Le Hibou Kitchen & Bar
757 Riverside Rd., Wakefield, 819-459-8883, cafelehibou.com
Open: Monday to Thursday 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., Friday 11 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., Saturday 10 a.m. to 9:30 p.m., Sunday, 10 a.m. to 8:30 p.m.
Prices: appetizers $ 7 to $15, main courses $16 to $25
Access: fully wheelchair-accessible
Since it opened in the fall of 2009, Le Hibou in Wakefield, just across the street from the Black Sheep Inn, has offered two kinds of food under one funky, charming, wooden roof.
At the spacious, vibrantly painted 70-seater filled with assorted retro furniture, wooden pews and owl-themed bric-à-brac, there’s no shortage of accessible crowd-pleasers such as nachos, burgers, and fish and chips. But owner Una McDonnell also wanted some finer, more globally inspired fare on Le Hibou’s menu. “It just flies out the window — people are thrilled not to have to drive to the city,” she told me this week.
For this Ottawan, the reverse has also been true, meaning that in recent weeks, it was the appeal of those unique, international dishes that lured me to Le Hibou. No offence to the solidly made basics, but during my two recent visits, dishes such as octopus with kimchi, labneh and black garlic, and pork belly with bacon dashi and noodles made the biggest impressions.
They’re the work of Arif Khalid, the 32-year-old chef who joined Le Hibou last October after stints cooking at the Piggy Market, Salt Dining and Lounge, and Play food & wine. Before that, Khalid, who received his culinary training at Vancouver Community College, cooked at the noted Toronto restaurant Splendido. A Kuwait native of Pakistani and Welsh descent, Khalid also credits his travels in the Middle East, England, China and North America as influences.
At Le Hibou, Khalid’s best dishes — currently served throughout the day from a single menu — have been complex, colourful, made-from-scratch creations, deftly and intriguingly seasoned, locally sourced yet worldly and thoughtful in outlook.
At a Friday lunch, we tried one more humble dish and three fancier ones.
If you can call poutine refined, you could say that of the butter chicken poutine ($15), made with superior fries, a savoury but not-heavy gravy and crumbled chicken sausage sourced from the fine birds raised at Ferme Aux Saveurs des Monts in Gatineau. While beet salads elsewhere are usually pretty perfunctory, or have come and gone, Le Hibou’s “beet study” ($11) showed some imagination, combing a square of cooked beet with a splash of raspberry-beet purée and a smear of goat’s cheese mousse, thinly shaved raw golden beets, pumpkin seeds and arugula.
Butter chicken poutine at Le Hibou in Wakefield
Beet dish at Le Hibou in Wakefield
With his elevated beef and octopus dishes, Khalid pulled out the stops.
The “Persian” kebabs ($25), made with grass-fed beef from Hale Farm a few kilometres up Hwy. 105 from Le Hibou, were packed with flavour, and the meat shared the plate with Le Coprin mushrooms, a crescent of lentil purée, dots of garlic sauce, and black hummus, made with chickpeas darkened with black tahini, black sesame seeds and squid ink.
Persian Kebab black hummus, black split peas, garlic sauce and Le Coprin mushrooms at Le Hibou in Wakefield.
Khalid told me this week that he’s been working on his kebab recipe for more than a decade, tweaking its technique and 28 ingredients — everything from cumin, coriander and turmeric to allspice, fenugreek, pomegranate powder, tandoori spice mix and black cumin.
Meanwhile, the chef’s octopus appetizer ($15) was a harmonious, multicultural success, featuring a tender, harissa-braised tentacle with accompaniments that forced us to scrape the plate so that none of the goodness — house-made kimchi, labneh (Middle Eastern strained yogurt sweetened with olive oil), hits of house-fermented black garlic and squid ink-infused tempura bits for crunch — would go to waste.
Octopus braised in harissa, served with kimchi, labneh, black garlic and squid-ink tempura bits, at Le Hibou in Wakefield
At our second visit, on a Tuesday night when Khalid wasn’t working, the dishes more often than not gave off sparks, although the plating seemed a bit less disciplined and a dish or two would have been better had they been warmer upon arrival.
Four plump, battered tandoori-spiced shrimp ($9) were fun to nibble on. So too were planks of deep-fried tofu ($7) with a rousing sesame sauce. The “English Sunday Dinner” ($14), which featured a Yorkshire pudding garnished with morsels of braised lamb, pea and mint purée, and potato purée, was a nice conceit, but we found the more direct, cheaper starters more satisfying.
Tandoori shrimp, foreground, tofu fries and “English Sunday dinner” (lamb and Yorkshire pudding) at Le Hibou in Wakefield
Tofu fries at Le Hibou in Wakefield
“English Sunday dinner” — Yorkshire pudding with lamb, pea and mint purée, potato purée, at Le Hibou in Wakefield
An Ottawa-raised friend visiting from Japan had to have mussels and fries ($16), a dish that she says she orders repeatedly when she’s back home. She was happy with the quality and generosity of Le Hibou’s serving. McDonnell says mussels and fries have been on the menu since opening day.
Mussels and fries at Le Hibou in Wakefield
I had the hefty Hale Farm burger ($17), a sturdy handful fortified with bacon, aged cheddar and a persuasive, sweet-spicy house-made barbecue sauce. It was good, but could have been juicier, and I envied my friend’s perfectly roasted pork belly, nestled in a bowl of fine, smoky bacon-dashi broth, with shiitake mushrooms, noodles and punchy pickled chilies ($24).
Burger and fries at Le Hibou in Wakefield
Pork belly and noodles at Le Hibou in Wakefield
Another friend’s cod dish ($23) was an interesting mix of flavours and textures, from its fish that had been marinated in buttermilk and Indian spices and then poached, to its turmeric aioli, sautéed Swiss chard and tandoori-spiced tempura bits. However, the dish was a touch too cool and visually it seemed sloppy and overloaded, and therefore confusing. Some explanatory words from our server when the dish landed would have helped.
Buttermilk spiced cod at Le Hibou in Wakefield
Most of the desserts, visible in a showcase beside the bar, have been baked goods from Une Boulangerie dans un Village in Chelsea. We’ve had small-portioned sweets — the lemon tart ($7) brought in from the bakery, dense little mocha tarts made in-house ($4) — and both hit the spot as meal-enders.
Mocha tarts at Le Hibou in Wakefield
In the past, years before Khalid took over the kitchen, I enjoyed a few non-working visits to Le Hibou during the summer when its irresistible 60-seat patio was open. Khalid told me that his current menu will lapse in late April or May, and because of booming summer business, “a much more simplified menu, yet still introducing international flavours” will kick in.
Given that, I’d recommend trying Khalid’s more involved dishes sooner rather than later to see what his cooking is about. Or cross your fingers that he can still get his flavours dancing on those simplified plates during the height of summer.
