Cumin Indian Grill
373 Somerset St. W., 613-695-6969,
cuminindiangrill.ca
Open:
Monday to Saturday 11:30 a.m. to 2 p.m., and 5 to 9 p.m., closed Sunday
Prices:
main dishes up to $15.99
Access:
no steps to front door, washrooms on ground floor and downstairs
For most of the last decade, if not longer, the hole-in-the-wall at 373 Somerset St. W. was home to a modest Indian eatery called Basmati. Then, last year, it became Café Delish, which served crepes and waffles, but also Indian food.
About eight months ago, the address reverted back to an exclusively Indian restaurant, an affordable place called Cumin Indian Grill. It recently caught my attention because its colourful renovations and menus with less-frequently-seen dishes suggested ambitions to raise the dining experience up a notch or two from what the previous tenant had offered.
At Cumin, the two-storey space, which seats about 25 and is practically as tall as it is deep, now has violet walls and cyan tables, while a white, faux barn board wall now hides the sight of, if not the sounds of, the modest kitchen.
Those cyan tables are adorned with cloth napkins held snug with Cumin -branded napkin rings. Edison lights hang on long strings, and the walls are adorned with stylized art. The place has a youthful feel its groovy South Asian pop soundtrack that comes with the music videos project overhead, on the eatery’s back wall.
The restaurants lunch and dinner menus are not extensive, but they are still wide-ranging and not as curry-centric as more established Indian restaurants often are. In particular, I was glad to see some Indian street-food dishes and Hakka (Indo-Chinese fusion) dishes. Also, Cumin’s meats confirm to halal practices.
The dishes that most hit the spot were hearty, rugged street-food items on Cumin’s lunch menu. The Punjabi dish of chole bhature ($13.99), a combination of potently spiced, tomato-y chickpea curry and puffy, freshly fried flatbread, was a favourite at our table. Almost as good was the pav bhaji ($7.99), which served its thick potato-and-peas curry with soft buns.
We thought less of the aloo paratha ($7.99), because the flatbread’s spiced potato filling was a little meagre.
I was surprised but happy to see chicken dum biryani ($15.99) offered at lunch, because I think of it as a labour-intensive rice dish fit for a evening’s feast. Cumin’s rendition delivered big flavours but felt more dry (especially in the chicken department) than the sublime chicken dum biryani that I’ve had at NH44 in Ottawa’s east end.
Of the Hakka dishes, I was most curious to see how an Indian kitchen would make hot and sour soup ($4.99). It turned out the soup’s broth had the look, gloss and savouriness of the Chinese-restaurant staple, but frozen vegetables stood in for meat, tofu and mushrooms.
Also from the Hakka selection, we liked the kitchen’s versions of chicken 65 ($14.99) and chilli chicken ($14.99), two dishes in which breaded, tender chicken morsels starred and which both had welcome spicy, sour stings.
Given that the eatery stresses its grill in its name, I had high hopes for its lamb chops ($15.99 for two). They were more than fine — tender, highly seasoned and covered in a green, herbal sauce.
With the lamb chops and other dishes came massive quantities of basmati rice and some stir fried onions and peppers. This approach might suit single diners, but tables wishing for family-style sharing might want to ask for their food to be partitioned accordingly.
Also grilled and good was the hariyali chicken ($13.99), in which chunks of white meat were stained green by their herb-and-spice marinade and sauce.
The lamb ($13.99) and butter paneer curries ($13.99) that we tried at lunch this week were substantially portioned but a little shallow of flavour. More rounded and complex was a beef Madras curry ($14,99) that we had at dinner last week.
Garlic naan bread ($3.99) was a letdown because it seemed more like an unleavened flatbread that the leavened, charred treat that we had wanted.
The restaurant is licensed and serves a small selection of beers, affordable Ontario wines and some spirits. We had to try our first “dirty lassis” ($7), to see what a rum-spiked mango lassi was like. It turned out that our dirty lassi was more fun to say than to drink — I prefer my lassis, dirty or not, to be colder and more sweet and creamy.
A more appealing drink that was some meal-ending pink chai. The uncommon-in-Ottawa tea-based drink — “You get this in Toronto,” our server said — was sweet and pistachio-studded, even if it was not pink. I’ll be seeking it out again.
The round of pink chai was on the house at our dinner because of a serving mix-up, compensating us because we did not receive the coconut rice or biryani rice we had asked for with our curries.Service here has varied with personnel. Two servers have been on-point, while a third, while pleasant, was clearly inexperienced, unable to answer questions about dishes and not mindful about refilling water to help us assuage our spice-covered palates. At one visit, the un-busy kitchen fired out food quickly, but it was more slow to produce when the restaurant was more than half-full.
In the end, although both service and food were hit-and-miss at Cumin Indian Grill. I’m likely to return, given its best dishes and visible efforts. Plus, a server told me that a crab dish, I’m guessing a South Indian spicy crab curry — is bound for the menu in early 2020. Who could resist that from a kitchen, however humble, that tries hard?
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