Sutherland Restaurant, Bar and Coffee House
224 Beechwood Ave., 613-741-7980, facebook.com/sutherlandrestaurant
Open: Weekdays 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., weekends 10:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., 5:30 to 10 p.m.
Prices: Small plates at dinner $9 to $18
Access: No steps to front door or washrooms
It’s good to see that Ottawa chef and restaurateur Warren Sutherland has moved beyond ribs, pork butt and pizza.
No offence to SmoQue Shack and Slice & Co., the two casual downtown eateries that Sutherland in recent years opened but this year left. It’s just that, given Sutherland’s initial successes at Sweetgrass Aboriginal Bistro, which he and his then-wife Phoebe opened in the early 2000s, we know that the New England Culinary Institute grad is capable of more ambitious and interesting food.
That’s what we hoped for from Sutherland, his eponymously named Beechwood Avenue restaurant that opened in early November. For the most part, interesting and appealing small plates are what we received.
Located on the new Kavanaugh condo building’s ground floor, Sutherland’s latest venture is a two-sided space that seats roughly 100. In the larger dining room, blonde wood and well-lit plants along one wall dial back the industrial feeling. The bar-side nook appears more cosy.
The restaurant caters to its condo-dwelling neighbours by serving breakfast, lunch and dinner. I ate dinner there twice this month, trying a dozen items — almost the entirety of a menu — and four desserts.
My first visit, with a pescetarian, was more satisfying than its meatier followup. I don’t necessarily blame the second visit’s dishes, though, which were well designed but generally less well executed. That Sunday night, when Sutherland, we were told, was off, the cooking just seemed a bit wobbly. Some items were either too salty or not salted enough, and a protein or two not cooked with sufficient precision. None of the missteps was egregious. But they did add up.
Sutherland’s small-plates scheme does improve on the less thought-out regimens at some other Ottawa restaurants. Elsewhere, dishes can land on tables when they’re ready (even if they’d be better enjoyed in a different order), and with the assumption that items will be shared (even if some plates don’t really lend themselves to dividing and devouring).
Instead, Sutherland’s dinner menu is split into “cold,” “warm” and “hot” plates, all priced between $9 and $18. We were told that the kitchen thinks of them as courses for individual guests who should each order two or three plates, rather than the stuff of family-style dinners. That said, we did make sharing work.
Our first visit’s opening wave of cold and warm dishes presented hit upon hit.
Vegetarian poke ($9) slyly recast the Hawaiian raw-fish-with-dressing treat. Cubes of cucumber, squash and more stood in for poke’s usual well-seasoned tuna and played well with seaweed, soy and sesame. A pretty, nuanced and likeable plate featured morsels of king crab, offset by fennel, pickled celery and apples on a big slather of lemon mayo ($18).
More earthy was a blob of made-that-day burrata (a fresh, semi-soft Italian cheese, $12), bolstered by its puddle of garlic, sun-dried tomato and balsamic, and scooped up with crostini. We’d scarcely polished off the cheese when our three hot plates landed.
My pescetarian pal, and indeed all of us at the table, appreciated Sutherland’s fish of the day (Arctic char, $16), which shared a bowl with a lightly spicy Brazilian-inspired moqueca de camarao sauce. We were equally pleased by the crispy deep-fried tofu with beans ($14) that was smoky enough to recall SmoQue Shack’s barbecue fare and a soupy, substantial mushroom risotto ($15) garnished with crisped slices of king oyster mushrooms.
The Sunday dinner began with a plate of Sutherland’s cured trout ($12), which for all of its nice components featured over-salted fish. Better were the flaky-pastried pork dumplings ($12) with a sweet sauce and best was what Sutherland calls charcoal chicken ($10), two Asian-themed lettuce wraps that starred well-marinated, smoky thigh meat.
The night’s hot dishes were uneven. Duck confit ($18) was beyond reproach, hitting the right textural and taste notes, and nicely paired with diced, compressed apples. But an otherwise attractive and well-thought-through pork plate ($16) was let down by its over-grilled piece of loin and too-salty accompaniments. Striploin steak ($18) was properly cooked and very well sauced, but the meat needed some of the excess salt in the plate’s massive potato pancake. The butter-poached shrimp that came with gnocchi “galettes” ($16) struck some at the table as way too cool for a hot dish.
We were blunt with our feedback about that dish when our server asked, and happily, at the end of the night, we weren’t charged for it. That bit of accommodation, plus some very tasty, homey desserts, erased our resentments about slips that had come before.
A scoop of house-made chocolate ice cream ($4) was dark, intense and not too sweet. Just-as-good vanilla ice cream topped a nicely raisin-y, spot-on, hot apple crumble ($8) and some squares of potently rum-sauced bread pudding ($8).
Sutherland (the restaurant) clearly adds some extra dining sizzle to New Edinburgh and Rockcliffe Park, and its best dishes justify a chef naming his place after himself. On that Sunday, though, a bit more care with some dishes would have given the kitchen even more to be proud of.
phum@postmedia.com
twitter.com/peterhum
