Glebe, the chef and owner, Surinder Singh, knows what his dishes should taste like, and they won’t be customized to be more tepid or fiery.

Of course, in the end, tepidness and fieriness are relative. There are Indian restaurants in Ottawa where a “mild” is more scorching than a “spicy” dish at one of its rivals. Where a restaurant falls on the heat spectrum might depend on whether they’re trying to please spice-craving expat tastebuds or less seasoned palates that are content with less seasoning.

At his restaurant, Singh, who formerly ran the now-closed Tea Party Cafe in the ByWard Market, serves what he calls “progressive Indian cuisine.” His menu, which concentrates on North Indian-inspired dishes, is smaller and more curated. At my first meal here, a server additionally told me that the food is “spiced rather than spicy … We’re not trying to blow people’s heads off.” Indeed, some dishes, I thought, could have used more heat and spicy punch, even if Singh grinds his own spices.

But I was more keen on Last Train to Delhi after my second meal there, which involved, I think, better choices. In all, I’d recommend this restaurant to those who like their Indian food prettily plated, well-composed and crafted, but not roaringly hot.

Last Train to Delhi replaces the tiny Filipino restaurant Tamis Café, which moved to Centretown nearly a year ago. Singh has renovated his Fourth Avenue space and made it more upscale. The dining room’s brick wall remains, but the narrow, contemporary dining area, which seats about 18, is dressed up by a bevy of plants, shelving filled with wines and spirits, and the wine glasses that dot the blond wood tables. Singh cooks away in the small kitchen visible from the dining area.

Our meals have begun with complimentary bowls of curried popcorn, which we thought could have used more zip. At my first dinner, things picked up with a nice tandoori shrimp appetizer ($15), in which the plump shellfish were sheathed in crispy exteriors of fried, shredded potato and bolstered by a pineapple chutney. But the Amritsari fish fry ($22), made with pickerel and accompanied by mint chutney, seemed more casually cooked and made less of an impression.

Another aspect of the kitchen’s progressiveness is its slight tilt toward vegetables over meat. “ We … do not have a lot of meat options and want people to enjoy eating more plants,” the restaurant’s website says. The restaurant is also environmentally minded, and it composts and recycles. “We … try our very best to lower the amount of waste we put to the curb,” its website continues.

At our first meal, the top vegetarian dish was Singh’s kofta curry ($20) made with pleasingly flavourful balls of bottleneck gourd and potatoes in a cashew coconut sauce that did have some lingering but mellow heat. The kitchen’s version of baigan bartha ($17), a dish of meltingly soft eggplant supported by onions and peas ($17), was more restrained flavour-wise than we liked. That night, I also thought the rice needed salt.

At my second visit, we happily ate more dishes that packed some vibrancy and intensity.

All of the chicken dishes appealed. Hariyali chicken kebabs ($14) made with breast meat were sufficiently moist and tender, and their coriander mint sauce delivered a welcome thrill. The Kashmiri chicken korma ($21) appealed too, with exceptionally tender chicken and a full-bodied, nut-enriched sauce. Butter chicken (a.k.a. murgh makhini, $22) was solidly made, too.

Our server, who that night was Singh’s wife, pointed out that the restaurant’s saag paneer ($20) was made authentically, with not just the usual spinach, but also rapini, which added a hint of bitterness, and house-made Indian cheese. It did do more for me than the saag paneers I’ve had elsewhere. We liked just as much Singh’s okra ($17), which was nicely textured and savoury.

The range of non-alcoholic drinks at Last Train to Delhi is admirable, including both rose and mango lassis ($5), plus lime soda and lavender lemonade for the yogurt drink-averse. Most of the restaurant’s half-dozen cocktails skew in a tropical direction. The wine list includes bottles between $41 and $65, plus a few by-the-glass choices, but I’d lean more to one of the Canadian craft beers or even one of six whiskeys, as that spirit is popular with food in India.

Perhaps it’s paradoxical, or even faint praise, to suggest that Last Train to Delhi serves Indian food for people who don’t like really spicy food. Better, I think, to focus on the thoughtful, from-scratch feeling of the food here and the hospitality and vibe that’s as mellow and sustaining as Singh’s best dishes.

phum@postmedia.com
twitter.com/peterhum

---

ALSO IN FOOD AND LIFE

Gitanes
361-6 Elgin St., 613-562-0699, gitanes.co
Open: Tuesday to Saturday 5 p.m. to 2 a.m., closed Sunday and Monday
Prices: appetizers $7 to $45, mains $22 to $70
Access: restaurant is below street level, steps or long ramp to front door

As the cool kids like to say, the menu at Gitanes was lit.

Or rather, as a more literal adult would say, the menu, a large paper card filled with beguiling choices, was lit on fire last week after my dining companion allowed it to hover too close to our table’s tiny candle.

Our server was sympathetic. She told us this was roughly the eighth case of a menu catching fire since Gitanes opened in mid-September on Elgin Street, in a much renovated space where Oz Kafe, now in the ByWard Market, had been.

That’s the first warning I will share about Gitanes. Don’t set your menu on fire.

The second warning: At Gitanes, which broadly speaking is a French-inspired restaurant, the food can be very rich. Both the French onion soup and the bordelaise sauce that comes with the massive O’Brien Farms ribeye are enriched with bone marrow. There’s a puddle of foie gras mousse beside the truffle-sauced chicken and even foie gras incorporated, quite subtly, into the ice cream sundae.

Of course, foie gras and truffles aren’t cheap. Accordingly, my third warning is that it will help you at Gitanes if you are rich or at least enjoy feeling rich. It is a youthful, casual and fun place, but also a splurge if you want to do more than nibble on some shrimp tartare ($10) and impeccably crisp, salted and herb-enhanced fries with aioli and ketchup ($8 for a generous portion).

Main courses can easily top $40 here. Seafood towers from the cold bar are $90 and $125, with a $90 supplement for caviar. For the most celebratory guests, Gitanes stocks 11 champagnes, including 2011 Pierre Peters “Les Chétillons” Blanc de Blancs Grand Cru Brut at $355 a bottle.

But after all these caveats, I still recommend Gitanes, as long as you know what you’re in for.

After Thru, Alice and Gray Jay, it is the fourth very notable restaurant to open in Ottawa since the spring of this year. They are all different. Gitanes, perhaps apropos of being on Elgin Street, is less high-minded than the others. But, at its best, Gitanes is more about food as a direct, carnal pleasure as well as a sophisticated indulgence.

That was our conclusion as we extracted briny, potent Rimouski-raised sea urchin from their shells (two for $25) and smeared the orange ambrosia (gonads, yes I know) on some miniature miso-buttered English muffins. For umami overload, the iced platter also contained some uni mayo, which by itself made our eyes widen.

Stored wrong or out of the water too long, sea urchin is really off-putting and tastes of iodine. I’ve had several bad uni experiences at restaurants, but Gitanes’ uni could not have been more fresh and mind-altering.

I don’t have the budget to have tried all 11 items from the cold seafood bar, which is out front at Gitanes, separate from the kitchen, but I’ll be saving up for snow crab and lobster.

I did try some of the more composed raw-fish items and they were very good, if not as transcendental as the admittedly acquired taste of uni. Slabs of mackerel ($14) were unctuous and earthy, perked by fermented rhubarb, hazelnut and serrano chiles and sitting in a bright sauce of fermented plum and ponzu. Tuna tartare ($20) was well-made — finely chopped, clean and mild of taste and elevated by the right amount of plum gelée, crème fraîche and bits of crisped sunchoke.

Beef tartare ($20), while not so appetizing-looking, was simple and fine, its meat tucked under a layer of bigger sunchoke crisps. I’m used to a bit more acid in my tartares, but in my experience, that’s not how Gitanes rolls.

Celery root and apple — a classic pairing — starred in a lower-key but satisfying salad ($16). The vegetable and fruit were crisp and thinly sliced, bolstered by a creamy dressing that had the nuttiness of brown butter going for it, while bits of cheddar added their pop to the dish.

That menu that nearly went up in flames boasts 16 appetizers and vegetable dishes, but we skipped intriguing options such as escargots, that French onion soup and duck boudin sausage to tuck into some of the big-money mains (as opposed to the cheaper burger or steak frites).

A massive chicken breast received a deluxe treatment ($47). It was blissfully moist after being cooked sous vide and then roasted, and its truffled sauce, cinnamon cap mushrooms and foie gras mousse made for an opulently rich main, offset only by the tangy hint of fermented elderberry.

On my second visit, a buddy and I split the uber-beefy O’Brien Farms 16-ounce ribeye ($70), also showered with mushrooms plus some cippolinis, and served with the dark, beefy-in-its-own right, marrow-infused bordelaise. We felt like the world’s most decadent carnivores.

Even more tongue-catching and pleasing was the Sichuan-peppercorn-perked sauce with Gitanes’ dry-aged duck breast ($40) that had a bit of extra funk to it, and was tender, if a touch overdone.

Flawless was the big chunk of roasted halibut ($47) with stewed beans, a quenelle of herby sauce, with clams and chanterelles along for the ride.

The sundae made with foie gras ice cream ($19) was very creamy and barely liver-y, but it delivered a wave of sweet, boozy excess, with its rum-spiked bananas Foster sauce and bourbon-soaked cherry.

Restrained by comparison was a dark, smooth slice of chocolate tart ($10) covered with ground cherries.

Service was always personable, assured and knowledgeable about the food and beverages, significantly adding to our enjoyment.

The restaurant seats about 50 people in distinctly different spaces. I’ve sat twice at the back, near the kitchen, in an area with a cellar-y feel under exposed ducts where we wished the very diverse piped-in music was somewhat quieter and the lights were a little brighter. That said, our space was softened by an area graced by sofa seating for about eight, not that we were that uncomfortable in our curvy moulded plastic chairs.

I envied the people at the front of the restaurant, who could watch the cook at the raw bar station. I really envied the folks at the chef’s table right in the kitchen, treating themselves to the $95-per-person tasting menu. There’s also a darker lounge-y bar area with a few tables.

Gitanes is co-owned by Nader Salib, who also has a stake in Common Eatery, a block south on Elgin Street. His co-owner is American chef Luke Reyes, who splits his time between Los Angeles and Ottawa.

Chef de cuisine Mitch Lacombe definitely deserves kudos. Having been the chef de cuisine at Restaurant E18hteen and sous chef at Riviera, Lacombe is no stranger to high-end dishes that smack of luxury. He is definitely helping to rocket Gitanes into the elite company of his previous kitchens.

phum@postmedia.com
twitter.com/peterhum

ALSO IN THE NEWS

Dining Out: Last Train to Delhi serves thoughtful Indian food for the spicy-averse

Dining Out: All-Canadian menu at Gray Jay pushes boundaries of creativity

Community, foodies come to aid popular Vanier taco spot trashed by vandals

Fauna Food + Bar
425 Bank St., 613-563-2862, faunaottawa.ca
Open: for lunch Monday to Friday 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., for dinner Sunday to Thursday 5:30 to 10 p.m. (last seating 9 p.m.), Friday and Saturday 5:30 to 11 p.m. (last seating 10:30 p.m.), bar open late
Prices: small plates $14 to $20, mains $30 to $37, plates for two $85 and $110
Access: washrooms in basement

We went recently to Fauna Food + Bar on a whim, after a last-minute need for a nice dinner out caught us by surprise.

That Saturday morning, we tried to go to two other upscale and well-established Ottawa restaurants, but they were booked solid. Fortunately, Fauna in Centretown could still take us for an early evening reservation. Luckier still, our meal turned out to be a contender for my best restaurant dinner in Ottawa this year.

We did go to Fauna with high hopes, although the last time I’d eaten there was in late 2014, soon after its chef-owner Jon Svazas opened it.

Since 2014, there have been accolades and tweaks at Fauna. It cracked the Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants list in 2016, 2017 and this year. Given that Svazas opened Bar Laurel in Hintonburg in 2016, Fauna’s chef de cuisine Billy Khoo plays a greater role now, and next Tuesday, it will be Khoo rather than Svazas who will lead the kitchen crew from Fauna next Tuesday at Ottawa’s edition of Canada’s Great Kitchen Party, the regional qualifier for next year’s Canadian Culinary Championships.

In 2014, Fauna was all about small plates. Today, it serves mains and even big dishes for two or more, and I was curious to see what the restaurant would do with dishes of that scale. Ultimately, regardless of plate size, the way to go seems to be to share.

Our meal’s strong, cool start consisted of two raw dishes, although they arrived so quickly from the kitchen that they beat the well-made but lagging cocktails to our table.

Bison tartare ($19) wowed us with the quality of its finely chopped meat, its different gradations of acid, fat, sweetness and umami, its crisp potato chips and its striking plating. “I could eat that all night,” said one of my friends.

More delicate was the swordfish ceviche ($19), a distinct departure from the rustic, boldly flavoured, chunky, Peruvian-style ceviches that typically win me over. Fauna’s ceviche impressed with its finesse and calibration, its mild fish artfully wrapped in cucumber and nestled in a flavourful pool of coconut milk, chili and herb oil.

Two warm small plates continued the kitchen’s streak. Shishito peppers ($20) stuffed with scrumptious lamb played on chile rellenos, and came with a complex mole sauce that delivered lingering heat. A plump, whole soft shell crab ($20) received a marvellously crisp tempura treatment, while the seaweed aioli and a sprinkling of spice blend added punch to the crustacean’s already intense flavour.

Then, the four of us tackled mains that brimmed with concentrated flavours that made us want to gnaw on bones and scrape the plates for every speck of goodness.

Beef cheeks ($37) were braised to fall-apart tenderness, and were part of a cohesive plate that also included matsutake mushrooms, kale and squash.

An admittedly thin chop of suckling pig ($37), supported by cauliflower purée, mushrooms, corn and beans, was succulent, porky perfection, blessed with mild but lucid flavour and some much-appreciated crackling.

A flash-fried half duck ($85) — meaty, succulent, crisp of skin, and perked by a blueberry jus — was our meal’s star, although its fine vegetables (broccolini, chanterelles, peppers) reminded us to enjoy that other food group. 

For dessert, we had the contrasting pleasures of a unique chocolate cake ($14) accented with violet and confit fennel, and brown-butter cake ($12) offset by cherry sorbet, poached cherry and brown sugar crackers.

Five years ago, I called Fauna, which seats about 60 at its woody tables and wraparound bar, the loveliest new dining room in town. It still feels vibrant and au courant, with its textured walls, massive and funky art and fun lighting fixtures. Downstairs, a private dining room provides an alternate setting.

I also noted in 2014 that Fauna is a little darker than I like, and grows louder than I like, and these aspects of the ambience have remained constant. Being seated beside one of the huge windows looking onto Bank Street at my recent dinner did make for a slightly brighter and more isolated experience.

The bar’s offering of 10 craft cocktails is wide and intriguing, while the lengthy and discerning wine list here favours natural, biodynamic and organic bottles.

Overall, Fauna at five feels like a restaurant that can execute and serve its many strengths with easy, knowing confidence. The level it attained, in particular with its mains and big duck plate, made me feel like we’d hit the jackpot — and maybe even as if I’ve been a wee bit too kind to its competition.

phum@postmedia.com
twitter.com/peterhum
Peter Hum’s restaurant reviews

Bistro Ristoro
17 Clarence St., 343-984-6080, bistroristoro.ca
Open: Tuesday to Saturday, 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., Sunday 11:30 a.m. to 4 p.m., closed Monday
Prices: appetizers $6 to $24, mains $16 to $26, pizzas $17.50 to $22
Access: no steps to front door or washrooms

Ottawa has lots of eateries that describe their fare as Mediterranean. But what do they really mean by that?

Dig a little deeper into their menus and you’ll usually see Lebanese dips, pies or platters. At other restaurants, Greek salads and appetizers prevail, or perhaps pizzas and pastas.

And then there’s Bistro Ristoro, which has been open for more than a year in the ByWard Market, near the quieter, western end of Clarence Street.

Its all-day menu, which I’ve sampled from twice this fall, takes its own tour of Mediterranean countries, offering an assortment of thin-crust pizzas and bread-y items from its visible brick oven imported from Italy, plus a smattering of Greek dishes, pastas and salads.

Plus, because the restaurant’s owner-operators are from North Macedonia, the landlocked Balkan country that doesn’t touch the Mediterranean Sea but is just north of Greece, the bistro — perhaps most interestingly — serves some Balkan dishes that you’ll be hard-pressed to find elsewhere in Ottawa.

At least, if someone knows another Ottawa eatery that serves plieskavitza (a spiced, half-pound beef patty that’s widely  cherished in the Balkans), could you please let me know, as I would then have something with which to compare Bistro Ristoro’s rendition.

We first visited Bistro Ristoro for lunch, when we found its dishes simple, generously portioned and a little hit and miss.

One carnivore at my table was pleased with his baked pork tenderloin ($24), which was a touch overdone but nonetheless tasty thanks to its white wine mushroom cream sauce. With the hunk of pork came fingerling potatoes and salad, making for a hefty, plate-filling lunch.

The other meat-lover opted for the Balkan kobasitza sausage ($18), a long, somewhat spicy link that we were told had been made by a Montreal-based supplier. Again, meat, potatoes and salad filled the plate.

A friend who had worked as a pizza-maker thought highly of his pastrmaylia ($21), described by the menu as “a Macedonian traditional canoe-shaped pizza.” When it arrived on our table, it made me think of a larger version of Turkey’s pide flatbreads, albeit with cubes of pork as a topping. My take was that the dough outshone the meat on this no-frills dish.

My mushroom risotto ($16) was the letdown of our lunch. Its rice was overly al dente and the too-dry risotto lacked the kind of creamy luxuriousness I prefer in the classic Italian indulgence.

Our choices at dinner last week were more satisfying.

From the menu’s dozen pizzas, we opted for the “flambée” ($19), which was a circular take on the usually oblong, Alsatian tarte flambée. Its blend of thick-cut bacon, cheese, red onions and sour cream was on point, and the thin-crusted pie was toothsome and sturdy — thicker and more dry than a Napolitan pizza, and also nicely coloured but devoid of charring.

Of four pastas, we tried the spaghetti carbonara ($18) and while the pasta was just a touch past al dente, the dish admirably delivered the yolky richness and bacon-y, cheesy satisfaction of a respectable carbonara.

Of two Greek dishes, the no-nonsense but well-made grilled halloumi salad ($16.50) topped the more pedestrian pork souvlaki ($16 for one kebab with fries and salad, $21 for two kebabs), which was made with chopped pork that could have been more assertively flavoured and whose fries were soggy.

Our survey of Bistro Ristoro would not have been complete without the massive plieskavitza ($20), also described on the menu as an “XL beef burger.” Surrounded by dough, the plieskavitza struck me to be equal parts pie and burger. The meat, which had been grilled separately, was well-seasoned and had a certain springiness to it. A dollop of a tangy dairy product called kaymak added a bit of sour richness.

The only dessert available here is a two-scoop serving of chocolate mousse ($8), served on a slate slab with whipped cream. It did the trick for the three of us.

Were I to return and have some wine with dinner, which would most likely be pizza, I might choose one of the Croatian options from the affordable, all-European wine list.

While I wasn’t out-and-out wowed by the food here, I nonetheless like this spacious, unpretentious, new-feeling place that seats about 40, where bouzouki and flamenco music can play on the sound system and Balkan musicians sometimes play on weekends. Bistro Ristoro appeals to me for its uniqueness in town and its willingness to build a bridge between Balkan dishes and palates unfamiliar with them.

phum@postmedia.com
twitter.com/peterhum

ALSO

Chef Ian Carswell of Black Tartan Kitchen wins Ottawa qualifier for 2020 Canadian Culinary Championships

Dining Out: Fauna a contender for best restaurant dinner in Ottawa this year

Theatre review: Jeff Ho’s insightful and moving tale of family trauma in trace

Bella’s Boys Italian Kitchen and Food Shop
250 Greenbank Rd., Unit 12, 613-695-1900, bellas.ca
Open: Monday to Thursday 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Friday 10 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m. to  4 p.m., closed Sunday
Prices: pastas $12 to $14, paninis $8 to $11.50, mains $16
Access: no steps to front door

A year ago, I was all set to write a glowing review of Bella’s Bistro on Wellington Street West, which after two decades was still going strong and serving its much-liked and comforting Italian food to packed houses.

But the review, which would have included special kudos for chef-owner Raffaela “Bella” Milito’s gnocchi with prosciutto and mushroom cream sauce as well as her classic tiramisu, never made it into print.

I had missed the memo that Bella’s Bistro needed to wind down its business. After 23 years, the restaurant closed last Dec. 31, in advance of condo construction at Mizrahi Developments’ 1451 Wellington, which one day will go up where Bella’s stood.

All of this is backstory to a fine lunch I had last week. It consisted of gnocchi with prosciutto and mushroom cream sauce, followed by a block of tiramisu, all as good as what I’d had at Bella’s.

But of course it was. I had just lunched at Bella’s Boys on Greenbank Road, which is run by Milito’s three sons, Rob, Nick and Andrew.

The Militos opened their eatery, which focuses on take-home foods, catering jobs and eat-in lunches, in early September, not far from where they grew up. Their mother herself, who launched her own restaurant only after cooking in the 1980s at the Ritz on Elgin Street, still toils away in her boys’ large open kitchen, as does her husband, Gino.

Rob says that after his mother’s restaurant closed, she “was bored out of her mind. She was just going stir-crazy.

“This is what they do. This is what they love doing,” he says of his parents, who are in their 70s and work as much as they want to with their sons.

The second generation’s business lacks the intimate, old-house atmosphere that made Bella’s Bistro date night central for its regulars. However, the Bella’s connection is visible, with the bistro’s front door hanging on the food shop’s wall and the sign from outside of the bistro, also salvaged before it was torn down, mounted above the fridges at the back of the shop.

Those keepsakes aside, the sons’ place is bright and utilitarian, a newly equipped commercial kitchen with just a few more than a dozen seats at small tables for its lunch crowd. The Militos and their staff are clad in black ball caps and T-shirts. While dine-in customers order at the front cash, their food, on paper plates, will be brought to them at their tables.

On my first few visits to Bella’s Boys, I was wowed by its panini sandwiches, which are not of the grilled variety but instead are distinguished by perfectly fresh and fluffy rolls that you wouldn’t want to ruin by compressing them.

The bread that Bella’s Boys uses is from the Bakery, a matter-of-factly named business a few stores away in the same Greenbank Road strip mall. These rolls were perfect for receiving tender, fresh meatballs ($8.50) or chicken parm ($9), both bathed in fine red sauce.

At Bella’s Boys, everything but the bread, Rob said this week, is made from scratch on the premises.

The kitchen’s pastas have consistently won me over with their freshness and balance of clear, clean flavours.

I’ve always opted for stuffed pastas here, and found the spinach and ricotta manicotti ($14), beef and veal ravioli ($14) and beef and veal cannelloni ($14) to be well-made, toothsome winners that delivered all of the necessary comforts.

When it comes to lasagna, I have something approaching a phobia due to too many shoddy, self-destructing lasagnas I ate at my university’s cafeteria years ago. The meat lasagna at Bella’s Boys ($12) eradicated that horrible memory with its tender flat noodles and substantial, zesty, meaty sauce.

Gnocchi ($13) was as fresh and tender as expected, and its enjoyable sauce was sufficiently rich and creamy that I was scraping every last bit of it off its paper plate.

All of these pastas were favourites at Bella’s Bistro, Rob says. The same goes for the food shop’s two chicken-based main courses, he adds. The “chicken honey” ($16) was a perfectly cooked piece of chicken breast served with a creamy honey-mustard sauce of smack-you-in-the-face quality.

There’s a dessert counter beside the cash, and its contents also cast back to Bella’s Bistro. That tiramisu with all of its components in the proper proportion and a slight boozy tingle was best, while coconut-y Hello Dolly bars packed a smaller but sweeter punch.

Rob says that when the Mizrahi condo building opens, a Bella’s business will be in it, although he can’t say whether it will be Bella’s Bistro 2.0, as the developer has mentioned, or a take-home shop along the lines of his Greenbank store.

But until Bella’s in some form returns to Wellington Street West, its old and new fans know that the trip to Greenbank Road will be well worth it.

phum@postmedia.com
twitter.com/peterhum

ALSO

Dining Out: Fauna a contender for best restaurant dinner in Ottawa this year

Dining Out: In praise of Afghan kebab houses serving filling, casual, meaty meals

Beyond the Nutcracker: A guide to Christmas concerts at the NAC

Cumin Indian Grill
373 Somerset St. W., 613-695-6969, cuminindiangrill.ca
Open: Monday to Saturday 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., and 5 to 9 p.m., closed Sunday
Prices: main dishes up to $15.99
Access: no steps to front door, washrooms on ground floor and downstairs

For most of the last decade, if not longer, the hole-in-the-wall at 373 Somerset St. W. was home to a modest Indian eatery called Basmati. Then, last year, it became Café Delish, which served crepes and waffles, but also Indian food.

About eight months ago, the address reverted back to an exclusively Indian restaurant, an affordable place called Cumin Indian Grill. It recently caught my attention because its colourful renovations and menus with less-frequently-seen dishes suggested ambitions to raise the dining experience up a notch or two from what the previous tenant had offered.

At Cumin, the two-storey space, which seats about 25 and is practically as tall as it is deep, now has violet walls and cyan tables, while a white, faux barn board wall now hides the sight of, if not the sounds of, the modest kitchen.

Those cyan tables are adorned with cloth napkins held snug with Cumin -branded napkin rings. Edison lights hang on long strings, and the walls are adorned with stylized art. The place has a youthful feel its groovy South Asian pop soundtrack that comes with the music videos project overhead, on the eatery’s back wall.

The restaurants lunch and dinner menus are not extensive, but they are still wide-ranging and not as curry-centric as more established Indian restaurants often are. In particular, I was glad to see some Indian street-food dishes and Hakka (Indo-Chinese fusion) dishes. Also, Cumin’s meats confirm to halal practices.

The dishes that most hit the spot were hearty, rugged street-food items on Cumin’s lunch menu. The Punjabi dish of chole bhature ($13.99), a combination of potently spiced, tomato-y chickpea curry and puffy, freshly fried flatbread, was a favourite at our table. Almost as good was the pav bhaji ($7.99), which served its thick potato-and-peas curry with soft buns.

We thought less of the aloo paratha ($7.99), because the flatbread’s spiced potato filling was a little meagre.

I was surprised but happy to see chicken dum biryani ($15.99) offered at lunch, because I think of it as a labour-intensive rice dish fit for a evening’s feast. Cumin’s rendition delivered big flavours but felt more dry (especially in the chicken department) than the sublime chicken dum biryani that I’ve had at NH44 in Ottawa’s east end.

Of the Hakka dishes, I was most curious to see how an Indian kitchen would make hot and sour soup ($4.99). It turned out the soup’s broth had the look, gloss and savouriness of the Chinese-restaurant staple, but frozen vegetables stood in for meat, tofu and mushrooms.

Also from the Hakka selection, we liked the kitchen’s versions of chicken 65 ($14.99) and chilli chicken ($14.99), two dishes in which breaded, tender chicken morsels starred and which both had welcome spicy, sour stings.

Given that the eatery stresses its grill in its name, I had high hopes for its lamb chops ($15.99 for two). They were more than fine — tender, highly seasoned and covered in a green, herbal sauce.

With the lamb chops and other dishes came massive quantities of basmati rice and some stir fried onions and peppers. This approach might suit single diners, but tables wishing for family-style sharing might want to ask for their food to be partitioned accordingly.

Also grilled and good was the hariyali chicken ($13.99), in which chunks of white meat were stained green by their herb-and-spice marinade and sauce.

The lamb ($13.99) and butter paneer curries ($13.99) that we tried at lunch this week were substantially portioned but a little shallow of flavour. More rounded and complex was a beef Madras curry ($14,99) that we had at dinner last week.

Garlic naan bread ($3.99) was a letdown because it seemed more like an unleavened flatbread that the leavened, charred treat that we had wanted.

The restaurant is licensed and serves a small selection of beers, affordable Ontario wines and some spirits. We had to try our first “dirty lassis” ($7), to see what a rum-spiked mango lassi was like. It turned out that our dirty lassi was more fun to say than to drink — I prefer my lassis, dirty or not, to be colder and more sweet and creamy.

A more appealing drink that was some meal-ending pink chai. The uncommon-in-Ottawa tea-based drink — “You get this in Toronto,” our server said — was sweet and pistachio-studded, even if it was not pink. I’ll be seeking it out again.

The round of pink chai was on the house at our dinner because of a serving mix-up, compensating us because we did not receive the coconut rice or biryani rice we had asked for with our curries.Service here has varied with personnel. Two servers have been on-point, while a third, while pleasant, was clearly inexperienced, unable to answer questions about dishes and not mindful about refilling water to help us assuage our spice-covered palates. At one visit, the un-busy kitchen fired out food quickly, but it was more slow to produce when the restaurant was more than half-full.

In the end, although both service and food were hit-and-miss at Cumin Indian Grill. I’m likely to return, given its best dishes and visible efforts. Plus, a server told me that a crab dish, I’m guessing a South Indian spicy crab curry — is bound for the menu in early 2020. Who could resist that from a kitchen, however humble, that tries hard?

phum@postmedia.com

 

ALSO IN ARTS AND LIFE

Beyond the Nutcracker: A guide to Christmas concerts at the NAC

National Gallery: Unfinished hides, residential schools in major Ottawa Indigenous art exhibition

Best bets, Dec. 12 to 18: Christmas Carols, magic and more Christmas tunes

Looking back at my eighth year of reviewing restaurants, I see a 2019 that was filled with an even bigger glut than usual of great dishes.

That’s due to a banner year of especially noteworthy new restaurants, serving indulgences ranging from Farinella’s Roman-bakery-style pizza by the slice to THRU’s grand and unique spurge of 50 or so bite-sized delicacies.

No wonder my annual list of favourites feels a little more diverse this time out, from sea urchin to take-out pasta, from fancy and fantastic dishes featuring rabbit to beef brisket smoked low-and-slow.

Newcomers such as Alice, chef Briana Kim’s modernist vegetable-based restaurant, chef Dominique Dufour’s highly personal and all-Canadian spot Gray Jay Hospitality and many others delivered. So, too, did more established eateries such as Bar Lupulus, Fauna Food + Bar and Supply and Demand, which I thought merited revisiting after some years.

Before the kudos, a few caveats are in order. The picks below are not the best in their categories bar none in the Ottawa area. They’re just faves compiled after more than 100 meals at more than 50 eateries in 2019. Nor are they wholesale endorsements of all the dishes at the restaurants that made them. And while some dishes can still be had, others were seasonal or short-run creations.

Foodies might notice one conspicuous absence on my list, namely anything from THRU, chef Marc Lepine’s fabulously creative six-seat restaurant-within-a-restaurant on the second floor of his much-lauded, cutting-edge place Atelier.

I’m afraid my notes about the barrage of items we had at THRU in May are less than clear. But in any event, the experience there was not about any single wow-inducing dish. Rather, it was more like a steady succession of outre treats, the point of which was something like gourmet overload in the best possible way.

But if THRU provided my meal of the year in Ottawa, the individual dishes below nonetheless satisfied mightily.

Best appetizer

At Gitanes in October, freshly shelled uni sourced from Rimouski, Que. were potently and pristinely flavourful, as rich and briny as any sea urchin I’ve had and much, much better than the occasional iodine-y specimen. The impeccable ingredient from Gitanes’ raw bar was bolstered by miniature miso-buttered English muffins and uni mayo, which by itself was some kind of delicious.
Honourable mention : tempura soft-shell crab at Fauna Food + Bar

Best salad

In September, the salad served at Alice during its tasting-menu dinner was as elegant and visually striking as it was tasty and novel. Assorted greens from Juniper Farms were arranged in a mini-bouquet, topped with toasted flaxseed and other small, good things and offset with a ring of kohlrabi filled with sea buckthorn jelly. The salad’s revelatory dressing was house-made fermented almond milk, added table-side.
Honourable mention : “spring has sprung” salad at Le St Laurent

Best spicy dish

In April, the most compelling of several spicy reasons to seek out NH 44 in an east-end Ottawa industrial park was chef-owner Teegaavarapu Sarath Mohan‘s Hyderabadi chicken dum biryani, a vibrant dish that tucked tender, marinated chicken legs into boldly flavoured, fresh and fluffy basmati rice. While the dish can be a half-heartedly made letdown elsewhere, at NH 44, it was an instant party.
Honourable mention : chili chicken at Harbin Restaurant

Best pasta

In December, the lasagna at the no-frills take-out and lunch spot Bella’s Boys on Greenbank Road was served on a paper plate. But it was truly superior, with fresh, tender flat noodles and substantial, zesty, meaty sauce that provided bite after bite of perfect comfort.
Honourable mentions: Braised beef caramele with red wine, blue cheese and gooseberries at Supply and Demand, pâte à choux gnocchi at Grunt

Best sandwich

If there’s a signature dish at Grunt, the cosy eatery on a Mechanicsville side street, it’s the roast porchetta sandwich, which fortunately is a staple on the frequently changing menu. While chef-owner Jason McLelland has sometimes tinkered with his pork belly treat since I tried it in the spring, his original iteration, which evokes an English Sunday dinner with Yorkshire pudding, mushroom demi-glace, crushed root vegetables and apple sauce, is hard to beat.
Honourable mention : chicken parm at Bella’s Boys

Best soup

The flashiest items at J:unique Kitchen in Centretown are the over-the-top “Vancouver-style” sushi rolls, some of which arrive at your table with flaming garnishes. But chef-owner James Park’s tonkotsu ramen also rewarded. Its broth was hefty and clean, its noodles had some spring, and its pork belly and generous garnishes had been prepared with evident care.
Honourable mention : boat noodle soup at Nana Thai

Best pizza 

Tie: Farinella’s potato pizza, flecked with rosemary and markedly peppery, stood out among the constantly changing offerings from the Little Italy eatery that makes excellent, oven-fresh, foccacia-like pizza. Just as good but entirely different was the quintessentially Neapolitan margherita pizza at Pizza All’Antica in Manotick.

Best fish

Rare is the Thai restaurant in Ottawa that departs from the tried-and-true dishes that North Americans know and love. But don’t let that dissuade you from trying the pla neung manao at Nana Thai on Preston Street. The dish consisted of a steamed whole tilapia, opened like a book and dressed with a thrilling mix of chilies, garlic and lime. The dish’s bright savoury broth was an appealing bonus.
Honourable mention : fillet of Atlantic cod with olive oil-poached fingerling potatoes, broad beans, horseradish and hollandaise sauce at Supply and Demand

Best poultry

At Bar Lupulus this past spring, guinea fowl that received an esoteric multi-day marinade in koji rice (cooked rice that’s been inoculated with Aspergillus oryzae mold) gained new, funky flavour before an expert preparation. Chef Justin Champagne presented the bird’s breast tender and crisp-skinned, while its dark meat was fashioned into a deep-fried croquette. The rest of the plate brimmed with treats, including saucy, umami-rich wheatberry risotto garnished with snails and truffled cheese.
Honourable mention : flash-fried duck with broccolini, chanterelles, corn, morcilla and blueberry jus at Fauna Food + Bar

Best rabbit

At Le St Laurent, chef Ryan Edwards combined prosciutto-wrapped, mushroom-stuffed medallions of rabbit with a crisp croquette of succulent braised leg meat, bolstered by lemon aioli or offset by some wild garlic. Pickled and roasted carrots rounded out the dish.
Honourable mention : rabbit dumplings with bone broth at Gray Jay

Best red meat

At Moe’s BBQ in a South Keys mall, pitmaster Mobeen Butt turns out formidable southern-style smoked meats, despite never having tasted the food that inspired him. Why? Because Butt’s food is halal, while typical U.S. barbecue never follows that stricture. Nonetheless, Butt’s smoked brisket was a thing of beauty, moist, thick-cut and beef-forward in flavour rather than heavily spiced or salted.
Honourable mention : Oak-brined carpaccio with nori mayo and foie gras-spiked caramel corn at Bar Lupulus

Best Dessert

Tie: I used to say Ottawa restaurants frequently fizzle when it comes to dessert. But this year, some ravishing, sophisticated creations ended a few of my meals. At Bar Lupulus, there was chocolate olive oil cake with pandan meringue inside, plus carrot sorbet with special fermented zip. At Alice, the kitchen’s riff on an ice cream sandwich placed a quenelle of fermented rice-based “ice cream” between shards of hyper-crisp oat cake, buttressed by berries in a charred pine cone syrup. At Gray Jay, a startling dessert paired a molten (but not overly sweet) maple cake with a semifreddo made with sugar and dehydrated chanterelles and topped with mushroom morsels. Surprising? Yes, but also very good.

The restaurants

Alice, 40 Adeline St., alicerestaurant.ca
Bar Lupulus, 1242 Wellington St. W., barlupulus.ca
Bella’s Boys, 250 Greenbank Rd., Unit 12, bellas.ca
Farinella, 492 Rochester St., farinellaeats.com
Fauna Food + Bar, 425 Bank St., faunaottawa.ca
Gitanes, 361 Elgin St., gitanes.co
Gray Jay Hospitality, 300 Preston St., grayjayhospitality.ca
Grunt, 173 Hinchey St., instagram.com/gruntottawa
J:unique Kitchen, 381 Cooper St ., instagram.com/juniquekitchen
Le St Laurent, 460 St. Laurent Blvd., lestlaurent.ca
Moe’s BBQ, 2446 Bank St., moesbbq.ca
Nana Thai, 121 Preston St., nanacuisine.ca
NH 44, 2450 Lancaster Rd., Unit 35, nh44ottawa.com
Pizza All’Antica, 5527 Manotick Main St., pizzaallantica.ca
Supply and Demand, 1335 Wellington St. W., supplyanddemandfoods.ca
THRU, 540 Rochester St., thru.tickit.ca

phum@postmedia.com

From my run in the 2010s as a restaurant critic, here are the dozen dishes that burn most brightly in my memory. That goes double for the atomic jerk chicken.

I’ve compiled my favourites as a grand, unfurling, tasting menu — something epic to see out the decade and welcome in 2020.

If only all of these dishes were still available. In the spirit of looking back, I give special nods to several restaurants that shut in recent years, leaving me and no doubt others still feeling deprived. Should old acquaintances be forgot, and all that.

1) Bread at Semsem (2018)
What to pick from the hidden-gem bakery and coffee shop in a South Keys mall, where savoury Arabic breads are baked to order? It’s a very tough choice, given that many appeal. I most fondly recall the “cheese sunflower” pastry, a wreath-shaped loaf that wraps bread, dotted with sesame seeds and Persian thyme, around the salty punch of halloumi cheese.

2) Crab salad at Navarra (2012)
It was a big blow to Ottawa’s dining scene in 2017 when chef-owner René Rodriguez closed Navarra on William Street. While the 2014 Top Chef Canada winner now runs the kitchen at the Lord Elgin Hotel’s Grill 41, Navarra was Rodriguez’s personal culinary playground, with a menu that drew upon his Mexican roots and Spanish inspirations. I was wowed by his salad of sweet crabmeat, avocado and even dried mango, nestled in a puddle of grapefruit, serrano chili and vanilla aguachile, and topped with black sesame ash.

3) Tomatillo gazpacho at Carben (2015)
At his Hintonburg restaurant, chef-owner Kevin Benes had a summery hit several years ago with this perfectly balanced soup that was topped with a long almond cracker, in turn garnished with ribbons of cucumber, compressed watermelon and house-cured Arctic char. It was a beautiful dish that tasted as good as it looked.

4) Salad at Alice (2019)
Only the most hardened carnivore could fail to be delighted by the flavours and ingenuity at chef-owner Briana Kim’s new vegetable-focused fine-dining restaurant. Her mini-bouquet of greens from Juniper Farms, garnished with flaxseed, offset by a ring of kohlrabi enclosing sea buckthorn jelly and dressed with fermented almond milk, set a new standard for salads.

5) Tuna crudo at Supply and Demand (2012, 2019)
At the Wellington Street West restaurant, this perfectly calibrated, big-flavoured dish doesn’t budge from chef-owner Steve Wall’s menu for good reason. Raw fish dishes in Ottawa don’t get any better.

6) Shan noodles at Rangoon (2018)
So humble, yet so complex. At Ottawa’s only Burmese restaurant, rice noodles came blanketed in succulent chunks of chicken and bolstered by a savoury sauce, chilies, pickled mustard leaves that added an enticing amount of sourness, coriander and sesame seeds. “Mix, mix,” chef-owner Ngun Tial said when she served us. We were glad we did.

7) “Atomic” jerk chicken at Flavours of the Caribbean (2015)
Confession: I could only handle the intoxicatingly delicious jerk chicken at the now-shuttered Flavours of the Caribbean at its medium level of spiciness. But I cite chef Frederick White’s “atomic” jerk chicken because I remember so well the agonies that its maximum-level heat inflicted on a co-worker/consenting victim.

“Curry at Sam’s Cafe. 8) Massaman curry at Sam’s Cafe (2014)
In the back of his Hintonburg corner store, Sam Souryavong made bold yet exquisite Thai curries that shamed their more North Americanized, homogenized peers in Ottawa. I loved most the Massaman curry, that relied on Souryavong’s house-made, thrillingly complex curry paste and as a result teemed with heat and flavour, including hints of nutmeg and cardamom. Sadly, Sam’s Cafe closed, and is now the Merry Dairy ice cream outpost. I like its frozen treats, but visits there are still bittersweet.

9) Duck platter at feast + revel (2016)
Soon after feast + revel opened in the Andaz Ottawa ByWard Market, executive chef Stephen La Salle knocked us out with his duck platter that was fully loaded with excellent components that celebrated the best of the bird — roasted duck breast, smoked and cured duck “pastrami,” duck confit, fried duck wings and plenty of rich duck liver aioli.

10) Guinea fowl at Bar Lupulus (2019)
My favourite savoury dish of 2019 was chef Justin Champagne’s guinea fowl, which had its funkiness amped up with a koji rice marinade and umami-rich, snail- and truffle-enriched wheatberry risotto. Come to think of it, it’s one of my very favourite mains of the decade.

11) Dry-aged ribeye at Bar Laurel (2016)
Chef-owner Jon Svazas’ go-big-or-go-home, 20-ounce ribeye that had been dry-aged for 80 days delivered concentrated beefiness with nuanced side notes and fat that was too tasty to squander. What’s more, the meat was made better with demi-glace, salsa verde, fingerlings, enoki mushrooms and broccolini.

12) Ice cream, almonds, blueberries, chocolate and espresso at Odile (2012)
At Odile, the second business opened in Hull by chef-restaurateur Marysol Foucault, served a dessert that seven years later still seems beguilingly spot-on. The sophisticated yet unfussy triumph consisted of vanilla and praline ice cream, roasted almonds and clusters of frozen wild blueberries enrobed in dark chocolate. A server emptied a small cup of espresso into the bowl, and voila — a deluxe, melting, caffeinated, nutty mud pie. Sadly, Odile closed after 15 months. Fortunately, Foucault’s brunch-lunch spot, Edgar, remains a vital, if non-reservable, table for Ottawa-area food-lovers craving her signature Dutch baby pancakes and more.

phum@postmedia.com

ALSO IN THE NEWS

Justin Bieber is coming to Ottawa in 2020

Year in review: Top highlights of Ottawa’s arts scene in 2019

Cappies review: Alice conquers whimsical wonderland with her charm

Maht
726 Somerset St. W., 613-680-7268, themaht.com
Open: Tuesday to Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 5 to 8:30 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 5 to 9 p.m., closed Monday
Prices : most dishes up to $17.95
Access: steps to front door

Late last month, we bundled up in our puffiest parkas and ventured into this winter’s first heavy-duty cold snap, wishing for a dinner that would take the chill off.

We were the only people hardy enough to eat that night at Maht, a 20-seat Korean restaurant that opened in Chinatown last spring where Wei’s Noodle House had been.

Since the early 1990s, that hole-in-the-wall address on Somerset Street West has housed a succession of tiny Vietnamese restaurants that each served appealing, affordable dishes despite their cramped quarters. We crossed our fingers for similar satisfactions at Maht, which in Korean simply means “taste.”

The cutting wind and -20 C temperatures outside called, we thought, for spicy, substantial Korean stews — robust, rugged bowls flavoured with funky gochujang paste, pepper and finely ground chiles, perhaps with bony chunks of pork or chicken adding meaty heft. We were not disappointed.

A sign on the wall announced that Maht’s open kitchen was serving gamjatang, a rustic soup made with pork neck bones. Having been cooked directly on the stove’s gas element, the bowl landed on our table while still bubbling ominously. We divvied up its spicy, porky contents, fortified ourselves with broth that set our mouths thrumming and plucked bits of long-simmered meat, soft but leached somewhat of flavour, from their bones.

Less effort to eat, and perhaps even more comforting and satisfying, was Maht’s pork and kimchi soondubu, another potently spicy stew in which soft tofu, kimchi of middling pungency and slices of pork provided contrasts.

While that dish and jjimdak, a hearty chicken stew of jolting and long-lasting pepperiness, have been on Maht’s menu for months, they seemed especially suited to warding off winter. That stew, which was meant for two and was Maht’s priciest item by a factor of two at $34.95, teemed with pieces of bone-in chicken and potatoes, slippery glass noodles, bits of mushrooms, carrots, green onions and more in a sauce that was peppery above all but also soy-salty and a touch sweet.

With all of the stews came bowls of nutty purple rice. We’ve also received small complimentary servings of kimchi and various pickled vegetables whose funky sourness offset the heat and richness of our dishes.

We proceeded our stews with some contrasting appetizers that hit the spot. Tteokkochi were skewers of crisp-fried rice cakes topped with squiggles of gochujang (savoury fermented chili paste) and pumpkin seeds, while the japchae, stir-fried glass noodles and vegetables, was salty and sweet.

At an earlier lunch visit, we began with the seafood pajeon pancake, whose tender shrimp and squid and overall tastiness made a good impression. We also had a plate of tteokbokki — rice cakes stir-fried in a spicy mish-mash with slices of fish cake and cabbage.

At that lunch, a three-chili spicy stir-fry of squid raised the bar for heat tolerance. The bulgogi- and pork-based rice bowls at lunch were more lacklustre though, especially compared to the roaringly flavourful squid dish but also because their purple rice was overcooked.

Dessert here was limited to ice creams — black sesame, red bean and ginger — which were nicely garnished and cooled our palates after those zippy stews.

Maht is licensed and serves a very small section of beers and alcohol. Service was attentive and keen to please.

Maht, we hope, has what it takes to be more than a refuge from the polar vortex. The women that run it apply good standards preparing food that’s in keeping with the wee kitchen’s size.

And yet, on social media the restaurant has teased us with glimpses of less common dishes that we hope might one day be offered. We’ll be interested to see if Maht can enlarge its menu and serve more tastes of Korea.

phum@postmedia.com

Hey Kitchen
710 Somerset St. W., 613- 569-9725 , hey-kitchen.business.site
Open: 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily
Prices: dishes up to $16.99
Access: steps to front door

The Japanese have a word for it — yōshoku.

In Japanese cuisine, yōshoku refers to fusion dishes that are basically Japanized forms of European or otherwise foreign dishes. Japanese curries that are much more mellow than their Indian inspirations are a famous example.

Although the generically named Hey Kitchen, which opened in early December where Korean restaurant Owl of Minerva had been in Chinatown, does not come out and announce its indebtedness to yōshoku, that kind of food enjoys pride of place on its menu.

This bright and affordable spot, already popular with young Asian customers, numbers among the latest wave of cozy and specialized restaurants to have opened in Ottawa.

Most significant in terms of Hey Kitchen’s distinctiveness is a menu that is taut, yet still roams across Asia, and even bewilders a bit with its novelties, which are presented matter-of-fact and without the kind of context or back story I’m providing now with the help of Wikipedia.

Leaving aside Hey Kitchen’s appetizers, which can be as familiar as french fries or as outré as chicken feet with pickled peppers, the larger offerings here head in two similarly contrasting directions. There are the rice- or pasta-based yōshoku dishes, and there are noodle bowls and soups that are definitely Chinese. (In fact, the restaurant is run by Chinese expats.)

A big chunk of Hey Kitchen’s menu can be traced back to the innovations of a Japanese fast-food franchise called Pepper Lunch. Its hallmark dish, which dates to the mid-1990s, places a mound of cooked rice surrounded by thinly sliced beef on an iron plate that’s been electromagnetically heated until it’s screaming hot.

Hey Kitchen serves eight similarly made “special teppan pepper rice” dishes. Of course, a beefy version is offered. But so, too, are versions with eel, tiger shrimp, smoked duck breast, smoked chicken, salmon, ox tongue or pork neck, some of which might be influenced by Chinese palates. All of these iron plates arrive at your table on wooden platters and are ringed by a red paper sash warning that the iron plate was heated to 200 C.

With these dishes come gravy boats filled with the brown sauce that puts the “pepper” in “pepper rice,” although as per Japanese tastes, it is not that peppery and is more savoury and sweet. The idea is that the gravy hits the hot plate and — voila! A cloud of aromatic steam wafts.

We tried the beef ($11.99) and salmon ($12.99) versions and both were hearty and enjoyable, with the one proviso that the meat, or fish in particular, will become overcooked if left too long on the plate.

Hey Kitchen also serves heaps of spaghetti or fettuccine on its blisteringly hot, warning-encircled iron plates. The same protein choices apply. Pepper sauce is available, but not exclusively so. Diners can also opt for tomato, cream or curry sauces, and even additional toppings such as mushrooms, bacon, fried or marinated egg, kimchi and corn are available for customized eating.

Call me a pasta purist, but I preferred the pepper rice dishes to the fettuccine-based dishes I tried. Above all, the tomato and cream sauces did little for me.

Another Japanese dish served here is omurice, a fusion dish dating back a century or so that involves thin omelettes stuffed with well-sauced rice. At Hey Kitchen, heavily sauced omurice dishes come with proteins on the side or on top.

Overall, I preferred the omurice to the pasta and rice dishes. I can vouch for steak omurice with black pepper sauce ($15.99), and especially fried chicken cutlet omurice with not-so-spicy Japanese curry sauce ($12.99).

The eatery’s nine noodle choices are basically Sichuan-style bowls made with your choice of noodles and protein in a soupy broth that’s as spicy and even numbing as you like, from not spicy or numbing to extra spicy or numbing.

I had Chong Qing noodles “with minced pork and peas” ($11.99), ordered “regular spicy” and “regular numbing,” which was more than intense enough on both counts thanks to ample quantities of chilies and Sichuan pepper, respectively.

Its minced pork turned out to be morsels of pork belly and its peas turned out to be chickpeas. Surprises aside, it was a big, satisfying lunch, with components and garnishes including peanuts, sesame paste, cilantro, green onions, half a marinated egg and pickled vegetables making themselves felt.

The menu’s four stewed soups are for, I think, enthusiasts of long-simmered Chinese broths that I think of as health tonics rather than meals.

My wife ordered the coconut and chicken soup ($8.99), thinking from its minimal description that she would receive something like Thai tom kha gai. But when she lifted the lid, she saw a brownish broth, chunks of coconut and bony chunks of chicken. I can guess that herbal black chicken soup and silk chicken with conch and ginseng soup would equally bewilder those unaccustomed to their authentic qualities.

Service here was fast and casual, with servers bringing carafes of acidulated hot and cold water and then whatever dishes are ready first, which could be your sizzling plate of pasta followed by your appetizer.

We’ve had takoyaki (Japanese deep-fried dough balls with bits of octopus in the middle, $7.99) which were suitably crisp and savoury, and popcorn chicken ($7.99), which was just so-so, lacking in the crunch I prefer in that guilty pleasure.

The restaurant is not licensed and serves no dessert. If you need something sweet, there are nearby bubble tea shops.

La Fiesta Latina
565 Somerset St. W., 613-712-1717, lafiestalatina.ca
Open: Tuesday to Saturday 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., Sunday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., closed Monday
Prices: up to $17 for dishes
Access: Steps to front door

At La Fiesta Latina, our third time was a charm.

In December, we went twice to the Mexican-Latino restaurant that had opened in early November on Somerset Street West just west of Bay Street. At our initial try, the food was promising. But when we visited again, the bland food and slack service left us quite unimpressed.

Happily for us, and the business, a lunch last week was much more enjoyable. Tasty, homey, heaping plates and lively, engaged service were much more on point. We left wanting to return to explore the breadth of this unpretentious place’s picture-filled menus (all-day breakfast and all-day other dishes). Plus, where else can we go for food from Mexico, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador and elsewhere in the Americas, a good percentage of which are vegetarian.

The culinary diversity corresponds to what our charming server told us last week. The kitchen team is made up of “all kinds of brown people,” he said. The restaurant’s website shows photos of aproned women in the mostly-from-scratch kitchen, from which emerges not just tacos and enchiladas, but also — in our best experience — chicken enchiladas in a sumptuous mole sauce, appealing Colombian arepitas (unleavened patties of maize dough) and assorted plates heavily laden with seasoned rice, plantains, savoury black beans and proteins.

On our first go, we tried a selection of the restaurant’s tacos, all of which had the ring of authenticity. Braised meats had been steeped in bonafide, big-flavoured sauces before meeting their store-bought tortillas, and while some looked similar, they presented us with different flavours. These were not the more chef-y tacos that reign elsewhere, beautifully garnished and made with freshly pressed tortillas. But they provided the fundamental taco satisfactions, and an array of hot sauces will help if extra heat is your thing.

(I will note that a scan of La Fiesta Latina’s Facebook page shows more heavily garnished and even interesting tacos, including one made with stewed lamb.)

The Venezuelan platter came with white rice that had additional flavours cooked in, thick-cut slices of plantain and good, garlicky black beans, although the shredded pork was awfully dry, whether by design or as a result of being reheated or kept heated for a long time.

About the second visit, perhaps the less said, the better. I will mention that some egg-y breakfast items were lacklustre, and our generally inattentive and perfunctory server — he was, to be fair, beleaguered during a weekend brunch rush — deprived us of water, which we had ask for, and also chips and salsa on the house, which other tables received but we never did.

Closest to the plus side of the ledger at that brunch were the rustically tasty chicharrons (nuggets of fried pork), which were crunchy, meaty and fatty all in one and garnished with wedges of lime.

So let’s skip ahead to last week’s lunch. Redemption!

First, our spirits rose with the immediate arrival of complimentary corn chips, fresh house-made pico de gallo and salsa, courtesy of our lively, new-to-us server whose fun demeanour rubbed off on us.

Then, that chicken enchilada with mole sauce? A savoury, sweet, spicy, chocolate-y winner. You could have served me cardboard with that sauce and I would have enjoyed it.

Chunks of pork shoulder and house-made, somewhat spicy chorizo sausages were stars on two fully loaded plates. The La Fiesta Latina platter pleased, too, with chunky fresh guacamole, among its many components.

Arepitas filled with pork were toothsome. At the previous lunch, the egg-filled arepitas were tough — one, almost tooth-breakingly so.

A small bowl of Ajiaco soup — an appealing Colombian soup starring chicken and corn — was simple but delicious. It came with capers and cream on the side, which the server said were necessary to make the soup really sing. Funny, those accompaniments were absent when one of us ordered Ajiaco at our second visit.

After our third visit, I can recommend going to La Fiesta Latina for the kitchen’s desserts alone. A tall slab of tres leches cake was supremely moist, indulgent and sweet. Big pieces of chocoflan cake hit the spot with their fudge-y bottom and creamy top. Arroz con leche was a reliable pleasure for fans of rice pudding.

The restaurant is a bright, narrow, welcoming space of 26 seats split between chairs and a hard banquette flanking tables. Its white walls are decorated with a mish-mash of framed photos, evocative art pieces and sombreros. The eatery is also a mini-grocery with some canned and bottled Latin-American staples for sale.

Recently licensed, La Fiesta Latina serves beer as well as imported soft drinks.

I’m partial to humble, friendly, unique places that serve consistently good food representing faraway homelands. Until last week, I wasn’t convinced that La Fiesta Latina was one of them. After that pleasing lunch, I have my fingers crossed.

phum@postmedia.com

ALSO

Gray Jay hosts carbon-conscious dinner: ‘As the national capital, we need to set a standard’

Best bets, Jan. 16 to 22: Theatre from the North, and a Bob Marley celebration

Dear Evan Hansen, Mean Girls, Wicked coming to Ottawa as part of 2020-21 Broadway Across Canada season

On Oct. 27, 1945, the typewritten menu at the Ontario Cafe at 66 Rideau St. listed such temptations as breaded halibut steak for 40 cents, grilled milk-fed veal chops for 45 cents, and, perhaps most surprisingly 75 years later, several chop suey dishes including chicken mushroom chop suey for 75 cents.

Those Chinese-Canadian items likely dated back to the early days of the eatery that stood where the Rideau Centre is now. My grandfather, James Hum, opened the Ontario Cafe with several partners in the early 1920s, having emigrated from southern China to Ottawa in the mid-1910s.

One of the first Chinese immigrants who settled in Ottawa, my grandfather died in 1934. The Ontario Cafe, which thrived when farmers sold their wares at the nearby ByWard Market, remained in my family for some years, although perhaps not into the mid-1940s. But two of my grandfather’s sons, my uncle, Tom, and my father, Joe, went on to open restaurants in Ottawa, too.

I did not take over the family restaurant when I had the chance to, decades ago, and I was never asked to. Instead, I now have the privilege of dining at restaurants considerably more frequently than my pay grade should allow, as long as I write about those meals.

Chinese food and my family are on my mind this week. Chinese New Year, which begins Saturday, encompasses many traditions and superstitions, and perhaps above all, it is a time for families to come together, honour ancestors and feast.

But even if your ancestry isn’t Chinese, you too might feel like celebrating soon with a Chinese meal. Analysis released this month by the website chefspencil.com found that the top “ethnic” cuisine in Canada was Chinese, followed by Italian, Thai, Indian and Mexican.

The international food website generated its rankings through Google Trends analyses. Drilling down into the results, you do find that input from B.C. contributed heavily to Chinese cuisine coming out on top. Still, when I asked Chef’s Pencil for data exclusive to Ottawa, Chinese food again topped the list, followed by Indian, Thai, Italian and Mexican. For all of Quebec, Chinese food was again No. 1, according to the website.

That kind of popularity is reason enough to ponder what’s meant by Chinese food in 2020, particularly in Ottawa.

Although Chinese-Canadian fare hasn’t died out entirely, we are a long way from chop suey. Waves of immigration from China have brought a succession of new, diverse dishes, served not just to fellow expats but to non-Chinese with curious taste buds.

Regional specialties such as Yunnanese “Crossing the Bridge” soup, Lanzhou hand-pulled noodles, the street-food crepes called jianbing and more are now served in Ottawa, the latest arrivals in a century-long evolution of Chinese food that in Ottawa began downtown, moved to Somerset Street West by the 1980s, and appears now in our suburbs.

From the Ontario Cafe, my relatives made their entrepreneurial move to Centretown. My uncle Tom held shares in the Arcadia Grill at 249 Bank St. and the Ho Ho Cafe at 248 Albert St. My father, who died in 2005, wrote in his diary of reminiscences that during the Second World War years, the Arcadia Grill “was extremely busy because it had an attractive store front and was the only restaurant to have air conditioning.”

By the early 1960s, my father and his brother-in-law were running the Marco Polo Tavern Restaurant on Bank Street near Heron Road. “There was a lot of construction going on in Alta Vista and we catered to the working class,” my father wrote. The Marco Polo served Canadian and Chinese-Canadian dishes galore — hot turkey sandwiches and chicken fried rice, grilled baby beef liver and garlic spare ribs. Now, the Thai restaurant Sweet Basil stands where the Marco Polo was.

Among the restaurant pioneers of Ottawa’s Chinatown was the Shanghai, opened by Alan Kwan in 1971. His children continue to run the restaurant, which they transformed into a hip, new-generation haunt. Still, Alan’s son Edward, known widely in Ottawa as drag queen China Doll, has posted on Facebook that the Shanghai could well close in 2021 when it turns 50.

In the mid-1980s, entrepreneurial immigrants from Hong Kong opened the massive, cornerstone Chinatown restaurants Fuliwah (now Oriental Chu Shing Restaurant) and the Yangtze. Cart-service dim sum likely touched down in Ottawa at these two competing neighbours on Somerset Street West.

By the early 1990s, modest restaurants such as Jadeland, Ben Ben and Cafe Orient, all still open, brought more casual Hong Kong-style fare to Ottawa. They remain popular with Hong Kong expats, says Grace Xin, executive director of the Chinatown Business Improvement Area.

“Chinatown is the place that really gives you the feeling of home,” says Xin, who came to Ottawa from southern China about 20 years ago.

A particular Chinatown success story is So Good Restaurant, which Peter So opened in 1994. So retired in 2018, selling the restaurant to one of his chefs, who has even gone on to open a second location on Springfield Road in New Edinburgh. Although in new hands, So Good retains its original, staggeringly long and diverse menu, which So says was such a hit because it offered so many vegetarian options.

This week, So and I chatted at Cafe Orient, a tiny Chinatown eatery that opened in 1993. The humble place is naturally a little tired-looking, but we enjoyed small dishes and snacks that Xin told me are true tastes of Hong Kong. Fried bread was lightly sweet and milk tea was creamy and satisfying. Chiu chow dumplings were plump and fresh. Morsels of steamed rice roll were basic but irresistible, swathed in hoisin and peanut sauces. Shrimp wontons were tender and chunky of filling.

I still do think that Hung Sum, the à la carte dim sum specialist across from Plant Recreation Centre, serves Ottawa’s best dim sum. But Cafe Orient’s no-fuss dishes definitely hit the spot.

“Szechuan” food first appeared in Ottawa in the 1980s. But they were just rough approximations, usually made by Cantonese chefs and restaurateurs keen to jump on a trend. True Sichuanese dishes, many brimming with dried chilies and liberal doses of numbing Sichuan pepper, only arrived in Ottawa in the past five or six years, at a few restaurants that have since closed and the still-open Full House on Carling Avenue. Meanwhile, the Dalhousie Street restaurant Spicy House serves chili-heavy fare from different parts of China.

What’s the core market for these new businesses? The 2016 census tallied more than 46,000 Chinese people in Ottawa, among an East and Southeast Asian population of more than 76,000. Perhaps the most crucial customers are thousands of homesick and hungry international Asian students attending Ottawa’s post-secondary institutions. A casual glance inside many of the new and affordable Chinese restaurants seems like instant confirmation.

Entrepreneurs have also proven in recent years that Asian night market festivals on Somerset Street West and elsewhere could draw crowds of as many as 25,000 — Asian expats and Canadian-born foodies — for everything from skewers of lamb, squid or potato to stinky tofu.

Two franchises of Chinese-based hot pot restaurants have opened in Ottawa — Liuyishou Hotpot Ottawa on Merivale Road and the more spacious, fancier Morals Village on Riverside Drive. Both provide sumptuous, fondue-like experiences grounded in a range of piping hot broths.

Crossing the Bridge noodles arrived stealthily in Ottawa a few years ago at the modest Vanier restaurant Yunnan Fusion. The dish, which originated in the southern Chinese province of Yunnan, has an elaborate back story. Legend says a wife who brought lunch to her husband, a studying scholar, split up broth and soup ingredients so they would degrade less during her trip that involved crossing a bridge.

Apocryphal or not, the tale lines up with how the soup is served at Yunnan Fusion, in homespun fashion, and at the franchise operations Dagu Rice Noodle on Riverside Drive and Yunshang Rice Noodle, which opened last year in Centretown.

In particular, the soups at Yunshang, a four-year-old Toronto-based business that also has locations in Vancouver, Montreal and New York, impressed me a lot. Appealing broths, authentic or otherwise, range from the original pork-y based one that’s like a more brusque tonkotsu ramen broth, to a Thai-style curry broth to broths made puckeringly sour by pickled vegetables or scorchingly hot by chilies. Trays of accompaniments and optional add-ons won us over, while popcorn chicken and spicy tofu appetizers were also solidly made.

But as far as Chinese noodles go, I’m most beguiled by the Guilin noodles served at Sula Wok on Main Street. Xin-Hui Su, best known by her nickname Sula, sells a lot of fusion dishes — think Asian tacos. But I crave her Guilin rice noodles, the most popular dish in the region of southern China from where she hails. Slippery noodles mingle with the alternating sournesses of pickled daikon and mustard greens and the pop of fried soybeans. The sauce that Sula makes for her noodles — made with 50 dried herbs and spices and cooked for more than a day — is truly compelling.

My preferred Chinese dumplings come from a Centrepointe mall eatery that opened nearly two years ago. At Dumpling? Dumpling!, pork, beef, chicken and shrimp dumplings were made with quality ingredients and contained big, clean flavours, while funky Chinese mushrooms, asparagus, coriander, fennel and curry spoke clearly too in preparations. We’ve preferred our orders pan-fried, to achieve a nice, crisp sear on one side.

Many of these restaurants are essentially specialists. Indeed, paring down menus does require less of a kitchen. So, when I’m asked for my favourite Chinese restaurant in Ottawa, one with a broad menu and not just efficiency and expertise in serving soup or street foods, I respond: Harbin Restaurant, located in a March Road strip mall in Kanata.

Harbin takes its name from northeastern China’s second largest city, and was opened in the fall of 2018 by Harbin native Hang Yu. He and his wife moved to Ottawa in 2012 to study engineering at the graduate level. But Yu, now 31 and a Kanata resident, went instead into the restaurant business, as hard as he says it is. “I just want to share my hometown’s food,” he says.

Yu says he always wanted to be a chef and has relatives who run restaurants in Harbin and Beijing. His restaurant’s chef is from Shanghai, but can cook Harbin specialties including a range of casseroles, other Northern Chinese dishes, authentically fiery and complex Sichuanese dishes and more.

In my experience, whatever he cooks, he cooks well, from scrumptiously spicy Sichuan-style chicken wings to Harbin casseroles of tender meatballs, spinach and vermicelli to punchily flavoured stir-fries of eggplant or beef.

About 80 per cent of Harbin’s customers are Chinese expats, Yu says, before adding: “Chinese, after staying in Canada a couple of years, their taste actually changes. You eat more sweet stuff, you eat more sugar.” Harbin’s recipes have been tweaked ever so slightly as a result, he says.

“We actually teach lots of Canadian people to eat Chinese food,” Yu continues. Family-style dining still seems novel to some of his guests, he says. And yet, sharing dishes at the table has been a convention of Chinese dining in Ottawa since at least the days of the Marco Polo Tavern Restaurant.

Yu, who plans to open another Harbin later this year on Merivale Road, makes me think that in a century, Chinese food in Ottawa has travelled very far from Rideau Street to Centretown to Alta Vista to Somerset Street West to March Road. It has changed radically, too, as have its purveyors. But at least two constants — deliciousness and a coming together of cultures through food — have endured.

phum@postmedia.com

Selected Chinese restaurants in Ottawa

Cafe Orient
808 Somerset St. W.

Dumpling? Dumpling !
261 Centrepointe Dr., facebook.com/dumplingdumplingca

Harbin Restaurant
591 March Rd., harbinrestaurant.com

Hung Sum
939 Somerset St. W., facebook.com/HungSumRestaurant

Morals Village Hot Pot
3987 Riverside Dr., Unit 1

So Good Restaurant
717 Somerset St. W., sogoodfo.w12.wh-2.com

Sula Wok
184 Main St., facebook.com/sulawok

Yunshang Rice Noodle
275 Bank St., Unit 101, yunshang.ca

ALSO IN THE NEWS

Cook this: Traditional-ish pork dumplings from Double Awesome Chinese Food

The slow death of plastic: Why the path to a plastic-less future is so complicated

A decade of deliciousness: The Citizen’s favourite dishes of the 2010s

Grill 41
100 Elgin St. (in the Lord Elgin Hotel), 613-569-2126, grill41.ca
Open: daily from 6:30 a.m. to 11 p.m.
Prices: mains at dinner from $22 to $69
Access: fully accessible

The veteran Ottawa chef René Rodriguez doesn’t need me to sing his praises, but here goes anyway.

Back in the fall of 2012, when I was just getting settled into this reviewing gig, a dinner at Rodriguez’s restaurant Navarra blew my mind. The Murray Street business served vibrant, elevated dishes energized by the culinary inspirations of Mexico, which is where Rodriguez’s family is from. After Navarra closed in 2017, Rodriguez later ran the kitchen at the upscale Italian restaurant Orto in the Glebe. There, we also found the food impressive.

Even if you haven’t eaten Rodriguez’s best efforts, you may well have rooted for him during his much-publicized TV cooking escapades. He won Top Chef Canada in 2014. On the 2017 Food Network show Beat Bobby Flay, Rodriguez did just that, prevailing over the American mega-chef.

So, this week’s disheartening mystery is why the dishes we’ve had at the Lord Elgin Hotel’s Grill 41, where Rodriguez has been the chef since last fall, have ranged from alright to so-so to disappointing.

Since at least mid-November, Rodriguez has held that position at the venerable downtown hotel, reporting to the Lord Elgin’s executive chef Neil Mather, while the restaurant itself is owned and operated by food services giant Sodexo Canada. The revamped menu now includes a slew of “René Rodriguez signature dishes,” designated with “RR” beside them.

And yet, during my two lunch visits and one dinner, we too often found those dishes and others were scarcely items of which  an accomplished, famous chef should be proud. Some were too casually made, such as an appetizer of dry, overcooked octopus, or too casually conceived, like the entry-level beet salad awash in frisée. The high prices of dishes compounded our disatisfactions.

Rodriguez told me this week of the hours he works at Lord Elgin, which are from 3 p.m. to 9 p.m., five days a week. (He also works at Mercadito, the taco-based business in the Queen St. Fare food hall.) He was not in the kitchen when we had dinner. Nor was he hands-on with our lunches. But how much should that matter? I know that the dinner at Navarra that wowed me years ago was prepared while Rodriguez was absent from his kitchen, by talented cooks who could assemble Rodriguez’s dazzling creations.

At Grill 41, we ate best when we had less ambitious fare at our two lunches. Thanks to the heavy-on-the-umami quality of the “RR” truffle burger (eight ounces of ground chuck, bolstered by truffled triple cream brie and mushroom jam), its $25 splurge was palatable, even if its fries were mediocre. The “RR” watercress salad, which matched the greens with cured tuna gravlax, deviled egg and olive powder ($21) was a simple dish, but all of its components were satisfyingly in place.

At lunch, we also tried the oddly designated “RR” Wolfgang Puck pizza ($24), made with Alfredo sauce, shiitake mushroom, arugula, radicchio and truffle, which was reasonably tasty, but also too crisply cooked. For a non-“RR” dish, we went for the highly recommended “Michael Smith” chowder, which must owe its name to the fact that the P.E.I.-based star chef helped develop Grill 41’s menu in 2011. While the thickly creamy seafood chowder was expensive ($19) and looked as if it had been doled out haphazardly, at least it was generously stocked with shrimp, lobster and other ingredients that were almost surprisingly toothsome and fresh.

Our dinner at Grill 41, though, was more uneven and included some “RR” dishes that flopped.

Of four appetizers, best was the ostentatiously named “RR — Grill 41 signature steak tartare” ($21), which was roughly chopped, adequately seasoned and enjoyable, although I’d say that its ingredients could have sung a little louder. Bear in mind, too, that there are slightly cheaper tartares in town that by comparison make you say “Wow!”

We were perplexed by the sea of Granny Smith apple emulsion that almost drowned four seared scallops ($19). While not a dud, the dish lacked the finesse you’d want from a scallops starter. Dry and flavour-deprived “RR” grilled octopus was a big letdown ($18) that made us scrape the plate for the meagre consolation of burnt honey. The menu also mentione pork belly being a component of the dish, but it was MIA. The “RR” house beet salad ($18) seemed off-puttingly thrown-together, made with slow-roasted squash that felt tired and an alarming amount of frisée.

Wild mushroom risotto ($22 and not an “RR” dish) was massively portioned and acceptable, but fell short of the more flavourful and al-dente rice treat I can make for myself. The “RR” grilled chicken supreme ($31) looked overcooked and was too dry. The side casserole of vegetables was a nice touch, but the chicken’s morel butter sauce tasted more of salt than of prized mushrooms.

Putting the “grill” in Grill 41 were the menu’s several steak-based dishes. We tried the “RR” 10-ounce striploin “steak frites” with Roquefort butter, fries and salad. While it was the best of our three mains, it was also priced high enough ($39) for us to expect perfection.

Let’s put it this way: These and other dishes did not instill confidence that we should later order the $69 “RR” surf-and-turf of filet mignon and butter-poached lobster, Robuchon potatoes, lobster sauce Américaine and broccoli gratin, no matter how much it appealed on the menu.

Another downer: the choice of desserts consisted that night of a standard issue house-made crème brûlée and a few brought-in items made by Pasticceria Gelateria Italiana in Little Italy. Perhaps this is the Sodexo way, but it’s hard to square with a $69 surf-and-turf dinner.

Had my budget allowed, we would have tried some of Grill 41’s reasonably priced two-ounce cocktails and martinis. But that’s a stone we left unturned.

Service from three different servers ranged from efficient and anonymous to effusive but also somewhat slack and lacking in polish to brusque. Two of three times, we did not feel attended to or cared for.

Reached this week, executive chef Mather responded to a synopsis of my thoughts with: “We’re very happy with René and since November, when we launched his dishes we have had great feedback and the culinary team is growing with him as they continue to learn more about his style and dishes.

“We are about to make more changes to the menu and add some other dishes from René. Also, we are working on a service training program to constantly improve our guest experience.”

When my predecessor, Anne DesBrisay, reviewed Grill 41 in February 2011, its appearance, following a renovation, didn’t do much for her. She called the bi-level room “remarkably unremarkable … beige and brown and bland, filled with composite wood, fake Benjaminas, hotel-issue carpet and Home Depot-ish lights. About the only interesting bit is the long wood-like cupboard of wine, behind which is tucked a private dining room.” I would say that nine years later, very little has changed.

Searching for a plus side, I would say I liked Grill 41 more than my predecessor did. She approved of the Michael Smith chowder, but sent back gnocchi that were “hard little floury pellets.” She deemed the macaroni and cheese inedible and found a pork chop so “desperately dry” that it was removed from her bill. In late 2019 and 2020, we ate better than that.

But the magic of Rodriguez’s cooking could scarcely be felt in the dishes we had. Of course, all the “RRs” on the menu were meant to entice and raise expectations. But the marketing rang hollow. Grill 41, whether Rodriguez was there or not, needed to deliver much less drab, overpriced food.

phum@postmedia.com

ALSO

Canada’s top chefs are in Ottawa for the Culinary Championships—and the contest gets harder every year

NAC preview: ‘Bickering Pines’ barn inspired Jim Cuddy’s latest solo album

5 things you need to know about the 2020 TD Ottawa Winter Jazz Festival

Atelier
540 Rochester St., Ottawa, 613-321-3537, atelierrestaurant.ca
Open: For dinner Tuesday through Saturday, closed Sunday and Monday
Prices: $125 for a 12-course tasting menu
Access: Steps to front door

Not to brag, but so far in 2020, I’ve already had two fantastic, 12-course, haute-cuisine dinners.

Last Saturday night at the Shaw Centre, there was the opulent, gourmet’s race-against-the-clock that was the grand finale of the 2020 Canadian Culinary Championships. Completist that I am, I hit every station and ate beautiful plate after beautiful plate, savouring delicacy-rich creations from some of Canada’s leading chefs.

And then there was my other fine-dining meal, which was even better.

In mid-January, I had the blind, 12-course menu at Atelier. And as vaunted as the culinary championships’ delights were, dinner at chef-owner Marc Lepine’s cutting-edge restaurant on Rochester Street topped them.

Perhaps that’s not so surprising. Atelier has been consistently lauded since it opened in late 2008, landing on various renowned lists of elite restaurants in Canada and North America. Lepine took home the gold at the 2012 and 2016 Canadian Culinary Championships, which were held in Kelowna, B.C., before the event moved to Ottawa this year. Canada’s principal assessor of restaurants and chefs, the annual Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants magazine, named Lepine the country’s most innovative chef in 2018.

I last had dinner at Atelier in 2011, when four of us marked some birthdays there. It was an evening of wows and irreproachable service, although these are the recollections of a “civilian” diner and not a pro critic — I didn’t start this reviewing gig until 2012.

So in 2020, I was curious to appraise Atelier from my critic’s vantage point, in light of the culinary championships and taking into account developments in Ottawa’s restaurant scene in recent years. Not the least of those was the opening last May of THRU, Lepine’s hyper-exclusive six-seat restaurant (or second-storey private dining room under Atelier’s roof, if you prefer) that serves an entirely different and mind-boggling menu, all the while relying on Atelier’s kitchen and staff.

After more than a decade, the specific restaurant experience Atelier and Lepine offer should be well-known to discerning food lovers in Ottawa and elsewhere. (Lepine even published his lavish and revelatory Atelier: The Cookbook in 2018, which he wrote with my predecessor, Anne DesBrisay.)

DesBrisay herself reviewed Atelier in early 2009, and her glowing take can be distilled to two short sentences: “This is a brilliantly creative place. Tweak the budget and book a table.” I’ll note that then, the tasting menu cost $75, not the $125 of 2020. I’ll also note, to put that price further in context, that eating at Atelier is in fact a bargain compared to the cost of dining at some not dissimilar Michelin-starred restaurants in the U.S. and abroad.

To achieve his brilliance, Lepine has become a national master of what used to be called molecular gastronomy but is now more usually called modernist cuisine, building on the technological and even chemistry-based innovations of such landmark restaurants as El Bulli in Spain and Alinea in Chicago, where Lepine did an unpaid internship.

One feature of modernist cuisine is the transformation of ingredients into chips, powders, gels and more, maximizing the surprises and the assorted visual and flavour-based balancing acts on the plate. Some dismiss modernist cuisine as pretentious and overly artificial, but I’m OK with it, and prefer to view dinner at Atelier as a parade of highly technical dishes that strive for uniqueness in multiple ways while appealing to a guest’s senses of curiosity and playfulness. Another way of looking at Atelier is that it’s simply Lepine’s forum for showing off what he can do with food.

There is a bit of a disconnect between the feel of Atelier and the ambience that some would associate with luxurious, expensive dining. Atelier has always been more minimalist and funky rather than posh and oversized, surrounding guests in the cosy, narrow quarters of a former Little Italy house, amid a stark but not uncomfortable atmosphere of grey, black and white.

Perhaps the goal is to have the creativity of Lepine’s food pop more against such neutrality. For a fine-dining experience, Atelier can even seem on the casual side — or at least, in January, I saw guests dressed as casually for their groundbreaking dinner as they would have been at a fast-food outlet.

Appearances aside, Atelier indisputably operates at a fine-dining level when it comes to service. The tone set by our servers was unfailingly attentive but never intrusive. Lepine serves the kind of novel, at times arcane fare that requires 30-second-long recitations of ingredients and techniques, and our servers were up to those challenges. The flawlessness of service included that extra-mile measure of re-folding a guest’s crumpled napkin when the guest had left the table.

My predecessor’s 2009 review managed the feat of sharing very, very little about what she ate as she didn’t want to give away too many surprises. I will offer some specifics, based on the fact that my friend and I tried not only the night’s tasting menu but also the vegetarian/vegan alternatives.

Our dinner began very strongly with a snack course that put three mind-expanding bites on a whimsically rotating platform. Who, apart from Lepine, knew that snail caviar, parsnip purée and crisp, cedar-tinged puff would be delicious? So, too, was a seaweed crisp topped with crab salad. Just as great was a cube of wagyu beef short rib in sticky soy caramel. We had vegan options, too, which swapped frozen coconut pearls for snail caviar, artichoke salad for crab salad and sweet potato for beef. They were fine, but the carnivore options struck us as the real deal.

A mushroom tom yum dish, garnishing exotic mushrooms with smoked apple dust and more, was fantastic. The vegan version, which left out fish sauce, was just a little less complex and great.

Among other courses, some were very good but short of a wow, especially in this meat-eater’s opinion. But there were highlights enough to make me think the meal was worthwhile, including an elaborate dish finished with perfect cauliflower soup, a scallop croquettes dish, a sablefish course, a quail course, and a strikingly garnished beef tenderloin-and-kimchi course.

Two desserts — one made with coffee, cajeta (Mexican caramel) and goat-cheese ice cream, the other made with chocolate ganache and passionfruit curd — were expertly crafted and stimulating in just the right way after the courses that had preceded them.

Guests are told to allot three hours for dinner at Atelier. We were there for a good extra hour and a half, but the food gave us much to talk about.

We didn’t dig into Atelier’s well-regarded wine list, but we heard the restaurant’s sommelier dispensing good information and we each enjoyed a top-notch cocktail, one boozy and the other alcohol-free.

Having been ahead of the curve for so long, Atelier has seen rivals, more so on the national and international dining scenes, make their own modernist inroads. I do think it’s harder than it was in 2008 or 2009 to be cutting-edge.

That said, based on what I ate at the culinary championships and at Atelier, I’d say Lepine still cooks like a two-time national champion at his restaurant. Only his other restaurant THRU, which somehow doesn’t hamper Atelier’s greatness, and chef-owner Briana Kim’s restaurant Alice are in Atelier’s league, in Ottawa and perhaps even beyond.

phum@postmedia.com

ALSO

Macarons et Madeleines announces closure after nine years

Best bets, Feb. 6-12: Dreamy alt-pop by Jasmine Trails, a tropical party at Kichesippi Beer

Why so many in Ottawa are making art about a lesbian couple’s ‘outrageous bravery’

Bukhari
1846 Carling Ave., 613-501-6140, bukhari-restuarant.business.site
Open: Monday to Thursday 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., Friday to Sunday 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Prices: main courses up to $20
Access: no steps to front door, washrooms

The website for Bukhari Restaurant, which opened in late 2019 in a Carling Avenue strip mall, refers to it as a health food restaurant. Of course, that’s not a bad thing. However, I’m more keen to dine out when the fare is indulgent or intriguing, in addition to being good for me. I can make my own grain bowls at home, thank you very much.

But if you scroll down the eatery’s home page, the intrigue mounts. There’s a reference in a photo to Bukhari serving “Arabian food.” What would that be?

The only way for me to find out was to step away from the screen and head over to the place.

During my visits to Bukhari, it turned out that its Arabian food was generally as tasty as it was affordable and unpretentious. Also, the kind and friendly staff there were happy to specify that Bukhari served dishes with their roots in Yemen, the country that sits south of Saudi Arabia on the Arabian Peninsula, closer to Africa than it is to, say, Iran.

Now, I can affirm that Bukhari serves the best Yemeni food I’ve had, which, it should be said, is also the only Yemeni food I’ve had. Bukhari, which replaced the top-notch casual Middle Eastern restaurant Pita Bell Kabab after its westward move on Carling Avenue, is one of the very few Yemeni restaurants in Ottawa. (I’ve since learned of House of Mandi on Hunt Club Road as well.)

Its food is halal, prepared to Islamic strictures, and lamb and chicken are the featured meats, although a beef dish or two can also be found. The meats can be grilled, fried, steamed or stewed.

Some menu items were familiar and less specifically Yemeni, including chicken and beef kebabs, chicken tikka, tabbouleh and Greek salad. But most dishes here were Yemeni — lesser known to me and listed with no descriptions. We had to ask about dishes such as chicken mandi and lamb haneed, and we were glad that we did.

Before any of our orders at lunch or dinner arrived, we were given small but appetite-whetting bowls of nicely seasoned lamb broth, served with wedges of lime on the side. “It’s welcome soup,” one of the female staffers told me.

Speaking of appetite-whetting, the only appetizer we tried at Bukhari was its baba ghanouj ($6), which was fresher, more herbal and much less smoky than other renditions I’ve had of that eggplant dip.

Hearty appetites would do well with one of the generous platters that pair a heap of long-grain rice with bone-in lamb or chicken. In chicken bukhari ($18), the tender half-bird was tucked in a mound of mildly spiced rice with slivers of carrot. Lamb haneed ($18) kept its rice, garnished with fried onions, separate from a foil packet filled with delectable pieces of lamb. Lamb mandi ($18) delivered pieces of shank and rib, both flavourful and toothsome, on top of rice garnished with fried onions and slivers of almonds.

All of these dishes came with plates of simply dressed green salad, dusted with tangy sumac, and a spicy, salsa-like condiment also landed on our table.

We didn’t try Bukhari’s biryani rice dishes, which we were told were the spiciest among the menu. Next time.

Bite-sized pieces of lamb figured in two very literally named and spicier dishes — fried lamb meat ($12) and fried lamb liver ($12). The former was accessibly tasty and quick to disappear when scooped up with pita bread. The latter packed some mild mineral tang with its heat.

Of Bukhari’s stews, we tried ogda chicken ($10), a pleasant mish-mash of bone-in chicken, potatoes, onions, zucchini and more, and fahsa ($13), a brothy and deeply savoury concoction packed with fall-apart chunks of lamb. After we dug into the fahsa, a server came with a frothy concoction that I later learned was made with the bitter herb fenugreek. The accompaniment is called holba, and by itself, it was bracingly bitter. If I order fahsa again, I’ll trying blending some of it into the stew for another layer of flavour.

Bukhari serves breakfast, too, with a few dishes that are specific to the morning meal and some, such as fried lamb and lamb liver, that are served all day.

We ordered shakshouka ($6), which elsewhere has been a dish of eggs in a spicy tomato sauce, and received instead something closer to a scrambled omelet, which was good and homey just the same.

We also had foul ($7), which was a savoury kidney bean dip served with pita. To finish, we had a very splittable dessert of arika ($12), which was a plate filled with a blend of bread, dates, and heavy cream, topped with honey and grated cheese.

Very little at Bukhari is ostentatious. The closest thing to fancy here is adeni tea, from Aden, the Yemeni port city, which came in an attractive gold-and-white tea set. The milky tea, lightly spiced with cardamom, ginger and more, I think, was a fine meal-ender.

The restaurant is not licensed, but it does serve several flavours of Barbican, the non-alcoholic malt beverage popular in the Middle East and North Africa.

Clearly, I’m a novice when it comes to Yemeni food. I know just enough to say I look forward to learning more at Bukhari.

phum@postmedia.com

ALSO IN ARTS AND LIFE

Dining Out: Spectacular dinner at Atelier proves it’s still the best in the game

Best bets, Feb. 13 to 19: Sandy Sharkey’s photos, and cellist Rachel Mercer

NAC preview: Fronteras lights expose the darkness of borders, barriers, surveillance culture

Heartbreakers Pizza
465 Parkdale Ave., 613-724-1144, heartbreakerspizza.com
Open: Tuesday to Saturday 4 to 8 p.m. for pickup and delivery orders, for delivery phone orders in between 2:30 and 3:30 p.m.
Prices: large pizzas for $30, small pizzas for $18, delivery through Love Local Delivery for $5 or more, depending on distance driven

During this new stay-at-home normal, when life has felt slower and shrunken, the small things have come more sharply into focus and become more meaningful.

Specifically, at my dining room table in the last week, those small things were circular and roughly 13 inches in diameter, composed of six beautifully doughy slices and impeccably garnished to deliver waves of flavour.

I’m speaking of the pizzas from Heartbreakers Pizza, a Parkdale Avenue business that has the distinction of having opened days before the strictures of COVID-19 slid into place a month ago, changing practically everything for everyone.

Like every other eatery in town faced with governmental mandates meant to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus, the fledgling pizza shop faced a choice of closing for the foreseeable future or offering its food for takeout and delivery orders only.

Fortunately for Heartbreakers, which seats 30 and had planned to forego offering takeout in its early days, pizza is eminently portable. More than that, the pies I’ve had from Heartbreakers have been top-notch thin-crust beauts.

They were impressive enough that I’ve added Heartbreakers to my shortlist of places, along with Tennessy Willems, Farinella and Pi Co., from which I’ll order pizzas to ward off the pandemic blues.

Heartbreakers is the newest of that batch, but its owners, Juliana Graf and siblings Andrew and Lizzie Chatham, have food industry experience that girds what they do. Andrew and Graf worked in various Ottawa restaurants, before they opened the Fieldhouse Café in Perth in 2014. Their desire to return to Ottawa led to this year’s opening of Heartbreakers.

The pizza place’s menu is admirably compact, offering two salads, chicken wings, and just five pies, of which one is customizable. (Vegan cheese is also an option.)

We’ve tried all of the pizzas, and no clear favourite emerged, which I think is a good sign.

First, every pie had an admirable, tasty crust with a pleasing amount of chew to it. The basic cheese pie, adorned with my son’s choice of pepperoni and roasted mushrooms, definitely outdid more generic versions of classic pizza.

The fennel sausage pizza was well balanced and solidly satisfying. The ham and pineapple and green olive pizza was pretty persuasive, even for those who normally curse tropical fruit on pizza.

My next pick from Heartbreakers may well be one of its vegetarian pies. The so-called “Gourd-geous!” pizza may oversell the namesake roasted squash among its toppings, but its walnut pesto prompted eye-widening and sighs of appreciation. The roasted mushroom pizza, packed with creminis, shiitakes and oyster mushrooms, is a must for fans of the fungi.

Of two generously sized salads, the kale Caesar ($14) showered with Grana Padano and toasted almonds was much more compelling and savoury than the simple salad of greens ($12).

The restaurant is licensed and because the Ontario government now allows it, Heartbreakers offers some interesting natural wines in the $33-to-$45 range to go.

Picking up our first order was no problem. However, there was a hitch last weekend with our delivery. We’d hoped to have pizza at our doorstep for about 5:30 p.m. through the new Love Local Delivery service, and were told the order would arrive during the one-hour window between 5 and 6 p.m. But 6:15 p.m. rolled round and still there was no pizza.

When I finally called Heartbreakers to inquire, the apologetic staffer explained that the system went down and my delivery information had disappeared, leaving them no way to reach me. To make amends, the Heartbreakers staffer comped my order, drove it to me herself and threw in a $20 gift card.

In pre-pandemic times, I might have been more irate about the slip-up. But after this first month of being a hermit, I was much more grateful to once again enjoy food that I didn’t have to cook, and a bit of reheating in a warm oven was the slightest of delays before our pizza feast.

phum@postmedia.com

North & Navy
226 Nepean St., 613-232-6289, northandnavy.com
Open: Dining room closed due to COVID-19, takeout Wednesday to Sunday 4 to 8 p.m.
Prices: dinners for four to six people at $85 and $115, plus items a la carte; delivery through Love Local Delivery, $5 or more, depending on distance

Five years ago, in the early days of North & Navy, I enjoyed a succession of treats both large and small.

Celebrating with out-of-towners, we tucked into a 46-ounce porterhouse steak, modelled on Italy’s iconic dish of Bistecca Fiorentina, which was our feast’s splurge-y, beef-alicious centrepiece. Bite-sized but still very appealing in their own right were North & Navy’s versions of cicchetti, the bar snacks of Venice that were a preamble to dinner. And then there were the mid-sized but stand-out house-made pastas that elevated humble ingredients to the point of luxury.

Had life in the spring of 2020 been more normal, I would have revisited North & Navy to see if the experience there still delivered wow-worthy Northern Italian-inspired food, served in a handsome, elegant setting by poised staffers.

But of course, like most of us, I’m housebound. And like all Ottawa restaurants, North & Navy, which cracked the 2018 Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants list, has shut its dining room since mid-March to help halt the spread of the novel coronavirus.

However, like scores of its peers, the Centretown restaurant remains open with skeleton staffing to prepare takeout and delivery orders. We had North & Navy to go last week, and while it didn’t, and couldn’t possibly, equal the thrill of enjoying chef-owner Adam Vettorel’s refined, from-scratch fare at his restaurant, our Friday night dinner was, like so many pandemic experiences, the next best thing.

This month’s take-out menu posted on North & Navy’s website offers about a dozen or so items from bread to pastas to tiramisu. North & Navy, like its fellow fine-dining restaurants Orto Trattoria, Stofa and Brassica, among others, offers family meals that bundle together courses and that’s the route we took.

The more expensive of North & Navy’s two family meals ($115) consisted of a half loaf of bread, endive Caesar salad, strozzapreti (a hand-rolled pasta not unlike cavatelli) with locally grown Le Coprin mushrooms, spaghetti pomodoro, beef short ribs, a side container of carrots, plus slices of tiramisu and cheesecake.

Billed to feed four to six, the meal filled up the five of us and left a fine, multi-course lunch for one the next day.

Ours was a dinner that, as well made as it was, comforted more than it dazzled. The only letdown was the spaghetti, which struck us as overly basic. But the other pasta was both more interesting and lusciously toothsome, and it better attested to the heights Vettorel can hit.

The course that generated the most excitement at our table might have been the endive radicchio salad, with its truly savoury Caesar dressing and pleasantly bitter notes that offset the richness of other dishes.

Hefty slabs of cheesecake and on-point tiramisu ended dinner on a crowd-pleasing note.

North & Navy’s fare arrived in premium take-out packaging and seemed to have degraded not too much despite a 15-minute trip in the car. Stapled to the paper bag was a thoughtful note that said the restaurant had taken all precautions regarding COVID-19 safety, and that its diners should wash their hands thoroughly after unpacking the meal.

With food to go, the restaurant also offers a selection of Italian and Canadian wines priced between $50 and $75.

In addition to making pastas and salads to go for paying customers, Vettorel has begun offering free lunches once a week to front-line coronavirus workers at the Brewer arena assessment centre.

Vettorel has also been using his virus time to launch a podcast called At The Pass, in which he discusses Ottawa’s restaurant business. Last week, he speculated that COVID-19 will kill even some well-known and well-regarded Ottawa eateries. He added that he didn’t know if North & Navy would survive.

Mehfil Indian Cuisine
792 Somerset St W., 613-695-4345, mehfilcuisine.com
Open: Dining room closed due to COVID-19; takeout and delivery Sunday to Thursday 4 to 8 p.m., Friday to Saturday 4 to 9 p.m.
Prices: dishes up to $18.95

The spice-averse teenager among us was doing her best to assuage the heat and sourness that was making her mouth throb.

She tried a spoonful or two of raita, South Asia’s most cooling condiment. The tangy, cucumber-flecked yogurt brought some relief, but not as much as she would have liked.

And yet, she still thought highly of the dish that ignited her taste buds — Mehfil Shrimp, the specialty from Mehil Indian Cuisine on Somerset Street West.

The rest of us, with our greater enthusiasm for more fiery fare, were even happier with those potent little shrimps, and with the range of items we ordered from Mehfil, which had its grand opening almost exactly a year ago.

Before the novel coronavirus changed everything in mid-March, Mehfil wooed customers with buffet lunches and an extensive menu consisting of North Indian dishes and a few Hakka (Indo-Chinese) items. In the last few years, the latter dishes have increasingly been offered at new Indian restaurants in town.

But during the new COVID-19 normal, Mehfil has shut its dining room, like all of Ottawa’s restaurants, and stressed dinner-time pickup and deliveries orders via Uber Eats, SkipTheDishes and DoorDash.

We ordered twice from Mehfil and found most dishes won us over. In particular, items that were meant to be on the spicier, hotter side rewarded us with vibrant flavours and complexity.

Inevitably, some dishes were a little worse for wear after their 10-minute trip to our table. Naan breads wrapped in tin foil had lost a lot of their liveliness and needed some warming in our oven to be more appealing. Deep-fried items such as the Mehfil shrimp had degraded to a less crispy, slightly soggy state, but were otherwise still quite enjoyable.

In that latter category, along with the house special, were Mehfil’s Amritsari fish pakoras, which were lightly battered, simple treats made with basa fish coated in chickpea flour and bolstered by mint and tamarind sauces.

From Mehfil’s selection of Hakka dishes, chilli chicken provided a bracing Indian take on the heat and sourness of Sichuanese fare. Its breaded and deep-fried boneless chicken morsels were hefty and toothsome, and in particular the vegetables included with the dish left mouths calling out for raita.

Saag lamb featured tender chunks of meat (we could have swapped in chicken or shrimp) in a thick, peppery spinach purée. Butter chicken was as mild as requested, but with richness that made it more than just a kid-friendly item.

Of 14 vegetarian dishes, we tried the okra-heavy bhindi masala, which was pleasingly flavourful and properly textured, and the more mellow Amritsari baingan bharta, which we thought needed more oomph.

Rice pulao rice was fine. Chicken biryani was less impressive, especially because in Ottawa, I’ve found it very hard to surpass the magnificent chicken biryani served by the east-end restaurant NH44 Indian Bistro, which also offers takeout and delivery these days.

Mehfil is licensed, and Ontario’s pandemic conditions allow it sell alcohol to go. On its Facebook page, Mehfil notes that it can include Cheetah beer with takeout and delivery orders.

With our first order, Mehfil threw in some complimentary papadum, while our second order included basmati rice on the house. These were small gestures, but especially during this pandemic, every little kindness counts.

phum@postmedia.com

Stofa
1356 Wellington St. W., 613-722-6555, stofarestaurant.com , stofa-homestyle.myshopify.com
Open: Dining room closed due to COVID-19, open Friday, Saturday, Sunday for pickup and delivery
Prices: $125 plus tax for a dinner for four, $5 or more for delivery, depending on distance, through Love Local Delivery

One of the best dishes I had last fall, back when we were able to gather in droves and eat elaborate creations elbow-to-elbow at public events, was a bowl that contained a Dungeness crab, pork and truffle soup dumpling in a uniquely savoury corn chowder.

The talented chef responsible was Jason Sawision of Stofa Restaurant on Wellington Street West, and his creation was his entry at last year’s Ottawa edition of Canada’s Great Kitchen Party, a qualifying event for this year’s Canadian Culinary Championships at the Shaw Centre.

All of this nostalgia for pre-pandemic gastronomy is making me a little teary. But its purpose is to explain the high hopes I had for the food that Sawision now prepares out of Stofa on weekends for purchasers of the fine-dining restaurant’s take-home dinners for four.

After all, Stofa, which opened in the fall of 2017, is one of four Ottawa restaurants that last year got a nod from Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants magazine. But Sawision’s kitchen is the only one of those four that, following the virus-mandated closure of its dining room, has turned to selling takeout fare to help pay the bills and weather the COVID-19 crisis.

Sawision has been in the takeout business for about a month, offering a different menu each weekend. His initiative’s catchy title — “Stofa-on-the-Sofa Family Meal” — hints that his fare is less haute cuisine than what you would have enjoyed at the restaurant. But we still found refinement as well as deliciousness in the containers that held our preferred courses.

Also, of all take-home food I’ve had in the last month, Stofa’s dinner was designed with the greatest awareness of the degradation that can befall hot-from-the-kitchen food as it journeys to someone’s kitchen table. Sawision went around that problem, offering a dinner that included from-the-fridge items meant to be served cold, at room temperature or reheated. Included with dinner were detailed instructions for reheating.

Last week’s Stofa was heavy on the Asian influences, as was Sawision’s entry in last fall’s Kitchen Party event, and sometimes it was the tiny condiment container that came with a course that made it a memorable winner.

To start, we had chips and salsa and egg rolls. How did Sawision riff on these humble staples?

The chips were impeccable, addictively good taro chips and the Thai salsa had an alluring savouriness that said come and get me, perhaps due to a splash of fish sauce. The pork and cabbage egg rolls were lean and satisfying, although I have to give a shoutout to the S&G Fries and Burgers chip stand on Carling Avenue for making what I think are Ottawa’s top egg rolls.

Sawision’s coconut lemongrass soup was a mellow vegetarian version of a comforting Thai dish, with toothsome slices of mushroom, chunks of potato and pieces of baby corn swimming in a rich, aromatic broth. Baby bok choy came with a container of dynamite ginger-scallion sauce, a go-to Chinese condiment that makes everything from poached chicken to braised pork to salmon to rice taste better.

More ordinary were the watercress salad with ponzu dressing and ginger, soy and sesame soba noodles. The latter in particular needed a dressing with bigger flavours.

All was forgiven, though, thanks to Stofa’s grilled and chilled beef tenderloin, elevated by a complex and beguiling spice rub and bolstered by some yuzu mustard mayo.

The meal-ending lemon ricotta cake was itself a bit dense, but the raspberry cream on top was to die for.

Each Tuesday, Stofa posts its menus — which in the past have been centred around mains such as baby back ribs with cola barbecue sauce and roast chicken with piri piri sauce — on Instagram and its Shopify-powered website. The leftover-yielding dinners — which go for $125, seemingly the going rate in Ottawa for many upscale takeout dinners — frequently sell out. With good reason, I say.

phum@postmedia.com