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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

phum@postmedia.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

phum@postmedia.com

Selected Chinese restaurants in Ottawa

Cafe Orient
808 Somerset St. W.

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

Harbin Restaurant
591 March Rd., harbinrestaurant.com

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

Morals Village Hot Pot
3987 Riverside Dr., Unit 1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

phum@postmedia.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

phum@postmedia.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

phum@postmedia.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

phum@postmedia.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

phum@postmedia.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

phum@postmedia.com

Atelier
540 Rochester St., Ottawa, 613-321-3537, atelierrestaurant.ca , instagram.com/atelierottawa , thru.tickit.ca
Open: Dining room closed due to COVID-19, but the restaurant is staging drive-thru dinners on Saturdays and Sundays
Price: $100 plus tax per person for a five-course blind tasting menu with non-alcoholic drink pairings; reservations are capped at 10 cars each night

Before the coming of the COVID-19 crisis, grabbing a drive-thru snack was one of this restaurant critic’s guilty pleasures, usually involving a late-night impulse purchase of fries that would gobbled down only to precede a few fitful hours of sleep.

But on Saturday night, we put on our best going-outside clothes and buckled our seat belts in anticipation of fine dining fare, served drive-through style.

Marc Lepine, chef-owner of Atelier on Rochester Street and two-time winner of the Canadian Culinary Championships, had closed his acclaimed restaurant’s dining room in mid-March, in keeping with governmental mandates. But in early May, Lepine announced on Instagram that he would re-open, not to offer takeout or delivery orders as other upscale restaurants have done, but to serve a five-course tasting menu plus non-alcoholic drink pairings to gastronomes willing to eat in their cars.

Leave it to Lepine, who was chosen in 2018 as the country’s most innovative chef by Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants magazine, to propose this whimsical re-think of what fine dining could be during a global pandemic that has made physical distancing necessary. Following last Saturday’s inaugural go, he will be offering drive-thru Atelier dinners for the foreseeable future on Saturdays and Sundays, via tickets that even at $100 are likely to sell out quickly online.

In January, back when life was normal, I had the usual at Atelier in its cozy but stark dining room, meaning an anything-but-usual 12-course dinner of surprising, cutting-edge creations brought to our table by polished servers who could discuss the intricacies of Lepine’s food.

In front of Atelier on Saturday, we were among a lineup of 10 cars filled with people wondering how the Atelier experience would translate to in-vehicle eating.

Each of us received a bag filled with plastic cutlery, napkins and straws, and then the first of five courses in premium takeout containers we could later return to our server for recycling. Our masked and gloved server, who also prepared our drinks, handed us each course in turn with a cheery description. Then we ambled to the parking lot beside Atelier, parked, and enjoyed.

Dinner inside Atelier typically began with a course of three amuse-bouche snacks. For the drive-thru, Lepine pulled off an impressive equivalent, which consisted of a refined mini-souffle with a burst of crab and citrus flavours, a deftly seasoned chunk of wild boar belly paired with anise foam, and, most abstractly of all, a square of pea and tarragon topped with walnut and celeriac puree.

After our snacks, around the block we went, pulling up to Atelier for the second course of sockeye salmon cured with sesame and chili oil, garnished with grains of “mushroom fried” puffed rice, pickled daikon and two purees, edamame and coconut-cashew. The meltingly tender fish was practically ideal, and its accompaniments spoke to the kitchen’s deft technique and artful plating, plastic container notwithstanding.

Our third course was vegetable-heavy, showcasing asparagus, crisp strands of potato, tomatoes, bits of mushroom and a just-coagulated sous-vide-cooked egg yolk. The final savoury course featured slices of beef brisket, which had just a bit more chew to it than we would have liked but also a huge amount of charred, delectable flavour due to its glaze. A carrot-jus reduction bolstered the meat, and some roasted carrots were extraordinarily good.

Before the dessert, there was a bit of cleverness that, not to disclose too much, involved a squeegee kid who wasn’t a squeegee kid and a parking ticket that wasn’t a parking ticket, both riffing on the dinner’s drive-thru aspect. Dessert, which even required a masked Lepine to administer some liquid nitrogen, I think, to make some instant ice cream, looked like a brown mish-mash but was a chocolate-y treat teeming with textures and novelties.

Normally, I’d be tempted by the wine pairings at Atelier. The drive-thru’s non-alcoholic beverages ranged from a sparkling matcha tea on ice with yuzu and ginger to a sugar-forward rooibos and lime strawberry shrub to a cross between a tomato juice and martini to a Vietnamese sweet tea with condensed milk, sour cherry and masala chai simple syrup.

We were done eating in about 90 minutes, roughly half the time of a pre-pandemic dinner at Atelier. We were also quite full.

Given how much hardship COVID-19 has caused, it can seem privileged in the extreme to bemoan the loss of fine dining to the pandemic.

But there are reasons just the same to be glad about what Atelier has pulled off. The restaurant’s drive-thru experiment demonstrated that Lepine, like us, is up to the challenge of making the best of things in trying times, while the remarkableness of his dinner showed that even while in quarantine, we could be delighted.

phum@postmedia.com

Ayla’s Social Kitchen
338 Preston St.,  613-762-7297, aylassocial.ca , instagram.com/aylassocial
Open: dining room closed due to COVID-19, open Wednesday to Sunday from 4 to 8:30 p.m. for pick-up and delivery orders
Prices: dishes between $13 and $20, $65 for dinner for two; $5 or more for deliveries through Love Local Delivery, depending on distance
Note: menu changes weekly, check instagram.com/aylassocial for updates

Amir and Maryam Aghaei, the owners and operators of Ayla’s Social Kitchen on Preston Street, figure that in the four days that their dining room was open, they served perhaps two dozen customers.

Then, on March 13, just as the novel coronavirus’s transformation of Ottawa was beginning, their brand new restaurant on Little Italy’s main drag closed.

The basement-level eatery, which is located where Posto Locale had been, did reopen later in March to make food to go, as it continues to do five nights a week. But the Aghaeis, who had named their restaurant after their six-year-old daughter, cut their business’s staff from 12 people to just themselves.

“We spent a ton of money on renovating. I thought if we didn’t do anything, we would run into a ditch,” Maryam Aghaei says.

But having had no time at all to build a following, the Aghaeis saw little to no business soon after they reopened.

“It was horrible,” recalls Amir Aghaei. “Nobody knew us. It slowly started. We started getting one, two, three orders, some weeks nothing.”

Eventually, the internet directed more customers to them, people who stumbled onto the restaurant’s Instagram page or food-lovers such as myself who found Ayla’s because it had signed up to have Love Local Delivery, the fledgling delivery service, bring its dishes to customers. Some who knew the Aghaeis from their previous business, the Pints & Quarts pub in the Glebe, gave their new venture a try.

Last weekend, we took our own leap of faith with Ayla’s and felt pretty well rewarded.

The restaurant serves what it calls Mediterranean cuisine, with Persian twists that nod to the Aghaeis’ background. The menu that applied for my dinner — Ayla’s offerings change weekly, Maryam Aghaei says — listed a fancier dinner for two, some more casual but tweaked comfort food, and some intriguing appetizers.

If you like poutine in the first place, you probably would have liked Ayla’s creative, cross-cultural version, made with thyme-seasoned and fried halloumi cheese standing in ably for curds, as well as lamb gravy and a scattering of pomegranate seeds. Lamb also figured, with eggplant, in a dip that was like a slightly more savoury take on baba ghanoush. Egg rolls made with shredded duck and served with a orange-chili sauce held our interest, although they did lack crispness.

Among the main courses, the bacon cheeseburger made with havarti was solidly made and substantial, although a more interesting pick would likely have been the grilled cheese sandwich made with pulled lamb.

The most explicitly Persian dish we had was a mellow sweet and sour stew of chicken, walnuts and pomegranate that other Iranian restaurants in town call fesenjoon.

The showpiece of our dinner was the piping hot and massive tray meant to serve two, which was filled with a pair of lamb shanks, mushroom risotto and broccolini. The flavourful, spoon-tender lamb and the al dente broccolini were hard to improve upon. But the mushroom risotto was our meal’s big disappointment due to its punishing saltiness. When I later mentioned that to Amir Aghaeis, he apologized and attributed the gaffe to him falling behind in the kitchen and allowing the risotto’s chicken stock to become too concentrated.

Two salads — a garden salad that came with the burger and a kale salad that came with the lamb shanks — were at least a cut above, not only because of the freshness of their greens but also because of their respective dressings. The herb-tahini dressing with the former and the honey-ginger dressing with the latter were as vibrantly flavoured as anything else that Ayla’s had prepared from scratch.

Two desserts by Maryam Aghaei — slices of moist, lemony almond and fig cake and a nicely wobbly chocolate panna cotta — ended the meal on a sweet, pleasing note.

While the Ayla’s dining room is closed, I can still give two examples of service by the Alghaeis that go above and beyond. First, the afternoon following our dinner, I received a text from Amir Alghaei, who asked what we thought of his food. Second, he told me this week that while the restaurant is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, if someone calls wanting food on one of those days, he will make it. “We never say no,” he says.

That might be the promise of an entrepreneur who saw his hopes hobbled by COVID-19 just days after opening and is desperate for every dollar of business. But I think it’s more likely that the Alghaeis would simply have been just as hospitable if the pandemic had never happened.

phum@postmedia.com

Absinthe Cafe
1208 Wellington St. W., 613-761-1138, absinthecafe.ca , instagram.com/absinthecafe
Open: dining room closed due to COVID-19, takeout and delivery available Tuesday to Saturday 4:30 p.m. to 8 p.m., closed Monday and Sunday, check its Instagram page for takeout lunch specials
Prices: mains $19 to $25, dinners for two $80 and $90, barbecue kits $40 to $55; deliveries by Love Local Delivery for $5 or more depending on distance

Last Friday at lunchtime, we were lined up 10 deep and two metres apart outside Absinthe Cafe in Hintonburg.

Old-school sandwich-board advertising and new-fangled Instagram posts had done the trick. Both touted chef-owner Patrick Garland’s daily special of lobster rolls. The $20 price was a splurge to be sure, but who wouldn’t want a delicious reminder of seemingly long-ago vacations in P.E.I. and New England when life in quarantine too often feels like a never-ending stay-cation?

The lobster roll in my paper bag was a little less plump than the one depicted on social media, but it still satisfied with chunks of sweet, well-sauced Gaspé Peninsula lobster. For a few dollars more, some duck fat fries and chocolate chip cookies were comfortingly familiar but also notably above average in terms of flavour and texture.

In all, that lobster lunch was a fine, if necessarily casual, way for me to reacquaint myself with Absinthe, which opened in 2003 and moved to its Wellington Street West location in 2007.

I’ve long expected to be impressed by the sure-handed bistro fare served there, from a signature steak frites to duck confit to the fondue I enjoyed in late 2013. Garland even had the culinary chops to win Ottawa’s Gold Medal Plates competition in 2014. With Absinthe pivoting to takeout and delivery fare in response to COVID-19, I was curious to see if the restaurant could wow me with not just that lobster roll, but also with food brought back to my place.

Passing over mains such a burger, striploin steak and lamb shanks, we opted for the roast chicken dinner for four ($90). Happily, nearly every component of that meal was close to definitive. On the whole, Absinthe’s family meal ranked among the top takeout dinners I’ve had since COVID-19 shut Ottawa’s dining rooms almost three months ago.

The chicken was well-seasoned not only on its skin but through and through, and every bite of it, whether it was light or dark meat, was perfectly moist. While the bird really was not wanting for anything, it was even better with its mushroom gravy of equally deep flavour.

The mashed potatoes perhaps could have used a bit more buttery richness. Notwithstanding that, the vegetables, which also included roasted carrots and squash, were exemplary.

Focaccia was fine and perfect for mopping up that exceptional gravy. An otherwise laudable Caesar salad included the meal’s only small flub because some of its lardons were burnt. Better was an add-on to our dinner for four, the seared tuna Niçoise salad, augmented with fiddleheads and boosted by a thick, lemon-y vinaigrette.

For dessert, the apple and rhubarb crisp asserted its tartness while more of those cookies took care of sweeter cravings.

In addition to ready-to-eat fare, Absinthe also sells barbecue-it-yourself dinners featuring marinated meats including lemongrass chicken, chermoula striploin steaks and more. With Father’s Day approaching, this kind of meal might be just the thing to share with my son.

phum@postmedia.com

Baccanalle
595 Montreal Rd. (back of the Phenix Building), 613-859-6297, baccanalle.com
Open : for takeout and delivery Thursday to Saturday from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.
Prices : whole roast jerk chicken dinner $45, mains $16 to $18, $5 or more, depending on distance, for deliveries through Love Local Delivery

Last week in this space, I raved about a roast chicken dinner that struck me as pretty close to definitive. That bird from Absinthe in Hintonburg was the stuff of intense cravings, moist and well-seasoned throughout and made even better by its mushroom gravy.

But at the risk of seeming fickle, I’m confessing this week to a new favourite poultry treat. I’m seeing stars over the delicious and economical roast jerk chicken from Baccanalle, a tiny but potent purveyor of Caribbean-inspired food on Montreal Road.

If my life’s last meal were to be a roast chicken, I might well order it jerked. I’m all in when it comes to that intoxicatingly savoury and sometimes incendiary marinade, powered by Scotch bonnet peppers, allspice, green onions and more. When I saw that Baccanalle offered a roast jerk chicken dinner to go for $45, it struck me as a must-order and I wasn’t disappointed.

Baccanalle’s bird wasn’t as full-on fiery as the jerk pork that I’ve had in Jamaica, or the now legendary “atomic” jerk chicken that chef Frederick White served us at the now-shuttered Flavours of the Caribbean in Lowertown. That nuclear-level dish memorably incapacitated a colleague of mine in a 2015 spicy-food duel, reducing him to a bent-over, near-heaving mess. (Pain notwithstanding, he enjoyed the chicken.)

Resa Solomon-St. Lewis, Baccanalle’s chef-owner and an Algonquin College culinary grad, made a more mellow but nonetheless complexly flavoured jerk chicken that elicited primal appreciation from all of us when we tore it apart last weekend. Its earthy, house-made marinade was slathered not just on the chicken’s exterior, making its skin something to fight over, but also inside the bird, contributing to meat that was worth picking off the bones.

Our chicken came nestled on a generously portioned bed of rice and beans (or rice and peas as they say in the Caribbean), which further contributed to the glowing heat in our mouths. Sides, chosen when I placed my order online a day in advance, included corn on the cob with spiced maple butter, packets of superior fried plantain chips from the local company Laborde Foods, and Baccanallle’s fine “Jamocha me crazy” brownies.

Solomon-St. Lewis also prepares freezable containers of cold pulled jerk chicken, a tub of which made for a fine staple in my fridge days after our al fresco dinner. I was inclined to eat its well-herbed and chili-flecked meat straight from the tub for some instant relief of my pandemic blues.

While Solomon-St. Lewis’s family is from Trinidad and Tobago, she makes some mean Jamaican-style patties, which were meaty and not greasy. We can also recommend Baccanalle’s thirst-quenching house-made sorrel drinks.

Jamaican beef patties from Baccanalle.

An order of blackened chicken underwhelmed a little bit, simply paling in comparison to the the more vibrant jerk preparations.

All that chicken aside, Baccanalle does have items to vegan customers, and even has a listing for “Baccanalle Vegan” on Uber Eats. The frozen “Anima” chickpea vegan curry that we tried was big-flavoured and teeming with vegetables, but was also on the mushy side after it had been thawed and then reheated.

Still, I would be curious to try more of Solomon-St. Lewis’s prepared items. She has grown her business steadily over the last five or so years, building a clientele through appearances at various farmers’ markets from Beechwood to Kanata. Her three-table bricks-and-mortar location, called Capital Fare Cafe, shut because of the pandemic, but she now is concentrating solely on her Baccanalle brand from that east-end kitchen.

If you’re picking up from Baccanalle rather than ordering its food to be delivered, be warned that it’s a little tricky to find. The business is at the back of the Phenix Building on Montreal Road, which has its own ticketed parking lot but is free for 15 minutes. You can phone Baccanalle to let them know you’re there to receive your food curbside.

It’s a bit of a rigmarole. But what isn’t during COVID-19? Just do it for the jerk chicken.

phum@postmedia.com

Four Ottawa-area restaurants are included in the prestigious Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants 2020 list released Thursday.

The local laureates include Riviera on Sparks Street (which ranked 26th), Atelier on Rochester Street (which came in 31st), Les Foug è res in Chelsea (ranked 61st) and Alice on Adeline Street (ranked 94th).

The list’s synopsis of Riviera describes it as “arguably the most stylish of Ottawa’s restaurants … offering magnificent updates on classic steakhouse fare” under chef Jordan Holley. Steps away from Parliament Hill, Riviera is a haunt for Ottawa’s political class.

Atelier is the cutting-edge 22-seat restaurant that chef-owner Marc Lepine, the two-time winner of the Canadian Culinary Championships, opened in 2008 to serve elaborate and innovative tasting menus. Opened in 1993, Les Fougères is the sophisticated yet rustic restaurant whose chef, Yannick LaSalle, won the Canadian Culinary Championships last year. Alice, which chef-owner Briana Kim opened in June 2019, offers a vegetable-focused tasting menu and spotlights house-made fermented ingredients.

Since COVID-19 forced the shutdown of restaurant dining rooms, the four lauded restaurants have pivoted their businesses in different ways.

Riviera and Les Fougères offer food for pickup, and the Chelsea restaurant has a store selling prepared foods that is open.

Atelier on Saturdays and Sundays offers a shortened tasting menu with non-alcoholic drink pairings, but as a “drive-thru” restaurant, with customers picking up courses in front of the restaurant, eating in their cars in the nearby parking lot, and then circling the block to pick up the next course. Alice sells different fermented products and plans to reopen in some fashion in the future.

In the 2019 edition of the list, the Ottawa restaurants cited were Atelier (24th), Riviera (51st), Stofa (98th) and Fauna (100th). In 2018, the list chose Lepine as Canada’s most innovative chef.

Topping the 2020 list, which was compiled from the polls submitted by 103 judges across the country, was the Toronto restaurant Alo, which also came in first in 2019, 2018 and 2017.

A companion list of Canada’s top 50 bars was also released this week, but no Ottawa-area bars were named on it.

phum@postmedia.com

Back to Brooklyn
81 Clarence St., 613-699-6999, backtobrooklyn.ca
Open: for takeout and patio service, Wednesday 4 p.m. to 10 p.m., Thursday 4 p.m. to midnight, Friday and Saturday noon to 2 a.m., Sunday noon to midnight, closed Monday and Tuesday
Prices: mains $16 to $45
Access: steps into restaurant

One night during this past weekend’s heatwave, we decided to try a brand new restaurant as it coped with some brand new circumstances.

Normally, which is to say before the arrival in March of COVID-19, I gave a just-opened restaurant a month to work out its kinks. But since life in pandemic times is anything but normal, and because we were keen, if a little apprehensive, to dine on a restaurant’s patio, we went last Friday to Back to Brooklyn in the ByWard Market.

You have to feel for any recently opened small business that must now square its ambitions with the demands of limiting the spread of a lethal virus. Back to Brooklyn, which previously was part of the building that housed Stella Osteria, likely wanted to be another place on Clarence Street for the young and hip to congregate care-free and en masse to enjoy food, cocktails and bottle service into the weekend wee hours. Instead, its arrival has been more low-key and even a little surreal.

About a month ago, it opened to offer food to go. On June 12, it and its neighbouring businesses began serving customers on patios. At Back to Brooklyn, we walked through the narrow, empty dining room to a smaller lounge-y back patio that seated roughly 16 and felt intimate despite the required rigours of physical distancing.

In place of menus, there were QR codes on our tables to be scanned that would direct cellphone browsers to the restaurant’s online menu. There were also new bottles of hand sanitizer on each table. While we weren’t required to wear masks, the servers accessorized with PPE face shields.

“You’re rocking that visor,” one of my dining companions said to our server.

“Thanks for saying that,” the server replied.

Service, here and elsewhere, would seem to be something that needs recalibration because of COVID-19. At Back to Brooklyn, our servers were friendly, knowledgeable and attentive. To help us and our servers mutually keep our distance, we were provided with a carafe of water to use for refilling. But we were also visited by one of the restaurant’s owners who was chatty and welcoming, but also unmasked and unshielded and who got a little too close for comfort.

While Back to Brooklyn’s menu is a concise listing of perhaps a half-dozen mains and starters, it is still more interesting than a lot of the patio fare in the ByWard Market. The restaurant’s chef is Warren Sutherland, whose long career in Ottawa includes co-owning Sweetgrass Aboriginal Bistro in the 1990s and more recently his now-shuttered Sutherland restaurant on Beechwood Avenue. The four main courses that we tried were artfully presented, directly flavourful examples of casual fine dining, enlivened by small flourishes and accents.

“Duck rice” ($25) was not duck fried rice as I might have guessed, but rather a fine confit duck leg on a wee timbale of brown rice with tasty Asian add-ins including pickled mushrooms, bok choy and more.

The vegetarian at our table opted for and was well pleased by the pan-seared cauliflower steak ($24), which was the centrepiece of a splashy, somewhat haphazard looking plate that also included purple cauliflower puree, tempura cauliflower and pickled cauliflower.

Of the free desserts, we thought the sour cherry and blueberry cheesecakes were best by a considerable margin. Back to Brooklyn also offers two desserts that meet keto-diet standards, a cheesecake and a carrot cake. Neither made us want to convert to keto eating for pleasure’s sake, especially when compared to the outstanding classic cheesecake, whose evocations of New York ostensibly lined up with the restaurant’s loose Brooklyn theme.

The restaurant had received its liquor license just days before our visit, we were told. So far, its cocktail offerings are classic ones, and we had a standard Old-Fashioned ($14) and passable glass of sangria ($12).

When he stopped by our table, the restaurant’s owner mentioned that he hoped to convert his roof into a massive patio. I could see such a hangout being a big draw for the quarantine-weary during this anything but ordinary summer, especially for the hordes of the great unmasked that were out in force last Friday on Clarence Street.

phum@postmedia.com

Farang Thai

Email: farangthaiottawa@gmail.com

Phone: 613-884-0221

Website: farangthaiottawa.com

Instragram: instagram.com/farangthaiottawa/

Prices: frozen meals are $14 (with protein) or $12 (vegetarian); minimum order is three dishes, 15 per cent discount applies for 15 meals or more ordered at once; delivery in the Ottawa-Gatineau area is free, orders are due on Wednesdays for deliveries on Friday, Saturday or Sunday

If you’re a stickler for culinary authenticity, it might interest you to know that the Ministry of Commerce in Thailand certifies restaurants around the world that it deems to be truly Thai in terms of ingredients, recipes and even ambience.

In Ottawa, four restaurants — Khao Thai on Murray Street, Pookie’s Thai on Carling Avenue, Talay Thai in Centretown and Thai Lanna Cuisine in South Keys — have received the ministry’s Thai Select designation.

I wonder, though, what the Thai Select program would think of the frozen meals that I’ve recently enjoyed from the Ottawa-based caterer Farang Thai.

The four-year-old company, which consists of couple Cameron and Corinne Fraser, is “committed to making Thai food that tastes the way it’s supposed to taste in the region it comes from,” according to its website.

Cameron, who is the cook, developed his recipes from his own culinary exploits in Thailand, which he first visited in 2007 to study Thai kickboxing. Food won out over fisticuffs and the Frasers say they made subsequent trips to Thailand with the country’s rivetingly flavourful regional dishes as their focus.

“Now our recipes are the result of eating as much as we can handle and trying the same dish from different vendors and restaurants to try and pinpoint what we like most, and translating that inspiration into delicious food, mostly from memory, or from asking what’s in it and how it’s made whenever possible,” says Cameron. He adds that he refers to certain cookbooks, such as The Food of Northern Thailand by Austin Bush, Bangkok by Leela Punyaratabandhu and Pok Pok by Andy Ricker for added inspiration.

Apart from the fact that Farang Thai doesn’t have a location for dining in, there could be some strikes against it when it comes to a Thai Select designation. The company’s name might be seen as a little cheeky, as “farang” means “white person” in the Thai language. Also, while the Thai Select program rewards restaurants that import Thai ingredients, Farang Thai uses vegetables, meat, herbs, and spices from local vendors as much as possible.

Finally, because Cameron Fraser has celiac disease, all of his food is gluten-free, which means there have been small tweaks to recipes because soy sauce and other sauces, for starters, usually contain gluten.

However, the Frasers say on their website that they’re “not trying to ‘Westernize’ anything. It’s grassroots Thai food. No fusion, no ‘Thai style,’ no substitutions (unless requested).” Farang Thai can also accommodate allergies and sensitivities, it says.

It’s been more than two decades since I made my one trip to Thailand, and my best benchmarks for Thai authenticity have since been dishes I’ve had in New York. All that said, I’m happy to shelve any arguments about authenticity and vouch for Farang Thai’s very generously portioned food as delicious and vibrant, marked by nuances that I don’t always taste in Ottawa’s Thai restaurants.

Also, there was no meaningful degradation of Farang Thai’s food even if it had come from freezer rather than straight from a wok.

Farang Thai does require a level of commitment in terms of bulk purchasing. Buying a minimum of three meals (usually a curry or stir-fry with rice) at a time is required. But those with large freezers and a love of Thai food might spring for buying 15 meals, which would come with a 15 per cent discount.

I’ve tried single portions of a half-dozen dishes from Farang Thai’s changing menu. Chicken satay was substantial, well seasoned and its peanut sauce was persuasive. Laab pork was a properly pungent, heaping serving of minced pork, with a finishing touch of toasted rice. Pineapple red curry with chicken and a cashew chicken stir-fry delivered clear, compelling flavours.

My favourite dish was a stir-fry of curried squash with beef, which popped with the most heat and complexity.

As far as spiciness goes, Cameron Fraser says “the default for dishes that call for chilies is ‘average’ or maybe medium. There are plenty of dishes that have no chilies at all, and there are plenty of others that absolutely cannot taste the way they’re supposed to if chilies are omitted, in which case we can certainly adjust the heat level, which we’ve done whenever possible.” If you did want more of a spicy jolt to your food, the caterer’s Farang Fire hot sauce has a good kick to it, combining lime juice, shallots, coriander, chilies and the fermented funk of fish sauce.

The only Farang Thai dish I wouldn’t rush to order again was the vegetarian glass noodle stir-fry, particularly when the meatier dishes each came with plenty of rice.

The only constructive criticism I had for the Frasers was that their food should come with reheating instructions. They say they’ve since added that information.

I do miss going out to Thai restaurants during the pandemic, not only for the thrilling food but also the deep hospitality. However, one small upside to this topsy-turvy virus time is that I’ve become acquainted with Farang Thai’s tasty, convenient and economical food, and my fondness for it will persist after COVID-19 has receded.

phum@postmedia.com

Tingz Restaurant + Bar
55 York St., 613-241-6221, tingzrestaurant.com
Hours: Tuesday and Thursday 2 p.m. to midnight, Wednesday and Friday 2 p.m. to 2 a.m, Saturday noon to 2 a.m., Sunday noon to 10 p.m., closed Monday
Prices: most dishes between $13 and $22
Access: small patio, dining room is downstairs

On the one-to-10 pandemic uneasiness scale I’ve concocted, where one is “I would march in an anti-mask rally” and 10 is “I never leave the house,” I’d say I’m probably a four or five.

Take that into consideration when I say that you should visit Tingz, the new modern Caribbean restaurant on York Street, to enjoy its best dishes on its patio, but maybe you’ll want to forego eating in its just-opened dining room until service is somewhat less slack.

An exterior shot of TINGZ restaurant in the ByWard Market.Chef Jae-Anthony’s jerk chicken, deftly grilled and bathed in a definitive savoury sauce, is among the very best I’ve had in town. Hefty chicken wings, exhibiting a fine char from the grill and nicely seasoned, were winners, too. Tingz’s fish cakes brought back fond memories of the doughy salt cod treats I enjoyed a few years ago in Barbados. When featured in dishes, chunks of oxtail and goat were tamed into succulence. Mac and cheese was a rich and satisfying indulgence, even if it struck us as not so summery. By all means, give these items, which were often piquantly seasoned or garnished, a try.

For that matter, wet your whistle with a refreshing and reasonably priced cocktail or mocktail. We liked the beat-the-heat Watermelon Madness, made with vodka, watermelon juice and 7-Up, and the Moscow Mule’s gingery oomph.

But, since we’re assessing our restaurant experiences during COVID-19 times, we weigh service and ambience not just in terms of how good they make us feel, but also how safe. Call me too easily uneasy, but, of two visits last weekend to Tingz’s patio and then a Sunday night dinner in the basement restaurant’s dining room, I markedly preferred the al fresco meals.

At Friday night’s patio dinner, we liked the little bottle of hand sanitizer on the table and the fact that our server was masked. At Saturday’s lunch on the patio, we liked a little less that our servers were unmasked, and we wondered where the hand sanitizer had gone.

On Sunday night, the patio, to our surprise, was closed, perhaps because a downpour was possible. (Restaurant patios on nearby Clarence Street, however, were open.) Down the stairs we went to Tingz’s dining room, where we encountered some smaller disappointments (noisy music that forced us to lean in or speak more loudly, a lack of soap and paper towels in the men’s room) and, more frustratingly, a wait of some 40 minutes for a dessert of plantain doughnuts that ultimately was deemed by the kitchen to be unservable because, we were told, its dough was less than perfect.

That dessert would have ended an already lacklustre meal that included jerk calamari rings that did not thrum with jerk goodness, some appealing cups of fried plantain filled with ackee, the Caribbean fruit that uncannily brings scrambled eggs to mind, and a visually stunning escovitch snapper that sadly was too bland, too dry and too expensive.

Meanwhile, at Friday’s dinner, the grilled cauliflower dish showed no signs of having been grilled, and seemed more like it had been steamed and even a bit overcooked.

Because of the no-show dessert on Sunday, we received a discount on our bill. But that break was not enough to compensate us for the unease of lingering too long and unnecessarily in an indoor space during the pandemic. (There were several other tables of unmasked customers in the dining room that night.)

Yes, Ottawa entered “Stage 3” of its reopening last Friday, with the province approving the city’s restaurants to operate indoor dining rooms, provided that physical distancing exists between tables. But I would have preferred more anti-infection rigour with my indoor experience at Tingz.

In response to questions from this newspaper, owner David Amar said the restaurant had a mask policy indoors, but masks were optional outside. Servers can opt out if they have difficulty breathing, and especially if the heat is a factor.

Amar counts himself among those who may choose to not wear a mask, as he is asthmatic.

Regarding hand sanitizer, Amar said he tried to have small bottles of it available for customers when they were seated, but “we’ve had a lot of hand sanitizer go missing. People have been stealing some.”

Maybe you rank lower on my COVID-19 uneasiness scale and would have been more relaxed. But, for now at least, I’ll choose the seemingly greater safety of savouring Tingz’s jerk chicken on its patio or to go.

Arlo
340 Somerset St W., restaurantarlo.com , instagram.com/arlo.somerset
Open: Friday to Sunday 5 p.m. to 10 p.m., weather permitting
Prices: wines by the glass $13 to $15, dishes from $8 to $29
Access: some steps up and down to back patio but there are tables on Somerset Street itself, which is closed; washrooms downstairs
Note: no reservations, walk-ins only

We sat outside at a rustic table, sheltered from the evening heat by a giant tree, charmed by the just-opened restaurant Arlo’s ambience that made all thoughts of nearby Centretown fall away. Nearby were the sights and smells of good things grilling. Behind us in the leafy back terrace was a mini-bathtub filled with intriguing wines waiting to be poured. Great tunes played.

Life, despite COVID-19, seemed very good. Or rather, because staff, from servers to cooks, were masked and because they instilled confidence in us about their diligence regarding the virus crisis, we were able to let pandemic anxieties slip away and just enjoy a perfect summer evening last weekend.

Chief among Arlo’s friendly and knowledgeable cohort was owner and sommelier Alex McMahon, whose resume lists stints not only at Fauna and Riviera in Ottawa but also the fabled world-class restaurant Noma in Copenhagen. For all his vaunted pedigree, McMahon on his home turf was the most unassuming of wine experts, working the patio and making his sophisticated passion — natural wines that are made without pesticides, chemicals and other additives — more accessible via relaxed patter with his guests.

On Saturday night, McMahon, who I should say recognized me and my mission from the get-go, gave us a concise primer on natural wines that likened some of them to punk rock and others to Miles Davis. Really, it made sense, even if your ear drums aren’t connected to your taste buds.

For wine aficionados who know more than we do, Arlo has a several-page list of natural wines by the bottle. I suspect a longer list will be in the offing when the restaurant’s dining room, still under construction, opens this fall. We did just fine sampling wines by the glass, whether they were smartly chosen and well-described white, orange, rosé and red natural wines, quaffing our thirst while chef Jamie Stunt’s food, which was prepared steps away from us, ably took care of our hunger.

During two visits, we tried everything that Stunt offered on Arlo’s concise chalkboard menu, from the $8 skewer of duck hearts to the $29 plate of flank steak. As simple as his food sometimes was, Stunt’s dishes all rang true, which is as you might expect from a chef who took home silver at the 2013 Canadian Culinary Championships. (Then, he represented Ottawa and brought glory to Oz Kafe, where he worked.)

Stunt can take humble items and make them at least novel and interesting and at best marvelous. I’m thinking first of his enjoyable grilled cucumbers ($10) and his highly enjoyable and complex kohlrabi salad ($12).

There was as much whimsy as there was simplicity to Stunt’s $36 seafood “bungalow” (more modest than a seafood tower), which combined pristine oysters with a cranberry mignonette, bracing mussels escabeche and plump, winning pickled shrimp. Those with smaller cravings for seafood could have ordered the bungalow’s components separately, but then the kitchen crew would not yell “Bungalow!” upon receiving the order.

Returning on Saturday, we tried larger, meatier items, including piping hot, cheese-topped baked oysters ($14) and those tender, tasty, and barely offal-y duck hearts, dusted with a beguiling blend of spices. The menu’s most expensive and protein-heavy items were big winners, although I would rank the impeccable serving of flank steak, enlivened by an on-point, highly herbal salsa verde, just ahead of the marinated chicken cooked sous-vide and then grilled ($27), joined by a plate-filling dollop of romesco-y sauce.

Arlo is a wine bar, not a dessert bar. Thus, there was just vanilla ice cream with berries ($8) to end our night sweetly. And yet, it too was delicious and pristine, about as good as it could be.

Although we visited Arlo when it had scarcely five nights under its belt, the place had the vibe of an establishment that knows what it wants to do and how to do it. Highly experienced people such as McMahon and Stunt at the helm must have something to do with that. I cannot imagine a more convivial place to unwind with a glass of something interesting and some equally good food. And when Arlo moves from caterpillar to butterfly in a few months, it’s only natural to expect it will grow from a summer-patio infatuation to a full-fledged restaurant dining room worth the adoration of its guests.

phum@postmedia.com

98 La La Noodles
179 George St., 613-518-0239, lala-noodle.com , i instagram.com/98lalanoodles
Open: daily from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.; dining room open, as well as small, somewhat shaded patio; takeout available
Prices: typically $12 for a small soup, $15 for a large soup, kebabs $4 to $8

Trepidation about COVID-19 forced us last week to forego one of the unique pleasures at 98 La La Noodles in Lowertown.

Were there no pandemic to worry about, we would have sat in the Chinese restaurant’s dining room, and probably walked back to the kitchen area near its entrance where a chef in full view made noodles in real time with little more than their bare hands.

For us, it never gets old to watch a demonstration of this centuries-old culinary expertise that transforms wheat-flour dough into long and impeccably fresh noodles through a series of artful twists, stretches, folds and spins.

Still, given the choice, when we twice visited 98 La La Noodles, which opened in early 2020 and replaced a similar but less-good noodle joint, we sat on the small, somewhat shaded patio only because, in general terms, al fresco dining thwarts the transmission of the novel coronavirus better than indoor dining.

In the end, there were so many solidly made and even exceptional items emerging from the restaurant’s front door bound for our table that we missed not at all a view of the noodle-making.

If you like boldly flavoured noodle dishes, be they soups or stir-fries, as well as meat and vegetable kebabs liberally seasoned with a potently spicy, cumin-y rub (these happen to be the restaurant’s secondary specialties), then you only need to know one more word from me: Go.

The restaurant’s multi-page, illustrated menu can make choosing what to eat a bit of a conundrum, especially if many of its dishes, which originate from China and are more recent arrivals on Ottawa’s dining scene, are unfamiliar. We were quite deliberate in our ordering, making beelines for what we most expected to enjoy rather than trying to construct a well-rounded, multi-course meal. Ultimately, we received at both visits a deluge of dishes, each of them arriving when they were ready, even if that meant so-called appetizers arrived after our noodles. Maybe that simply didn’t matter.

Of more than a dozen cold appetizers that tended to be chilli-spiced or pickled, we’ve had the simply dressed strips of shredded dried tofu and the sweet and sour jellyfish, which elevated toothsome chewiness to a priority. Chinese hamburger, made with shredded pork that tasted of star anise and other seasonings between a house-made fry-bread bun, was a filling snack. These small plates were fine, but I wouldn’t lose sleep over skipping them in favour of saving room for the generously portioned noodle dishes and flavour-bomb kebabs.

Of five noodle dishes, my go-to pick might be the classic beef noodle soup with pickled mustard greens, taking a small over a large to leave room for more kebabs. The just-made noodles (ordered as you please for thinness, thickness and flatness, or as per your server’s suggestion) were texturally spot-on and fresh-tasting, and the beef broth was rich and concentrated. Flecks of pickled mustard greens added a layer of sourness and the dish had pleasant chilli heat, even from its designation of one chilli from a possible three.

A more robust dish was the Sichuan classic, dan dan noodles. A big stir of the bowl’s contents coated flat, wide noodles in a thick, spicy, peanut sauce and bits of pork added a meaty accent. I’d order this dish again simply to eat half a serving and take the rest home, in one of the restaurant’s premium take-out containers, for my next-day lunch.

More bracing still were the hot and sour noodles, which coated thin glass noodles, garnished with peanuts and more, in a peppery and highly sour sauce that brought black vinegar to mind. More soothing but still strikingly savoury was the dish of cold noodles topped with minced pork. The signature noodle stir-fry, which we ordered with shrimp as its protein, was an easy-to-like, more mellow-flavoured dish. With some of these dishes, we received small bowls of a more clear broth, which we sipped for its palate-cleansing merits.

Of the kebabs, the must-have, because they are the most famous, were the skewers of tender and captivatingly spicy lamb that best represent Xinjiang, the autonomous territory in China’s far northwest. But the same treatment afforded to plump shrimps, thin morsels of bone-in beef short rib and even pods of okra made for deeply satisfying bites. Chinese eggplants, slathered with a sauce dotted with fermented beans, also benefited from time on the restaurant’s grill.

The restaurant is licensed, and accordingly serves several brands of Asian beer. But we beat the heat on the patio with Thor-sized mugs of strawberry and passion-fruit green tea, which are also as close to serving dessert as 98 La La Noodles comes.

You have to wonder about the future of Ottawa restaurants once patio season ends. In the case of 98 La La Noodles, which is simply the best restaurant of this kind that I’ve tried in Ottawa, I’ll have to overcome my current reluctance to dine indoors. The noodles and kebabs there are just too good.

phum@postmedia.com

House of Mandi
1183 Hunt Club Rd., 613-737-3200, houseofmandi.ca , instagram.com/mandi_ottawa
Open: website says it opens from noon daily, but best to call ahead
Prices: mains $20.99 to $25.99, sides $6.99 to $13.99

When you go to the House of Mandi, you must order the mandi.

For one thing, the iconic specialty from the Arabian Peninsula from which the Hunt Club Road restaurant takes its name is engrossingly tasty, bite after bite. At House of Mandi, you can have either a lamb shank or half-chicken -— both toothsome and “local and fresh,” the restaurant says — as a meaty centrepiece atop a big mound of saffron-yellowed, raisin-studded and intriguingly smoky basmati rice.

For another thing, the mandi lamb ($24.99) or mandi chicken ($20.99) might be the only available main courses of the six that are listed on the menu. At least that was what we found when we twice visited House of Mandi in the last week.

We could only imagine the enjoyable culinary discoveries that might have been after reading of Kabli lamb or chicken, dishes of “unique taste and flavour inspired by the Kabuli Palaw of Kabul (with) rice infused with orange zest among other remarkable spices,” not to mention Kabsa lamb or chicken, which mixed slowed-cooked meat later with basmati rice and topped with shredded carrots and fried onion.

But during COVID-19 times, when restaurants have to hunker down and watch their food costs, labour costs and food waste, it’s a bit churlish to get worked up about what’s unavailable due to a limited menu. Better to be grateful for what one can get. Plus, what we could order from House of Mandi, which opened two years ago in a tucked-away South Keys strip mall, was by and large very good.

At our first dinner, our non-Mandi dishes included four of 12 side dishes and one of six salads — just about one of every available item except for the green salad.

Sambosas of beef or vegetables ($7.99 for four) were exceptionally well-made and well-fried triangles of pastry stuffed with well-seasoned, distinctive fillings. They put many similar treats at other restaurants to shame.

Most interesting was jareesh ($12), an unassuming looking bowl of coarsely ground wheat that had been boiled with chicken, milk, cream cheese and spices, and topped with near-burnt fried onions and ghee (clarified butter). New to all of us, the rich and comforting dish with a light seam of smokiness brought risotto and congee to mind.

Fatteh ($11.99) featured of soft potato and softer fried eggplant with mellow garlicky yogurt, tomato sauce and the crunch of fried pita. Fatoosh salad ($8) brought tomatoes, lettuce, cucumbers and onions to the table, topped with more fried pita and drizzles of pomegranate molasses.

While masoob ($12) was listed as a side dish, we ate the sweet-savoury item as our dessert. It made sense to conclude dinner with this bread pudding-like dish that combined ground whole wheat bread with mashed bananas, cream, honey and ghee with a topping of shredded cheddar cheese and black sesame seeds.

After that mid-week dinner, taken in the large, modern dining room where we sat at one of just a few occupied tables, we hoped that on a follow-up visit we would try different items — one of the Kabli or Kabsa mains, some stuffed grape leaves or stuffed vegetables and the unfamiliar looking mlookia, which we guessed was a soup of granulated mallow leaves, chicken stock, herbs and spices.

Given our previous dinner, we certainly had faith in the chef, who we were told was the wife of House of Mandi’s Saudi Arabian owner. Also, a peek at the restaurant’s Instagram page showed all kinds of dishes in catering-sized portions that tempted, even if their captions were in Arabic.

But when we phoned the restaurant, which was open from 3 p.m. rather than from noon as listed on its website, we were told that it was working with the same limited menu that we had chosen from four days earlier. The good news was that more beef sambosas and more lamb and chicken mandi were barely degraded after a 25-minute trip home in their quality containers, and we enjoyed the food on our back porch.

Mindful of the pandemic, House of Mandi, which along with the Yemeni restaurant Bukhari on Carling Avenue is one of Ottawa’s few Arabic eateries, has hand sanitizer at its entrance and serves bottled water. At our first visit, our server was masked. When we picked up food to go, staff were not masked. The restaurant has discontinued its buffet service, leaving a row of empty chafing dishes as a reminder.

We hope that when the pandemic ends, if not sooner, House of Mandi can expand on what it offered last week. But until then, its core dishes are more than sufficiently alluring and satisfying.

phum@postmedia.com