Kitchen Maroo
710 Gladstone Ave., 613-234-2945, instagram.com/kitchen_maroo
Open: Monday to Saturday 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m., Sunday 11:30 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Prices: mains up to $14, fried chicken $30 or $18 for a half order. Food is available for take-out and Uber Eats delivery only
Access: steps upon entrance to dining area
In the early days of fusion cuisine, that term referred to Caucasian chefs borrowing heavily from other culinary traditions with impunity, if not always great effectiveness.
More recently, the use of the fusion label has waned, and dishes that once might have been deemed fusion fare have been subsumed into a more omnivorous and diversely seasoned, modern Canadian cuisine. I call that progress.
Still, there are still real dilemmas to be confronted regarding the cultural appropriation of food. I can direct you if you’re interested to look into what happened when the award-winning Montreal restaurant Le Mousso earlier this year decided to stage a “Seoul Train” pop-up. Let’s just say that some Montreal foodies scoffed when Le Mousso proposed that “the menu will be nothing like what we know of typical Korean dishes, but rather offer a creative experience, revisited and rich in flavours, as Le Mousso knows so well.”
All of this is a roundabout introduction to the food I’ve eaten in the past week from Kitchen Maroo, a tiny, three-month-old restaurant on Gladstone Avenue west of Bronson Avenue. The restaurant, whose chef and front-of-house person are Korean, bills itself as a Korea n fusion restaurant. Leaving politics aside momentarily, I would call Maroo’s most self-evidently mashed-up efforts — think bulgogi sandwiches, bulgogi pasta and Korean fried chicken — casual but flavourful successes that I would happily eat again.
Maroo is a very humble eatery that until this week seated 16 at four well-spaced tables while pop music played on the sound system. On Tuesday it announced on its Instagram page that it would offer food to go only. Its menu consists of about 20 items, with a good amount of repetition, such that cutlets of pork, chicken or vegetables can appear in sandwiches, in wraps, or with sauces and starch on the side.
In all, Maroo knows how to be practical and hits its marks in terms of flavours, textures and consistency. Kimchi here is made in house, as are sauces and salad dressings, I was told.
Maroo’s bulgogi sandwich ($13) — why not call it a bulgogi hoagie? — has quickly become a new favourite sandwich for myself and my son. On my own, I might not have combined bulgogi’s sweet-salty beef with cheddar cheese, grilled mushrooms, garlic butter and mayo. That would definitely have been my loss, as Maroo has shown me.
The cutlet sandwiches, which featured crisp, breaded meat, were very fine too. That said, I was most keen on the chicken cutlet with a curry sauce, served with baby potatoes and house salad ($13). Again, the cutlet was crisp and not greasy, and its white meat was pleasantly moist. The curry sauce was mellow and sweet, as Asian interpretations of Indian curry — a now classic fusion move — typically are.
Maroo offers two kinds of noodle dishes. The more Italian-Korean pasta choices come with seafood mixes, either spicy or not, or bulgogi or tofu. The spicy seafood linguine ($14) featured shrimp, squid rings and mussels, all toothsome, in a moderately spiced sauce. Much punchier, I thought, was the stir-fry of chewy udon noodles with spicy pork and potent kimchi ($14). The spice-averse could opt for the beef udon stir-fry ($14) and be well satisfied.
Maroo also makes Korean fried chicken, that most fetishized of fusion dishes. Our full serving ($30) was shared among five people along with other dishes. Small chicken pieces were admirably crisp and moist while the two potent sauces, spicy-sweet and garlic-soy, did most of the lifting flavour-wise.
Only one dessert was available when we visited. Tofu cheese cake ($5) was a light, smooth and sweet winner.
For a cheap and no-fuss place like Maroo, it’s too bad that many international students at Ottawa’s universities are living in their Asian homelands this fall rather than in Ottawa. They would be perfect customers for the limited but satisfying short-order cooking here that mixes East and West. But if you don’t flinch at the phrase “culinary fusion,” and as long as you’re OK with a Korean chef appropriating buns and pasta, you might be Maroo’s perfect customer too.