Cantina Gia
749 Bank St., 613-569-0464, instagram.com/cantinagia/
Open: Wednesday to Sunday 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., closed Monday and Tuesday
Prices: sandwiches $10 to $12, pasta dishes $12 to $18

Shelby Burger
11 William St., 613-562-4978, instagram.com/eatshelbyburger
Open: Monday to Saturday 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., closed Sunday
Prices: burgers $4 to $16.50

On Wednesday afternoon, feeling a mix of relief, disgust and sleep deprivation, I marked the latest developments in U.S. politics with a quintessentially American lunch, namely a really good smash burger.

Off I went to the ByWard Market to order from Shelby Burger, the recently opened William Street joint where smash burgers rule.

What’s a smash burger, you say? It’s an au courant style of hamburger made with smaller, three-ounce beef patties (balls, actually) that are smashed flat so that their exteriors develop a tasty crust. The revered U.S. burger chains Shake Shack and In-N-Out Burger swear by smash burgers.

While Shelby Burger wasn’t the first to offer smash burgers in Ottawa — that honour might go to The Third in Hintonburg — it does serve some mighty compelling specimens, I’ve found, made with grass-fed beef from P.E.I. farms sitting pretty between the requisite soft and squishy potato buns.

With visions of flipping states in mind, I ordered a two-patty double onion Shelby burger ($9.25). It was the best item that I’ve yet tasted at Shelby Burger — deliciously juicy but also lightly crusty, additionally moistened by special sauce and oozy American cheese, and bolstered by onions that had been fried with the beef, plus pickles. While I don’t think I’m a glutton, single-patty burgers from Shelby Burger felt a little undersized to me.

The crispy chicken burger ($10) that I tried from Shelby Burger was admirably crisp, but also joltingly salty. Herb-dusted fries and sweet potato fries were solidly made and all the more enjoyable when we ate them immediately on the William Street sidewalk. (Shelby burger’s dining room could open as soon as Saturday, following the relaxation of the Ontario government’s current pandemic restrictions.)

I had high expectations for Shelby Burger’s fare, which includes a celery root schnitzel and an Impossible Burger as vegetarian options, given that a top Ottawa chef oversees its food, even if he isn’t smashing its burgers. Jordan Holley, executive chef at the Spark Street fine-dining hotspot Riviera, is a Shelby Burger partner.

Similarly, Cantina Gia in the Glebe is a new casual eatery under a leading Ottawa chef’s direction. Opened a month ago at the address where Pomeroy House and then Nosh had been, Gia is a new venture by chef Adam Vettorel and his business partner Chris Schlesak, who launched the fine-dining Italian restaurant North & Navy in Centretown five years ago.

For now, Gia offers sandwiches, pasta dishes and more to go through its window onto Bank Street. Last week, a colleague and I took our eggplant parmigiana and porchetta sandwiches to a picnic table on a side street and dug in.

The vegetarian sandwich ($12) was enjoyable, although it had lost some appeal because it had cooled down by the time we were seated and eating. But the porchetta sandwich ($12) was outstanding, thanks to its heap of thinly sliced, moist and fennel-tinged roast pork. It did lack the crisp, crackling skin that makes me adore a similar sandwich at Pesto’s Deli in Kanata. But Gia did substitute slices of pear for sweetness as well as crunch, and its focaccia was studded with grapes that gave the sandwich extra personality.

We had room for dessert after our sandwiches. Tiramisu ($8) was classically good and quickly devoured. Gia’s small, stuffed doughnuts called bomboloni ($7) came in three varieties — chocolate, dulce de leche and pumpkin spice — that made choosing a favourite difficult.

Last weekend, I sampled Gia’s dinner-time pastas and found they were as good or better than the sandwiches, with straight-forward, authentic underpinnings, fresh al dente noodles and big, clear flavours.

Rigatoni bolognese featured a stripped-down version of that much-loved but often too tomato-y sauce. The dish put its minced meat front and centre and like some of Gia’s other pasta dishes resonated with a bright, lemony note that seems like a signature move.

Orechiette with sausage and rapini balanced its meatiness and bitterness on top of its tender, ear-shaped pasta. Linguini vongole packed the proper clammy punch, although I would have liked it even more if its sauce had been based on white wine rather than tomatoes. Bucatini all’amatriciana let me down a little, as I wanted a more tubular texture from its thick noodles and more porkiness from its sauce.

Our dinner’s meaty splurge was a crisply breaded pork “Milanese” cutlet ($22), impressively flattened and attached to its bone, supported by arugula, a roasted lemon and cherry tomatoes whose flavours had been intensely concentrated.

We preceded the mains with some ricotta-stuffed zucchini blossoms ($12 for four), which were delicate indulgences. We also split Gia’s Caesar salad, which was enlivened by fried garlic chips and fried capers and whose dressing had an assertive savouriness.

Because Gia’s dining room has yet to be finished, I can only look forward to the night when I’ll be able to eat under its roof — perhaps when the next U.S. president is inaugurated.

phum@postmedia.com

Fairouz Cafe
15 Clarence St., 613-422-7700, fairouz.ca
Open: Wednesday to Sunday 10 a.m. to 9 p.m., closed Monday and Tuesday
Prices: mains $18 to $25, Middle Eastern feast $125

As a fan of fine dining, I was a bit glum when I learned in early September that Fairouz, the upscale Middle Eastern restaurant on Somerset Street West, would close. At least its plan was to change rather than shut for good. In mid-October, the business re-launched as Fairouz Cafe, a more relaxed eatery in the ByWard Market.

After Fairouz opened in the spring of 2016, I was very keen on its sophisticated but boldly flavoured dishes that ambitiously channelled chef Walid El-Tawel’s Palestinian roots. Nor was I alone. A year after it opened, Fairouz made it onto the Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants list — an achievement that acknowledged its refined setting and service as well as the quality on its plates.

But amid this year’s COVID-19-based disruptions, Fairouz’s owners decided their best move to weather the pandemic was to relocate to the west end of Clarence Street while, in the words of co-owner Tony Garcia, “casualizing” their food and orienting the cafe more to takeout and delivery.

I wondered: Does Ottawa, one of the universe’s hotspots for shawarma, really need another place that serves meat in pita bread?

That cynical take, I discovered last Sunday, does a serious disservice to the new Fairouz Cafe. We brought home its Middle Eastern feast ($125) and felt like we were eating the best meat in pita bread in the city, augmented by some fantastically flavourful house-made condiments.

Opening chef El-Tawel is no longer part of the Fairouz team, having taken a position this spring with the high-end kitchen supply store Chef’s Paradise. However, overseeing the cafe’s kitchen is Justin Laferriere, who was El-Tawel’s sous chef and was with the restaurant since it opened.

So, after eating our consistently delicious dinner, I should not have been that surprised to note the clear connections between my extravagant dinners at Fairouz four years ago and the takeout fare that delighted us in my dining room. (We could have eaten in the cafe, whose dining area opened last Saturday, following the loosening of Ottawa’s pandemic restrictions. But our plans to eat at home had already been made.)

The components of the cafe’s Middle Eastern feast were familiar but strikingly elevated. That was true not only of its lean and tender beef kebabs, succulent pulled lamb and surprisingly moist chunks of chicken, but also of the house-made pita bread, dips, side dishes and garnishes that came with them.

The feast’s hearty dips  — a chunky muhammara of cashew, red pepper and pomegranate, hummus that was rich and paprika-topped, labneh (strained yogurt) dusted with za’atar (wild thyme) — would have been familiar to Fairouz regulars. I see that my summer 2016 review of the restaurant lauded them too, as well as other Fairouz staple items that remain on the cafe’s menu.

We were also grateful for a smokey pilaf of al dente freekeh, an eggplant-based relish with some mellow heat to it, and plenty of deeply charred tomatoes, cipollini onions and shishito peppers. Even the cafe’s garlic sauce and marinated olives, flecked with chili and lightly bitter ajwain seeds, seemed several cuts above the usual.

To take a bigger tour of the cafe’s menu, we additionally ordered the fried cauliflower side dish ($13) and the eggplant mashi main course ($22). Both were hits. The cauliflower was fortified with tahini and refreshing pomegranate seeds, while the eggplant dish stuffed its star with onion, garlic and tomatoes and topped it with toothsome green lentils and marinated red onions.

For dessert, there were slices of sumptuous, pistachio-topped chocolate cake, made extra-moist and complex with the addition of tahini.

The four of us tucked into all that we ordered, satiating ourselves but still leaving enough food behind to feed us the next day for lunch. Couples or singletons could opt for any of the feast’s components a la carte.

Perhaps the best we can ask for in this crazy year is to affirm continuity and growth despite the pandemic’s staggering setbacks. Fairouz Cafe shows us how that’s done.

phum@postmedia.com

Vivaan
225 Preston St., 613-265-6444, vivaanottawa.com
Open: Tuesday to Sunday 4 to 10 p.m., closed Monday
Prices : appetizers and curries from $14 to $21

In our light-hearted past, there was no need to do a risk-benefit analysis before going out for dinner.

You’re familiar, of course, with the usual pluses of a restaurant meal — the prospects of being pampered, of enjoying delicious food that we didn’t have to cook ourselves, and of skipping dish-cleaning drudgery. But now, we weigh on the other side not only the exertions of venturing into the November cold but also anxieties about possibly being sickened by a global health scourge.

If your decision to stay home or go out is a toss-up, let me add one more specific pro — the dessert at Vivaan that mounds squares of lightly crisped, buttery fried bread in a puddle of sweet, milky, nutty sauce.

That dish, which we enjoyed last week at the month-old Indian restaurant on Preston Street, might sound simple and even homey. But trust me — it’s revelatory.

We had chef-owner Teegavarapu Sarath Mohan, toiling in the open kitchen of the classy space that used to be DiVino Wine Studio, to thank for that perfectly executed meal-ender, and for the parade of treats that came before it.

Mohan is scarcely into his 30s but the self-taught chef, who was previously a tech worker and food blogger, is already running his third restaurant kitchen in three years. Vivaan presents the latest evolution of Mohan’s cooking exploits, which began at Flavours of Kerala in Kanata and then moved to NH44, his initial venture of his own, on Lancaster Road.

Vivaan offers a curated and elevated Indian cuisine, several notches above steam tables loaded with items at lunchtime. Mohan’s menu ranges from dressed-up street food, which was one of NH44’s calling cards, to well-plated appetizers to curries, rice, flatbreads and desserts.

We went a little heavier on appetizers, thinking they would be better enjoyed on site, unlike other less time-sensitive items we could one day order to go from Vivaan.

Scallops ($16 for three) were nicely seared and complemented by a mild coconut-milk froth. More potently flavoured were Mohan’s tender, spice-crusted lamb chops ($17 for two). The most memorable starter was a plate of humble chicken drumsticks ($16) that were both fiery and tasty, offset by a punchy slaw, some even punchier chutney and a big swipe of sauce made with cilantro, peas and mint.

The only street food item we chose was Vivaan’s pani puri ($13). Their crisp semolina shells filled with spiced potatoes require a bit of playful interaction — we added finishing “injections” of cilantro and mint water with plastic syringes.

While Vivaan also serves such Indian street fare as Bombay sliders and stuffed flatbreads, I’m more likely to get such items from Royal Paan, the newcomer Indian street-food eatery on Baseline Road, while preferring Mohan’s restaurant for its most distinctive dishes.

We shared three larger items that we would absolutely have again, and which, I think, would be fine ordered to go.

Mohan is from Hyderabad, India and he makes an exceptional Hyderabadi chicken biryani ($18), notable for its light, fluffy rice, moist and flavourful chicken, and bracing hits of spice paste. For one of my friends, some raita to tamp down the biryani’s heat was a very good idea.

The chef also serves Hyderabadi katli dal ($18), which is made with spinach and tamarind as well as yellow lentils. It intrigued me with a depth of flavour that made other dals seem second-rate.

Drawing upon a preparation for seafood from Kerala, the tropical state on India’s southwestern coast, mussels moilee ($21) was packed with plump, toothsome shellfish in a mildly spicy coconut-milk sauce flecked with curry leaves.

That sauce, like Mohan’s other concoctions, was too good to waste, and we savoured it as a dip for his made-to-order parotta flatbread ($3) and the even better onion-stuffed kulcha bread ($4).

You already know Mohan’s bread dessert ($9), a version of the Hyderabadi treat shahi tukda, was sublime. Vivaan’s mango shrikhand ($9), made with sweetened, extra-creamy yogurt that had been hung in cheesecloth to shed some of its water content, was compelling in a different way, and would travel better.

Both desserts successfully reflected Vivaan’s desire to improve upon the status quo of other Indian restaurants, which frequently settle for so-so store-bought Indian sweets to conclude their meals.

During prime time for dinner last Thursday, we were the only customers in Vivaan’s spacious dining room, which includes six very distantly separated tables under a high ceiling, all within view of the kitchen. (That meant that Mohan, who knows me, saw I was eating his food and in fact came out to say hello.)

Service was warm and hospitable, and our only complaints were small. We wished that the poppy dinner music had been quieter and that Vivaan offered cocktails as well as basic beers and wines.

Earlier this fall, Mohan told me opening Vivaan was a huge risk. But NH44 was hidden in an industrial park and severely struggling before Mohan closed it in September, and he hoped being on Preston Street would lead to more visibility and business.

For at least the time being, COVID-19 may well frustrate Mohan’s hopes for customers packing his dining room. But pandemic or no pandemic, his food deserves fans, even if they prefer the safer choice of Vivaan’s delectable curries to go.

phum@postmedia.com

Aiana Restaurant Collective
50 O’Connor St., 613-680-6100, aiana.ca
Open: Tuesday to Friday noon to 10 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 5 to 10 p.m., closed Monday
Prices (which include service): lunch $22 to $51, dinner $35 to $65, tasting menu (regular or vegetarian) $185
Access: entrances are wheelchair-accessible

Because this has not exactly been a year of pleasant surprises, I’ll start by sharing one with you.

Ottawa, I learned last week, has a recently opened restaurant that kicks off its most lavish dinner with tiny snacks that brim with caviar and truffles.

At Aiana, our tasting-menu experience began with impeccably thin potato-chip cones filled with the prized Acadian sturgeon eggs or, for a momentary vegetarian, the prized end-of-summer fungus from Burgundy. They arrived at our table with a lightly choreographed flourish as two servers placed the amuse-bouches before us in unison. The sight of these amusements promised us gourmet pleasures, and as we munched on them, we became a little giddy.

Mind you, caviar and truffles have not been top of mind for me in 2020. Even for a restaurant critic, life during the pandemic has been more about comfort food and getting by than about celebration or opulence.

And yet, perhaps improbably, we have Aiana pulling out the stops, aspiring to give Ottawans the kind of elevated fine dining that would earn a Michelin star or two if that company’s inspectors considered Canadian restaurants.

Aiana, which opened in August, also pioneers in Ottawa a business decision that’s been taken at certain U.S. upscale restaurants. Aiana’s lofty prices include service charges, ensuring that its staff receive progressive wages, Devinder Chaudhary, Aiana’s owner and a consulting accountant, told me.

Among those workers is Raghav Chaudhary, Aiana’s executive chef and Devinder’s 27-year-old son, an Ottawa native who was trained at the Culinary Institute of America and has worked at Michelin-starred restaurants in San Francisco and Sweden.

So, while some mains at Aiana are just under $40, a roast chicken dinner for two costs $80 and a nine-course tasting menu comes in at $185, there are good reasons and even mitigations. I think tipping wasn’t even an option when I paid.

I have heard some very knowledgeable restaurant-goers in Ottawa say a place like Aiana, with its high prices, fondness for caviar and truffles, and slightly more formal service, is too rich for the city’s blood, pandemic or no pandemic. I’d like to disagree.

It is true that COVID-19 has forced many leading Ottawa restaurants to pivot to making simpler, takeout fare a priority. (Aiana, too, offers its fare to go.) It’s also true that other restaurants seeking to dazzle with tasting menus price them more modestly. Atelier’s 12-course menu is $135. Alice’s vegetable-forward tasting menu is $120. Carben’s eight-course tasting menu, which delighted us earlier this fall, is just $80.

But places like Atelier, Alice and Carben, for all of their quality and innovation, are still neighbourhood restaurants with modest settings. Aiana, in the Sun Life Financial Centre, is closer to Beckta on Elgin Street, which has a $125 tasting menu but also $48 main courses, and Riviera, which has no tasting menu but offers main courses topping $45 as well as $100 caviar service. These are restaurants that are not shy about extolling luxury as a temporary indulgence.

Even if I wasn’t partial to caviar and truffles, I think Ottawa, as the capital of a G7 country, ought to have restaurants that champion that kind of haute cuisine — provided they meet the high standards they should set for themselves.

For the most part, Aiana’s nine-course tasting menu — a well-paced mix of diverse items from the à la carte menu and some exclusive delicacies — kept the delights coming, although some slight constructive criticisms were warranted.

After those splendid potato-chip cones, the lightly curried and warming squash soup was a triumph, poured tableside and replete with puffed wild rice, sumac-dusted crème fraîche and wee, crunchy maple leaves made of squash.

Smoked sturgeon pâté, topped with caviar and served with some buttery brioche sticks, made me swoon, while my friend’s vegetarian course, a quinoa porridge, was strikingly creamy (enriched with Boursin cheese, we were told) and comforting.

We thought our respective tartares — some finely chopped bison and beet — were well-made but could have popped more in terms of salt and acidity. After came a more substantial but sophisticated course. For me, a lightly spiced half quail was a touch dry but benefited from some punchy pickled ground cherries and a cute, miniature Scotch egg. Its vegetarian counterpart replaced the bird with oblongs of rutabaga.

Then, we were bowled over by two small wonders — a perfect chocolate-foie gras macaron, which leaned more into its savouriness, and a mushroom tart of concentrated flavour.

Of the final savoury courses, the meatier option topped the vegetarian alternative. I received a deeply beefy pithivier (a puff pastry pie stuffed with Wagyu beef trimmings and mushrooms) with parsnip purée and jus, both supremely rich. My friend’s bowl of tomato-sauced farro was fine, but suffered in comparison with the more special pithivier.

A wave of sweets concluded dinner — too-generous servings of sweet ginger granité, a complex, satisfying hazelnut tart dessert, and then some bonbons. We were too stuffed to have coffee or tea.

I also had an easier-on-the-budget lunch at Aiana last week. If you accept the proposition that a serving of popcorn can cost $12, Aiana’s dressed-up popcorn, which mixes kernels coated in caramel and truffle-oiled corn, is irresistible. A Wagyu burger ($26) was big, juicy and flavourfully garnished. A massive serving of short ribs ($37) had great depth of flavour, as well as some shaved black truffles, more of that fine parsnip purée and some on-point lentils.

At both visits, service was well-trained and attentive, but also unstuffy — perhaps just a bit more deferential and a bit less chummy than at other upscale restaurants. At lunch and dinner, chef Chaudhary came to our table and to see other guests, too.

Designed by Linebox Studio, Aiana’s space is a beautiful, welcoming mix of teal blues and greys, with well-distanced tables positioned under posh lighting and flanked by a stunning open kitchen on one side and an impressive bar and wall of wines on the other.

Aiana’s instrumental groove music was occasionally a little intrusive, although that might have been less noticeable had the restaurant been blessed with the uplifting buzz of conversations and clinking glasses in the background.

Indeed, the only significant letdown about Aiana was something practically beyond its control — that it felt more empty than full of guests when we visited, presumably because of the pandemic’s impact on our collective morale and finances.

That’s really regrettable, because it does feel as if the Chaudharys are on their way to providing Ottawa with a distinctive, tip-top restaurant that could be the latest jewel on our dining scene. Hopefully, they can prevail against the fierce headwinds of COVID-19.

phum@postmedia.com

Shibayan
437 Sunnyside Ave., 613-421-5888, shibayan.ca
Open: Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, Sunday noon to 9 p.m., Friday and Saturday noon to 10 .p.m., closed Tuesday
Prices: appetizers $4 to $10, soups and mains $11 to $15
Access: steps to front door

Yuzumi
83 Holland Ave., 613-422-8301, yuzumi.ca
Open: Monday to Saturday noon to 7 p.m., closed Sunday
Prices: sushi tacos $3.50 and $4, sushi rolls $11.99 to $13.99, bao buns $10.99 to $12.99
Access: steps to front door

Nearly two years ago, I assigned myself the enjoyable, but gut-stretching task of ranking Ottawa’s ramen .

Back then, in that dimly recalled, pre-pandemic past, I catalogued 13 eateries that doled out piping hot and frequently porky bowls of Japanese soup, noodles and garnishes. Three of them — Sansotei, J:unique Kijtchen and Koichi Ramen — made top-tier stuff. But even medium-tier ramen could make my day.

With that much research under my belt, I’ve remained keen to try ramen restaurants as they pop up in Ottawa, wanting to see where they would fit on my list. As far as I can tell, the latest arrival on Ottawa’s ramen scene, and the only newcomer since my early 2019 ranking of ramen, is Shibayan on Sunnyside Avenue.

The tiny and almost two-month-old eatery, one big block east of Carleton University, serves mid-tier ramen that would certainly cross my mind if I were hungry and driving through its neighbourhood.

In line with pandemic living, Shibayan, which used to be home to a burrito joint, is a takeout-only business. So, we’ve sped home with our ramen separated, its broth in one plastic tub and its solids in a sturdy recyclable bowl.

By and large, we liked the ramen that we assembled at our dining table. For me, ramen is about broth, noodles and then everything else, in that order, and I think Shibayan gets its broths right. (It might have helped that Shibayan’s co-owner, Eric Carbonneau, worked for a year at Sansotei.) Its noodles are more pedestrian, and garnishes can be great or just so-so.

Of its seven types of ramen, ranging in price from $12 to $15, I was most satisfied by the tantanmen, which had a rich, spicy broth, seasoned ground pork, a good soy-marinated egg and corn going for it. I was less keen on Shibayan’s tonkotsu and black garlic ramen — arguably Ottawa’s default settings for ramen — but only because their slices of pork belly were dry.

Vegetarian ramen from Shibayan, with a tomato-based broth and braised and tasty oyster and shiitake mushrooms, also appealed.

I can also recommend the juicy karage (nuggets of fried chicken, $7) and vegetarian dumplings ($8) as starters, as well as the tempura shrimp ($10), which did lose its sogginess after a bit of oven time once they were unpacked at home. Slices of mango and matcha cheesecake ($4.50) were cheap, sweet finishers. I was less keen on the only rice-bowl dish that I tried because its admittedly generous portion of chicken cutlet and Japanese curry on rice had been squashed to its detriment in its container. Still, I would not be put off from trying Shibayans’ broiled eel or chicken and egg on rice at a later date.

Also offering Japanese takeout, but specializing in new-generation sushi and fusion fare, rather than ramen, is the modest eatery Yuzumi, located on Holland Avenue north of Wellington Street West.

Yuzumi also makes bao buns ($10.99 to $12.99 for two), but they were not of a calibre that should worry Gongfu Bao and its artisanal buns in Centretown. Given its punchy flavours, the Cajun shrimp bun was my pick over the more traditional, but mediocre pork belly bun.

Yuzumi also serves poke bowls, rice bowls and some fancy sushi rolls. On the one fancy sushi roll that I tried, the salmon was lacking in flavour, sufficiently so to make me propose that items with tuna and Cajun or tempura shrimp could be the best choices here.

Overall, the sushi tacos here were tops. If I were ever to compile a ranking of Ottawa’s sushi tacos, I would expect Yuzumi’s entries to do well.

Related

• Your guide to the best (and worst) ramen in Ottawa

phum@postmedia.com

When working in my home office, eating at my kitchen table, or binging on Netflix, I find it easy to lapse and forget that a lethal virus is raging outside.

But during the last five months, any trip to a restaurant has been a grim reality check. What was previously one of my job’s big perks and a weekly highlight now brings the pandemic front of mind.

I’m quite conflicted. On one hand, after the spring and fall bans on indoor dining in Ottawa were lifted, I was happy to return to the gourmet pleasures I’ve enjoyed since 2012, when I took over this newspaper’s Dining Out column. While the novel coronavirus brought many things to a screeching halt, great restaurant cooking and hospitality were not among them.

But on the other hand, I don’t want to get sick. Nor do I want to make anyone sick or encourage behaviours that might make anyone sick.

Like many people, I keep an eye on Ottawa’s daily COVID-19 case numbers. My discomfort about dining out, and indeed about leaving my house, has grown or dwindled in lockstep with them. These days, I breathe more easily about eating in restaurants and recommending that readers do the same because Ottawa’s daily tally of new cases has held low and steady for much of the past month.

And yet, I still have trepidations to overcome each time I dine in a restaurant. Nor did it help when I checked the internet for columns in which other restaurant critics wrote about how COVID-19 affected their work.

Most recently, Washington Post food writer Tim Carman documented the sheer misery of contracting the disease himself a month ago.

Throughout pandemic times, Carman practiced physical distancing, mask-wearing and other protocols more rigorously than I do. He only ate outdoors, and even then he covered his face when interacting with people. Still, he somehow became infected.

“I’m not the first food writer and critic to get the coronavirus, and I probably won’t be the last, given what I know about infection rates and the work ethic of my peers, who continue to move about their communities to tell you about the good, the bad and the tasty,” Carman wrote.

Carman did not lose his sense of taste or smell, as some people infected with COVID-19 do and as he worried he might. He did, however, experience “a pain so profound and all-encompassing I couldn’t put it into words.”

The New York Times suspended its restaurant reviews from mid-March to mid-September, when indoor dining in one of the world’s greatest cities for eating went on a long COVID-19 break. When Pete Wells, the newspaper’s esteemed restaurant critic, returned to reviewing, he wrote: “the word that best sums up my feelings about it is: Yikes!”

Seeking to assess the risks his return to reviewing would entail, Wells cited a U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study that was released in September and which pointed out the correlation between dining in restaurants and contracting COVID-19.

“In the study, adults who had tested positive for the virus were asked where they had been and what they had done in the two weeks before coming down with symptoms,” Wells wrote. “They were twice as likely to say they had eaten at a restaurant as people with negative test results. No other activity the researchers asked about was linked to as many cases.”

Fortunately, I and Ottawa’s other restaurant-lovers have our own numbers in which to seek comfort. Just three known outbreaks accounting for two per cent of Ottawa’s 189 total outbreaks between Aug. 1 and Oct. 24 were traced to restaurants. Toronto’s comparable numbers were more damning — it saw 27 outbreaks in restaurants and bars, accounting for 14 per cent of its outbreaks.

Now, the seriousness with which a restaurant views the pandemic is a conscious part of my reviewing, along with the deliciousness of its food and the polish of its service. (Ambience, meanwhile, can basically be discounted, because physical distancing, sparse customer attendance and the abnormalities of the times have so thoroughly shattered the usual buzz and conviviality of restaurants.) I could never have imagined the day when I would be praising restaurants for their Plexiglas shields between tables, their temperature checks of guests upon arrival or their rapid disinfecting regimens.

It’s been suggested to me that it’s a bad time to be restaurant critic — not because restaurant-going is riskier during a pandemic but because giving a bad review would amount to kicking a business when it’s down.

I can say I did visit a few eateries that really didn’t do it for me, and I chose not to write about them at all, when I might’ve done so pre-pandemic. Also, in light of COVID-19’s assault on restaurants, when I did choose to write, I think I have been more forgiving and granted more marks for effort. I note that Wells of The New York Times stopped awarding the newspaper’s customary star ratings and other food publications have ditched numerical scores, presumably because they think the current moment calls for more leniency and less harsh judgement. This might well be a good attitude to help us get through the pandemic, period.

Given how badly Ottawa’s restaurants have been battered in 2020, I even feel more acutely a duty to advocate for restaurants at large.

A pithy saying about journalism holds that one of its purposes is to comfort the afflicted. On my beat these days, telling the incremental story of restaurants as they struggle with the pandemic’s ever-shifting circumstances feels a bit like doing just that.

phum@postmedia.com

Wellington Gastropub
1325 Wellington St. W., 613- 729-1315, thewellingtongastropub.com
Open: takeout Wednesday to Friday noon to 7 p.m., Saturday 11 a.m. to 7 p.m., dine-in Wednesday to Saturday 5 to 10 p.m., closed Sunday to Tuesday
Prices: mains $24 to $33, lunch boxes to go $20
Access: steps to front doors, then flight of stairs to second-floor restaurant

When the Wellington Gastropub opened in 2006, its name required some explanation.

Then, Ottawa had a clear demarcation between its ambitious restaurants and its more casual pubs. The Wellie, as it came to be nicknamed, was a hybrid, mixing gastronomical offerings with easy conviviality, not to mention a fondness for better beers. My predecessor loved the Wellie so much when it opened, and then again, in 2010, that I never stopped by to check it out after my reviewer’s stint began in 2012. I just assumed, and word of mouth led me to believe, that co-owners Shane Waldron and chef Chris Deraiche had refined their formula to the point of very smooth sailing, inspiring more than a few, albeit lesser, gastropubs along the way.

But then 2020, the year of anything but smooth sailing for Ottawa’s restaurants, happened. In addition to COVID-19, Waldron had to cope with Deraiche’s decision this summer to step away from the business and its kitchen.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of the pandemic, chef Jonathan Korecki, formerly of Restaurant E18hteen and a Top Chef Canada finalist, returned to Ottawa after several years of cooking in Tokyo. The culinary stars aligned: Korecki was out of work, the Wellie needed a chef, and Waldron hired Korecki.

Given that change, I figured it was the right time to finally eat at the gastropub.

My two recent dinners confirmed that Korecki, not surprisingly, still sends quality plates out of the kitchen, which remains in good hands after Deraiche’s departure.

At the same time, the gastropub’s menu leans as hard as it ever did into a traditional meat-and-veg mandate. There’s no obvious nod to the fact that Korecki was previously the executive chef at the official residence of Canada’s ambassador to Japan, where he developed a deep love for that country’s food and people.

The chef and Waldron must feel that the gastropub’s brand is bigger than Korecki’s and that, during a pandemic, when customers are skittish about dining out, it’s not the best time to stray from proven hits and comfort food.

Speaking of proven hits, I’m reliably informed that one of Ottawa’s luminaries of photojournalism treats himself each birthday to the Wellie’s beef tartare ($22). I can’t say whether Korecki has tweaked Deraiche’s recipe, but I can say that the Wellie’s tartare is both classically made and exceptionally big-flavoured and well balanced, one of the best beef tartares in the city. We also had the Wellie’s lemony fishcakes with dill dressing ($14), which were fine, if not as eye-wideningly good as the tartare.

As for main courses, there was very little to complain about regarding plates that starred braised lamb shanks ($28) or beef short rib taken off the bone ($32), or a roasted chicken breast ($25) or pounded-until-thin and then fried pork schnitzel ($26). The chicken breast stood out as a juicy, crisp-skinned wonder that restored one’s faith in chicken breasts after too many dry disappointments, and its truffle sauce was a luxurious add-on that distinguished the dish from its homier peers.

The Wellie’s kabocha squash gnocchi ($24) were lightly sweet and a touch heavy, but they made for a satisfying and even self-indulgent dinner with their fine tarragon cream sauce.

The only dish that I thought was lacking was a mushroom risotto with properly seared scallops ($33), but only because the rice seemed short on savoury umami punch.

Korecki’s main-course plates, while hefty, seemed somewhat minimalist as they generally contained meat, starch and sauce and were scarcely garnished. If you wanted more veg, you would have to order the Brussel sprouts, parsnips, or Swiss chard and kale on the side for $6.

But, then, you might not have room for dessert. The gastropub’s decadently rich dark chocolate pavé with whisky-macerated cherries and moist, sumptuous vanilla cake (both $8) sent us home on sweet, happy notes.

True to its pub side, the restaurant offers a page of interesting wines, 10 Ontario craft beers on tap and many more Ontario and Belgian beers in bottles and cans, as well as several featured cocktails.

Service at the gastropub was friendly and welcoming, and it began with us checking in on the restaurant’s COVID-19 guests’ list with our cellphones. We received our menus on our phones, too. For all its popularity, the restaurant was barely busier than our own table on the weeknights we visited.

The gastropub also offers its full menu to go for pickup, as well as some box lunches that Korecki calls “bento boxes,” referring to the Japanese meals that contain multiple delights in their partitioned trays. That said, the Wellie’s bento boxes contain such distinctly non-Japanese items as stewed beef and pork meatballs in tomato ragout with Lancaster gouda.

Perhaps when the pandemic abates, the gastropub will be able to allow Korecki to show off more food that acknowledges the Japanese part of his life journey without detracting from the restaurant’s comfort-food mission. In my book, that would be yet another reason to bid COVID-19 good riddance.

phum@postmedia.com

Del Piacere
416 Preston St., 613-422-4416, delpiacere.ca
Open: Monday to Thursday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., Friday 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., Saturday 9:30 a.m. to 11 p.m., Sunday 9:30 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Prices: appetizers $8 to $20, mains (including pasta) $24 to $36, pizzas and calzones $14 to $19
Access: two steps to front door

How do you feel about spelling errors on menus? Are they charming? Or do they warn that other aspects of a restaurant might be a little sloppy, too?

Pietro Amariello, chef-owner of Del Piacere on Preston Street, would have you interpret the imperfections on his menus as signs of his culinary authenticity.

“He says leave it like that, so that they know the chef is actually Italian,” says Sofia Iaboni, Del Piacere’s server.

Amariello, she says, cooked in Lucca, Italy for 30 years before he came to Ottawa in 2018. He worked at La Favorita, the veteran pizza and calzone eatery 100 metres up the street, but left to open Del Piacere in early October, pandemic be damned.

This month, I put my lexical prejudices aside and was rewarded with two very good dinners at Del Piacere. The generously portioned and unpretentious from-scratch cooking by Amariello, who is very much alone in his kitchen, lived up to his restaurant’s name, which roughly means “it is pleasing.”

Located where Stoneface Dolly’s had been, Del Piacere has an open kitchen that includes a wood-burning oven. We tried just one of Amariello’s 10 pizzas. (Gluten-free pizzas are also available, Iaboni says.) The tasty prosciutto and mushroom pizza ($15) that we took home was massive and thin of crust, true to the Neapolitan style Amariello promises.

Del Piacere also serves five calzones, but we were more interested in trying the appetizers, pastas and mains in the restaurant’s bright, basic dining room where a radio station provided dinner music.

Three shareable appetizer platters hit the right notes. Plump shrimps and strikingly tender squid rings had been deftly fried for the plate of fritto misto ($16). The deep-frying was equally on the mark for the plate of fried artichoke, zucchini and batons of polenta ($14), served with ranch dressing. The simply sauteed mix of squid, mussels, scallops, shrimp and vegetables in a garlic lemon sauce ($18) would be a good choice for those who eschew deep-fried treats.

The two exceptional pastas we had at Del Piacere, which are served as hefty mains rather than smaller first courses, were the most impressive dishes we sampled.

Spaghetti carbonara ($24) had the ring of truth, with its house-made al dente noodles bathed in egg-y goodness. The serving was also big enough to provide a next-day lunch.

The pasta of the day was a bowl of ravioli stuffed with gorgonzola and artichoke in a tomato and cream sauce ($22). The ravioli were thin, toothsome and nicely filled, and the sauce was straightforward and zesty.

With more protein-heavy main courses, we had only small regrets that the starch and vegetables on those plates were not as good as the meat and fish. But otherwise, a hefty, breaded bone-in veal chop ($34), a chunk of medium-rare beef tenderloin with green peppercorn sauce ($36) and a big portion of sole ($33) won us over, even if the more pedestrian saffron risotto that came with the fish and veal chop could have been improved upon.

The restaurant’s three pieces of veal scaloppine with mushrooms and marsala sauce ($32), was fine, but seemed like a better choice for smaller appetites. Its accompanying “zucchini pie” was a small tart that was heavy on the bread and light on the zucchini, while its mashed potatoes were more homey than luxurious.

But if that veal dish left room for dessert, that was a good thing.

Amariello’s big bowl of classically satisfying tiramisu, a bargain at $7, is likely to induce sighs of contentment. I was just as happy with a big slice of chocolate ricotta crostata ($7), which emerged from Del Piacere’s dessert showcase. The chef also makes cookies ($6) known as “brutti ma buoni,” or “ugly but tasty,” which were like lumpy biscotti, flecked with nuts and raisins.

Iaboni, who is upbeat and enthusiastic about her boss’s food, is Del Piacere’s only server. Her personal touch is one reason to visit the restaurant. But if pandemic concerns trump your desire for dining out, Del Piacere makes food to go, for pickup and through three of the big delivery services. Iaboni says older people on the residential streets of Little Italy are ordering Amariello’s food.

Del Piacere’s website also says Amariello can cook whatever you would like of him, given 48 hours’ notice.

“Do you have a favorite dish you miss? Something mamma used to make?” the website asks. I don’t, but I do have enough curiosity about the food in Amariello’s native Tuscany, as well as sufficient confidence in his cooking, that I might make a special request in the future.

phum@postmedia.com

Gray Jay
300 Preston St., 613-680-0380, grayjayhospitality.ca
Open: Tuesday and Wednesday 5:30 to 10 p.m., Thursday to Saturday 5:30 p.m. till closing, closed Sunday and Monday
Prices: smaller plates $14 to $24, larger plates $25 to $50
Access: two steps to front door

The second time I ate at Gray Jay, I knew better than to ask for coffee.

Chef and co-owner Dominique Dufour’s cosy restaurant on Preston Street is as principled as it is accomplished, friendly and even intriguing. At this four-month-old restaurant named after Canada’s national bird, Canadian ingredients are a must. Because coffee beans don’t grow in Canada, Gray Jay does not serve coffee.

For the same reason, don’t expect any tropical fruit at Gray Jay, or any Canadian produce out of season unless it’s been preserved. Do expect Dufour to exercise great creativity within her constraints. She, like a growing number of au courant chefs, is pushing a vision of elevated Canadian dining aligned with the precepts and expanded bounties of new Nordic cuisine.

That’s why Dufour tops her lightly cold-smoked oysters with a sprig of foraged and then fried reindeer moss. She indulges in fermentation, following the trickle-down influence of culinary trailblazer Noma in Copenhagen. Dufour marries seaweed with roasted cod or potatoes, adds rye and oats to her savoury dishes, and favours mushrooms to the point of working them into a persuasively tasty dessert.

Before launching Gray Jay, Dufour came to Ottawa from Montreal last year to be the executive chef at the Le Germain Hotel Ottawa. She opened Norca, the boutique hotel’s sleek restaurant whose name refers — and this will sound familiar — to “Northern cuisine, Canadian ingredients.”

But if Dufour is working from a similar playbook at Gray Jay, her food here, which I enjoyed twice this month, strikes me as more personal, interesting and consistent.

Gray Jay’s taut fall menu consists of 11 items. About half of them are smaller, very well crafted, novel and vegetable-forward. Three meatier large plates round out the savoury selections and there are two desserts. Sharing is very much encouraged.

You can also order a chef’s-choice tasting menu, served family-style for $65 a person, or graze from a selection of cheeses and house-made charcuterie, which befits a place with a sophisticated and user-friendly wine list (that is, surprisingly, not exclusively Canadian).

There’s a great deal of thought and technique involved in Dufour’s dishes, all the more to deliver something complex and stimulating that a guest hasn’t eaten before.

Those succulent, hard-to-pass-up oysters ($24 for six) sat on beds of puréed cauliflower and cucumber, emulsified with hemp seeds, and topped with dollops of a zippy fennel, roasted red pepper and Tokyo turnip mignonette, not to mention the fried moss.

I’ll note here that these and a few dishes were brought to our table from the long open kitchen facing the dining area by Dufour herself, who likes to break down the distinction between front and back of house. She’s generous with the details and stories of her creations, and will tell you, for example, that she favours wild, hand-harvested P.E.I. oysters because choosing them helps to minimize damage to the oysters’ habitat.

Indeed, between them, Dufour and sommelier/server Alex Nicholson provided the most engaging and knowledgeable service that I’ve experienced this year in Ottawa.

A dish that wowed us as a distinct indulgence consisted of thinly sliced and marinated pumpkin, tossed with roasted cauliflower and garlic-oil-confit sunchokes in a caramelized onion sauce, with scoops of rye-and-sunflower-seed-topped bone marrow as a finishing touch.

Just as impressive, but more unexpected, was Gray Jay’s deliciously braised Japanese eggplant ($16) with a chickpea-based miso and loose yogurt made with soy milk driving up the umami factor, while beets that had been julienned, fried and dehydrated added crunch and novelty.

Gray Jay’s menu offers cod collar at two price points ($25 and $40). We took the smaller cutlet, and were told by Nicholson that either way, Dufour was experimenting with roasting that off-cut of fish on the bone, as if it were red meat. The slab of fish, topped with a gremolata of garlic, butter, lemon thyme and sourdough crumble, was juicy and varied in texture, quite unlike a more demure fillet.

True red meat lovers should be pleased with the steak of deer or bison, depending on availability ($50, for two people). We had significantly smoked but richly meaty bison, served with yet another perplexingly good sauce, this time made with chestnuts, fermented and caramelized apples and caramelized onions. Completing the dish was a mound of dill-flecked shoestring potatoes that were dramatically crunchy, possibly to a fault.

A bowl of rabbit dumplings ($33) was a lucid, comforting dish. Its toothsome, expertly made dumplings sat in a rich bone broth that played its salty notes with pride.

Both of Gray Jay’s desserts were winners. The more conventional (and vegan-friendly) of the two was a squash flan ($8) whose sweet, soy-milk-based sauce had notes of hay.

More startling was the dessert ($9) that paired a molten (but not overly sweet) maple cake with a semifreddo that was topped with morsels of chanterelle mushrooms that had been made more mellow, yet still savoury, by their preparation, and the semifreddo sat on a crumble of yogurt cooked down to caramelized solids. The semifreddo had a streak of tamed mushroom to it as well, thanks to the addition of sugar blended with dehydrated chanterelles.

All of these experiments happen in what was formerly a Domino’s pizzeria, which Dufour and her co-owner, Gray Jay’s general manager Devon Bionda, renovated on their own. Their restaurant, which seats 27, is a light-coloured space with concrete tabletops and concrete underfoot, cushioned banquettes and harder chairs.

There’s softer seating at the front of Gray Jay, on an older sofa, while a small bar also appeals. The open kitchen is an eye-grabber and conversation-starter, with its pale green antique fridge and other funky accoutrements. The overall vibe brings to mind some Quebec City restaurants I’ve visited that make fine-dining fun.

Related

• Why is Ottawa's dining scene constantly short-changed by Canada's restaurant taste-makers?
• Why have Michelin stars evaded Canada's top restaurants?

Gray Jay’s fall menu will be in effect until mid-November, Dufour told me, after which a game-based winter menu will take over. Meanwhile, on Saturdays, Gray Jay serves whole-animal-based menus. Past stars have included smoked goose, a Holstein calf, brook trout, and lamb from Shady Creek Lamb Co. in Kinburn.

Dufour is clearly a chef filled with talent and ideas, stretching out successfully at Gray Jay. “This project is very personal and very much a gamble on our side,” she told me. “We are holding on with hopes, dreams and passion.”

That gamble by Dufour and her team has paid off handsomely. It’s time now for Ottawa foodies to be passionate in their support of this special place.

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

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.