Ayla’s Social Kitchen
338 Preston St., 613-762-7297,
aylassocial.ca
,
instagram.com/aylassocial
Open:
dining room closed due to COVID-19, open Wednesday to Sunday from 4 to 8:30 p.m. for pick-up and delivery orders
Prices:
dishes between $13 and $20, $65 for dinner for two; $5 or more for deliveries through Love Local Delivery, depending on distance
Note:
menu changes weekly, check
instagram.com/aylassocial
for updates
Amir and Maryam Aghaei, the owners and operators of Ayla’s Social Kitchen on Preston Street, figure that in the four days that their dining room was open, they served perhaps two dozen customers.
Then, on March 13, just as the novel coronavirus’s transformation of Ottawa was beginning, their brand new restaurant on Little Italy’s main drag closed.
The basement-level eatery, which is located where Posto Locale had been, did reopen later in March to make food to go, as it continues to do five nights a week. But the Aghaeis, who had named their restaurant after their six-year-old daughter, cut their business’s staff from 12 people to just themselves.
“We spent a ton of money on renovating. I thought if we didn’t do anything, we would run into a ditch,” Maryam Aghaei says.
But having had no time at all to build a following, the Aghaeis saw little to no business soon after they reopened.
“It was horrible,” recalls Amir Aghaei. “Nobody knew us. It slowly started. We started getting one, two, three orders, some weeks nothing.”
Eventually, the internet directed more customers to them, people who stumbled onto the restaurant’s Instagram page or food-lovers such as myself who found Ayla’s because it had signed up to have Love Local Delivery, the fledgling delivery service, bring its dishes to customers. Some who knew the Aghaeis from their previous business, the Pints & Quarts pub in the Glebe, gave their new venture a try.
Last weekend, we took our own leap of faith with Ayla’s and felt pretty well rewarded.
The restaurant serves what it calls Mediterranean cuisine, with Persian twists that nod to the Aghaeis’ background. The menu that applied for my dinner — Ayla’s offerings change weekly, Maryam Aghaei says — listed a fancier dinner for two, some more casual but tweaked comfort food, and some intriguing appetizers.
If you like poutine in the first place, you probably would have liked Ayla’s creative, cross-cultural version, made with thyme-seasoned and fried halloumi cheese standing in ably for curds, as well as lamb gravy and a scattering of pomegranate seeds. Lamb also figured, with eggplant, in a dip that was like a slightly more savoury take on baba ghanoush. Egg rolls made with shredded duck and served with a orange-chili sauce held our interest, although they did lack crispness.
Among the main courses, the bacon cheeseburger made with havarti was solidly made and substantial, although a more interesting pick would likely have been the grilled cheese sandwich made with pulled lamb.
The most explicitly Persian dish we had was a mellow sweet and sour stew of chicken, walnuts and pomegranate that other Iranian restaurants in town call fesenjoon.
The showpiece of our dinner was the piping hot and massive tray meant to serve two, which was filled with a pair of lamb shanks, mushroom risotto and broccolini. The flavourful, spoon-tender lamb and the al dente broccolini were hard to improve upon. But the mushroom risotto was our meal’s big disappointment due to its punishing saltiness. When I later mentioned that to Amir Aghaeis, he apologized and attributed the gaffe to him falling behind in the kitchen and allowing the risotto’s chicken stock to become too concentrated.
Two salads — a garden salad that came with the burger and a kale salad that came with the lamb shanks — were at least a cut above, not only because of the freshness of their greens but also because of their respective dressings. The herb-tahini dressing with the former and the honey-ginger dressing with the latter were as vibrantly flavoured as anything else that Ayla’s had prepared from scratch.
Two desserts by Maryam Aghaei — slices of moist, lemony almond and fig cake and a nicely wobbly chocolate panna cotta — ended the meal on a sweet, pleasing note.
While the Ayla’s dining room is closed, I can still give two examples of service by the Alghaeis that go above and beyond. First, the afternoon following our dinner, I received a text from Amir Alghaei, who asked what we thought of his food. Second, he told me this week that while the restaurant is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, if someone calls wanting food on one of those days, he will make it. “We never say no,” he says.
That might be the promise of an entrepreneur who saw his hopes hobbled by COVID-19 just days after opening and is desperate for every dollar of business. But I think it’s more likely that the Alghaeis would simply have been just as hospitable if the pandemic had never happened.