Café My House
1015 Wellington St W., 613-733-0707, cafemyhouse.com
Open: Tuesday to Friday 5:30 to 9:30 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 10:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and 5:30 to 9:30 p.m., closed Monday
Prices: sharing boards around $40, five-course tasting menu $85, 10-course tasting menu $135
Access: no steps to front door or washrooms
When chef Briana Kim competed last fall at Ottawa’s Gold Medal Plates event, a somewhat clued-out journalist wrote of her business, Café My House: “the vegan restaurant in Hintonburg isn’t known as a fine-dining eatery.”
That not-in-the-know writer was yours truly, and this review of Café My House is my attempt to set the record straight.
Granted, vegan fine-dining is rare. Kim in an interview this week told me that she thinks she’s the only vegan fine-dining restaurant in Canada.
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More importantly, Kim, who won at Gold Medals Plates in November ahead of nine other chefs and represented Ottawa at last month’s Canadian Culinary Championships in Kelowna, does her singular thing very well. If vegan fine-dining does indeed exist, that’s due to the self-taught Kim’s pioneering and labour-intensive efforts.
For me, the bottom line is that my two recent meals at Café My House — a gorgeous, artful, five-course blind-tasting menu at dinner and a more relaxed but still highly crafted brunch — were delicious and even striking revelations to open one’s eyes and palate. (Let me add here that I’m basically as carnivorous as they come.)
Kim, 34, opened the first Café My House in 2009 on Bank Street near Walkley Road, but about five years ago she relocated to the hipper environs of Wellington Street West and the larger space of what had been the more casual AlphaSoul Cafe. Today, Café My House is a narrow, predominantly green-walled and dimly lit space that seats about 40 at its tables and bar, plus 16 more at its cosy back patio.
Over the years, Kim’s cooking has evolved, she says. The Bank Street My House initially served more conventional food, sometimes drew on Kim’s Korean roots, and even occasionally allowed for ham, eggs, smoked salmon and cheese on its plates. However, after two years at that location, Kim began to offer tasting menus once a month. Since the move to Hintonburg, Kim has dialled up the refinement, complexity and creativity of her now solely plant-based food, and at dinner, tasting menus are the specialty.
My recent dinner began with a sunchoke and watercress soup, poured table-side into a blocky bowl of crunchy sunchoke and salsify chips, pea shoots, sea asparagus and pine nuts, topped with an onion tuile. With its great, clear flavours and aromas and panoply of textures, the dish made a sparkling first impression.
At Café My House on Wellington St. West sunchoke watercress soup, right, is poured into a container containing pea shoots, sunchoke chips and more.
Then came an elaborate, edible composition, tucked under a transparent dome that held in its smoke and arranged various items, crispy noodles and crumbles around a mushroom “panna cotta.” Of course, unlike panna cotta, Kim’s creation is creamless, not to mention savoury. But she has a fondness for playfully referring to treats of non-vegan dining with her ingredients, which can include “steak,” “pepperoni,” and “chorizo.”
Mushroom panna cotta at Café My House.
For a Café My House first-timer, such allusions and the sheer novelty of Kim’s cooking might prompt a slew of questions to a server about the wizardry required for each dish. I’ve found that staff, in addition to being friendly and attentive, were also well-informed about the details of Kim’s dishes.
More generally, Kim this week told me that modernist cooking techniques, ingredients and even powders figure into her work. Interested in the intersection of food, art and even science, Kim experiments with dehydration, rehydration, preservation, carbonation and fermentation. It makes sense when she says that she looks up to the chefs at two wildly innovative, world-class, tasting-menu-based restaurants, Noma in Copenhagen and Alinea in Chicago. Indeed, she says she hopes to arrange an internship for herself at either Noma or Alinea.
Dinner continued with a harmonious, wow-worthy collection of circles. On a platform of lightly pickled melon were wheatberry “meatballs,” discs of “chorizo,” onion jam and toasted coconut. This dish made me turn conventional thinking on its head — I began to muse about carnivores depriving themselves of vegan delights.
Pickled melon with wheatberry “meatballs” and “chorizo sausage.” at Café My House
Those who think that vegan food lacks flavour would be forced to re-think after trying the mouth-filling punchiness of Kim’s lime-basil granita palate cleanser.
Lime-basil granita at Café My House.
The dinner’s last savoury course was a re-plated version of Kim’s Gold Medal Plates-winning dish, which arranged a mushroom “steak,” charred cabbage, pickled pear and fennel-and-rice crackers in a bowl with kombu broth and mushroom mousse. Again, Kim transformed humble ingredients into a feat of finely calibrated flavours and textures.
Mushroom steak in kombu broth at Cafe My House
Dessert, our server said, was a play on “PB and J,” in which splashes of jam and nut butter, cacao nibs, parsnip chips and more covered a plate. It was enjoyable, although not my favourite dessert that I’ve had at Café My House. I thought more highly of the chocolate-based items I’d had at brunch there. One was a chocolate caramelized onion cake, which Kim told me is sometimes paired with smoked onion coconut ice cream. “I always add savoury components to our desserts to highlight the vegetables we use,” she added. “We’ve had tomato cheesecake paired with pea sponge cake and dehydrated tomato raspberry fruit roll-ups.”
PB & J dessert at Café My House
Somehow, despite the intensity of its preparations, the kitchen makes accommodations for people with celiac disease or allergies, as I discovered from the alternate plates that landed at a neighbouring table.
At brunch, we’ve shared Kim’s tasting board ($38), which was full of winners. There were superior and imaginative examples of avocado toast and kale Caesar salad, two mini veggie burgers, “apple sage sausage,” “pepperoni” and “deviled egg” that were slyly reminiscent of their namesakes and tasty in their own right, and precisely pickled veg. A hearty dish of mushrooms and tomatoes on toast was like manna for an umami-lover.
Tasting board at Café My House.
Mushrooms and Tomatoes on toast at Café My House
While brunch at Café My House seems to me like a great introduction to Kim’s cuisine, the five-course blind tasting menu is worth the splurge and the best expression of what this special chef is about. (Note: The dinner that I enjoyed last month is to be entirely replaced a week from now with a new tasting menu.)
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Peter Hum’s restaurant reviews