Asian Stars Restaurant
1380 Clyde Ave. Unit B, 613-695-2288, asianstarsrestaurant.com
Open: Monday to Saturday 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., Sunday noon to 9 p.m.
Prices: Main dishes: $11.95 to $14.75
Access: No stairs to entrance, wheelchair-accessible washroom
To the list of foodstuffs that taste like chicken, you can add wheat gluten, a.k.a. seitan.
Take my word for it. That’s my conclusion after trying the kung pao seitan served at Asian Stars Restaurant, which opened in late June in a Clyde Avenue strip mall, adjoining a Denny’s location.
Vegan Kung Pao with Mock Chicken.
There — at Asian Stars, not Denny’s — co-owner and chef Phuong Côté puts extra effort into preparing house-made mock chicken, pork and beef, laboriously mixing flour into dough, rinsing the starch from it, and then simmering it in broth before portioning it and adding it to stir-fried dishes. Côté’s a part-time vegetarian, and her sister Kim, a fellow co-owner and Asian Stars’ front-of-house manager, is a Buddhist who won’t touch meat.
But the eatery is far from exclusively vegetarian and it’s impressed me over three visits with a range of quick, accessible and well-made appetizers, meal-sized soups and stir-fries.
Côté, who cooked on Somerset Street West for almost a decade and in Vietnam before that, touches upon multiple cuisines with her menu.
Her homeland was represented principally and well by big, steaming bowls of pho and vermicelli bowls laden with grilled meats (mock or real), spring rolls and the like.
The chicken and beef broths in her soups were clear, clean and fragrant, while the protein additions floating therein — lean slices of barbecue pork; tender, if slightly smaller-than-hoped-for and less flavourful shrimp; lean, rare beef — were good too.
Pho Soup with Rare Beef at Asian Stars Restaurant
Chicken-broth-based Pho with Barbecue Pork and Shrimp at Asian Stars Restaurant
A vermicelli salad teemed with just-cooked noodles and crisp, fresh vegetables and herbs, along with admirable shrimp paste on sugarcane and grilled pork.
Staple Vietnamese starters set meals off on the right foot, whether they were long, flavourful, deep-fried shrimp rolls or impeccable salad rolls. Best on a platter of appetizers were some moist, spicy pork meatballs that out-flavoured a heap of mango salad and morsels of beef satay.
Appetizer platter at Asian Stars Restaurant
Asian Stars also serves the spicy, beefy soup from Huế, in central Vietnam, but the menu generally stresses the country’s culinary crowd-pleasers, along with similarly popular, and North Americanized, dishes drawn from Chinese and Thai kitchens.
The flavours in black bean, kung pao, General Tso and spicy orange stir-fries have all been distinct and well-measured, although heatheads will find some of those dishes subdued, and should ask Côté to boost them, spice-wise.
More significantly, those dishes, served with white rice or vermicelli as requested, have been piping hot, not greasy, and stocked with toothsome, colourful vegetables.
Black Bean Seafood Stir-fry at Asian Stars Restaurant
Of the Thai-influenced dishes, the stir-fry that brought the bracing hit of tom yum soup to its plate had a nice sour punch, but pad thai, for all its tender chicken and tofu, lost marks because of a bland sauce and an absence of lime and coriander.
Pad Thai at Asian Stars Restaurant.
For dessert, roasted pineapple, served with vanilla ice cream, was a caramelized winner…
Grilled pineapple dessert at Asian Stars Restaurant
… and better than the banana deep-fried in a spring roll wrapper. Iced coffee with condensed milk was satisfyingly potent and sweet, although there was more ice than coffee in the cup.
Some advice if you go: When you write down your order, in lieu of telling a server what you want, be precise and use good penmanship. We’ve received the wrong kind of noodles in our soup and rice instead of vermicelli with one order.
But if the service was not spot-on, it was at least very hospitable and friendly. Indeed, because Côté and Verrault’s husbands — and fellow Asian Stars co-owners — are ex-military, the restaurant grants a 10-per-cent discount to serving or retired Canadian Armed Forces personnel, police officers and firefighters who dine in.
Stéphane Côté told me that soon, card-carrying members of the National Capital Vegetarian Association will receive a discount at Asian Stars too.
I’ll leave it to vegetarian veterans to report back if they are doubly blessed.
phum@ottawacitizen.com
Twitter.com/peterhum
