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Tulip Restaurant & Bar
361 Queen St. (inside the Hilton Garden Inn Ottawa Downtown), 613-234-6363,
tulipottawa.com
Open
: Daily from noon to 2:30 p.m. and 5:30 to 9:30 p.m., also weekday breakfasts from 6:30 to 10:30 a.m., weekend breakfasts 7 to 11 a.m.
Prices:
appetizers $7.95 to $21.95, mains $17.95 to $29.95
Access:
no steps to front door, washrooms
In the fall of 2017, when David Vinoya was the chef of Wild Sage Kitchen & Bar in Regina, he won that city’s Gold Medal Plates competition after wowing judges with a striking dish that he had enigmatically dubbed “The Nest.”
Equal parts still life and small plate, it was, in the words of head judge James Chatto, “sensationally beautiful.”
In Vinoya’s dish, watercress became a gel. Black olives were turned into powder and beets were made into “soil.” Molecular gastronomy turned chicken into a crisp tuile. The dish’s star was a sphere of ice cream made with the yolks of eggs that had been cured by soaking them for a month in mud and salt, as is done in the Philippines, where Vinoya was born and raised.
These days, Vinoya cooks in Ottawa. Wild Sage was inside a DoubleTree by Hilton hotel, and more than a year ago, Vinoya moved here to become the executive chef at the Hilton Garden Inn Ottawa Downtown, where Tulip Restaurant and Bar lies beyond its Queen Street entrance.
This summer, I had two dinners and a lunch at Tulip, hoping for some medal-winning brilliance.
Tulip’s menus definitely intrigued. Vinoya has a wide-roaming curiosity about food, so that his multicultural menu makes stops in Japan, Italy, China, the Middle East, the Philippines and the rest of Canada, sometimes mashing up influences from here and there. Among the menu’s details are ingredients such as crab, sea urchin, bacon jam, black garlic aioli, and truffle oil — the stuff that makes connoisseurs and especially umami-lovers salivate.
In line with Chatto’s kudos, Vinoya’s plating is definitely a strong point. His dishes were usually pretty and exuberant, if on occasion a touch contrived.
But on the whole, our meals were uneven. Some dishes were interesting, solidly made and satisfying. Others were just OK and a few let us down. For too many dishes, some components had little to no impact, making you wonder if simpler food would not have been better.
My second dinner there was markedly my best experience at Tulip, and I wondered if who was cooking in the kitchen is as significant as what we ordered.
At my first visit, a weekday lunch, we had several appetizers that were not as tasty as they looked.
Three steamed pork belly buns ($11.95) were presented like treasures on a black stone slab in a wooden tray, with a small salad and dipping sauce on the side. But visuals aside, the bao buns needed work. The too-dry pork belly sorely lacked succulence. The odd move of dredging the buns in creole seasoning added significant heat, but unpleasantly so. The sweet-salty sauce on the side would have been better inside the bun. Overall, the kitchen’s twists on a classic snack did not improve it.
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Spicy tuna ($13.95) arrived atop oblongs of deep-fried rice and, more ostentatiously, on a bed of rocks in its bowl. It was not bad, but would have been better had its rice been less crisp.
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Fried flatbread ($12.95) topped with mushrooms, truffle oil, whipped goat cheese, a cloud of parmesan and pea shoots was tasty, although the bread did feel heavy.
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Lunch’s heftiest item was Tulip’s doughnut-burger hybrid ($18.95), seemingly built for Instagram or for eating on a dare. Perhaps predictably, it was too massive and dulce-de-leche-drizzled to be eaten by hand, which to me is a big point of eating a hamburger. In all, this burger struck me as overladen. (To be fair, Tulip offers a “standard” burger and six sandwiches that are more streamlined.)
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At a weekend dinner, three dishes were meh, while a fourth stood out.
The texture of a large slab of pan-fried falafel ($14.95) varied from cake-y to moist to mushy, and it was a little bland. The accompanying salad, which featured a lemon brûlée peanut chutney, arugula, red cabbage, avocado herb sauce, cured onions and sumac vinaigrette, could have been edited, as not every element sang.
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A corn meal-crusted filet of sea bream ($27.95), a mild Mediterranean fish, had three more pin bones that we would have liked. The purple gnocchi on its plate were blobby, not light.
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Our dessert, a caramel and chocolate ganache tart ($8.95) felt a little cold and tired.
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Happily, my mid-week dinner last week was redemptive.
That spicy tuna appetizer seemed bigger of flavour and better texturally. I liked even more the indulgence of chicharron ($18.95), its fresh-tasting and light fried pork rinds topped as if they were nachos.
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Tulip’s pork chop ($28.95) was big, juicy and worth returning for, and the veg on the plate — sweet potato purée, mushrooms, broccolini — hit the mark.
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A half cornish hen ($26.95) impressed with its moist flesh, although its glaze was a touch too sweet and its polenta was too salty.
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Vinoya’s dish called “Anarchy” ($ 24.95), was a (cleanly organized) plate of seafood pasta. Squid ink pasta topped with pea shoots sat beside clams, scallops and tiny shrimp in a red pepper sauce. The dish was fine and its seafood was tender, but it was a little under-seasoned.
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That night, desserts were a highlight. Maja blanca ($8.95) was a mellow, refined coconut pudding with its roots in the Philippines. A block of Minoya’s calling-card salted egg ice cream ($8.95) was luscious and scarcely salty. The “tree of sweetness” dessert ($10.95) nodded to the restaurant’s name, planting purple cotton candy in rich, chocolate-soil-topped chocolate mousse.
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Tulip includes both a bar and a more restrained dining area that we understood was more for breakfast guests.
As last week’s dinner finished, Vinoya emerged from the kitchen to personably check in with guests about their meals. We responded that we’d enjoyed our food.
I wish I could have told him the same about my two other visits. Vinoya clearly is a chef to watch, but at the Hilton, a little more rigour in his kitchen and menus would help.
phum@postmedia.com
twitter.com/peterhum
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