Norca Restaurant & Bar
30 Daly Ave., on the second floor of Le Germain Hotel Ottawa, 613-691-3218, norcarestaurant.ca
Open: for lunch Monday to Friday 11:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., for dinner Monday to Saturday 5:30 to 10 p.m.
Prices: small plates $14 to $21, larger plates $25 to $44
Access: elevator to second floor
At Norca Restaurant & Bar, the sleek new restaurant on the second floor of the Le Germain Hotel Ottawa in Sandy Hill, “Northern cuisine, Canadian ingredients” is both the motto and mission behind the name. And yet, in terms of quality and service, if not geography, my recent experiences eating at the three-month-old boutique hotel in Sandy Hill were somewhat all over the map.
Norca is clearly meant to be a fabulous place not just for visitors to Ottawa, but also for local gastronomes. It presents attractive and intriguing (and expensive) dishes that woo with premium and récherché ingredients, technical flourishes and bits of bounty from Canada’s wilderness. Here, for example, sourdough pasta is flavoured with spruce tip extract.
But the “northernness” here seems to me to be less Nordic in the sense of Scandinavian cuisine (although that pasta does also include cultured whey) and closer to “boréale,” which is the adjective of choice in Montreal and Quebec City for restaurants that give wild and local things — be they berries, plants, game or fish — pride of place.
Bits of the ambience at Norca connect too to the natural world. There’s a neutral colour palette to the room and much woodiness, which extends from the tables to the chunks of branches that hold your bill snugly at meal’s end. But Norca is a more posh space than that — or, rather, a collection of smaller spaces, from the long copper bar to the high tops and low tables beside the wall-to-ceiling windows to the more secluded and cushiest-of-all tables surrounded by couches and wraparound chairs.
One admirable, much-appreciated thing about Norca is that even with jazz or groove music playing, it’s not a loud place that makes you strain to hear a conversation.
Running the kitchen at Norca is chef Dominique Dufour, who worked in recent years in Montreal where she got her culinary start, before wanderlust sent her for a decade to cook in Vancouver, Toronto, the Yukon, Spain and the United Kingdom.
My first sampling of Dufour’s food was at lunch, when the food was more conventional but still tweaked. A lamb smoked meat sandwich ($17) was more mild than expected, putting smoke before seasoning, but nonetheless flavourful and interesting. Its salad and thin, well-seasoned, un-oily duck-fat fries were also superior. My friend’s sous vide-cooked beef ($24), however, was an undisclosed cut that, while flavourful, remained tough despite its long warm-water bath.
Lamb smoked meat sandwich at Norca Restaurant & Bar
Sous-vide beef at Norca Restaurant & Bar
The lack of desserts at lunch beyond sorbet and biscotti surprised us. So too did the rather perfunctory service, which lacked the sparkle of the surroundings. Service at dinner was more engaging and knowledgeable.
At dinner, a menu that included six small plates, four larger plates, and a mix of snacks, deluxe platters and family-style dishes pulled out more stops.
First, a playful amuse-bouche kicked off things with a nice surprise. Rather than ruin it completely, I’ll just say there was a splashy, pleasant liquid centre inside a cocoa butter shell.
Amuse bouche at Norca Restaurant and Bar
Thereafter, small plates, larger plates and desserts were heavy on components and manipulations. The best of them wowed but a few fell short.
The consensus at our table was that of four small plates, the composition ($19) built around Delicata squash, foie-gras-slathered morels, other wild mushrooms, savoury gougères (small, Avonlea cheese-enhanced pastries), a beurre blanc foam and even bits of tomatillo was best, providing bite after harmonious bite of novel pleasures.
Foie gras-stuffed morels with squash and gougeres at Norca Restaurant and Bar
A dish that starred well-made crab dumplings ($21) also impressed us, although I thought the sumptuous sweet corn custard, barley miso brown butter and even wisps of fried corn silk were scene-stealers.
Crab dumplings in corn custard at Norca Restaurant & Bar
Two other small plates were likeable, but perhaps fell short of their potential. Zucchini blossoms ($22) were overwhelmed by their lamb stuffings and sheep’s yogurt, although the sumac in the bowl did sing. The Mexican-inspired braised beef cheek starter ($20), served in a smoked corn husk, was just OK, and seemed like less than the sum of interesting parts.
Zucchini blossoms stuffed with lamb at Norca Restaurant & Bar
Beef cheeks small plate at Norca Restaurant & Bar
The larger plate of boneless quail ($27) stuffed with smoked egg yolk and a smooth pork mousseline was excellent and packed with flavour through and through, from its centrepiece to its eggplant purée to the sunflower seed-“dukkah” (a play on a Middle Eastern, nut-based condiment).
Quail main course at Norca Restaurant and Bar
But the seafood dish of lobster, scallop on its shell and a morsel of Humboldt squid ($44), while pretty, disappointed. Its lobster could have been more tender, its scallop was over-salted, its allocation of seafood could have been larger, and its green spätzle was underwhelmingly flavoured and mushy rather than springy.
Lobster, scallop and squid with spatzle at Norca Restaurant and Bar
Better was a platter of striped bass ($49), meant for two, which was right-sized, moist and clean of flavour, with proper potato “scales,” a nice, bright sauce vierge and fried parsley.
Striped bass at Norca Restaurant and Bar
Norca’s desserts raised expectations with their $12 price tags and creative components. While they were thoughtful and sophisticated, they didn’t really deliver. In one dessert, hay ice cream and sumac-compressed cherries hit the spot, but bay-leaf aerated cake was less striking and a brittle tile of oats did not improve on toasted oats. A dessert of dense Genoise cake, clover marshmallow, haskap berry gel, tarragon meringue and candied tarragon didn’t come together and seemed more creative than enjoyable.
Aerated cake with hay ice cream, oatmeal crisp at Norca Restaurant & Bar
Genoise with tarragon meringue, candied tarragon
There were more straightforward pleasures on Norca’s wine list, which stresses natural, organic and Canadian bottles, and groups them according to the impression they make, from “powerful and earthy” or “fruit-forward and refreshing” reds, to “crisp and clean” or “weird and wonderful” whites. Cocktails and mocktails dovetail with the northern theme, featuring the pop of sumac, bee pollen, toasted barley, clover, sorrel, sea buckthorn and more. The craft beer list scours Ontario for almost all of its choices.
A closing gift of maple fudge was sweeter than our desserts. Coffee at Norca is by Nespresso.
The appealing merits of Dufour’s concept and cooking are clear over the course of an evening at Norca. If only the meal’s highs had been more consistent. Consistency, however, should not be out of reach.
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Peter Hum’s restaurant reviews