Bukhari
1846 Carling Ave., 613-501-6140,
bukhari-restuarant.business.site
Open:
Monday to Thursday 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., Friday to Sunday 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.
Prices:
main courses up to $20
Access:
no steps to front door, washrooms
The website for Bukhari Restaurant, which opened in late 2019 in a Carling Avenue strip mall, refers to it as a health food restaurant. Of course, that’s not a bad thing. However, I’m more keen to dine out when the fare is indulgent or intriguing, in addition to being good for me. I can make my own grain bowls at home, thank you very much.
But if you scroll down the eatery’s home page, the intrigue mounts. There’s a reference in a photo to Bukhari serving “Arabian food.” What would that be?
The only way for me to find out was to step away from the screen and head over to the place.
During my visits to Bukhari, it turned out that its Arabian food was generally as tasty as it was affordable and unpretentious. Also, the kind and friendly staff there were happy to specify that Bukhari served dishes with their roots in Yemen, the country that sits south of Saudi Arabia on the Arabian Peninsula, closer to Africa than it is to, say, Iran.
Now, I can affirm that Bukhari serves the best Yemeni food I’ve had, which, it should be said, is also the only Yemeni food I’ve had. Bukhari, which replaced the top-notch casual Middle Eastern restaurant Pita Bell Kabab after its westward move on Carling Avenue, is one of the very few Yemeni restaurants in Ottawa. (I’ve since learned of House of Mandi on Hunt Club Road as well.)
Its food is halal, prepared to Islamic strictures, and lamb and chicken are the featured meats, although a beef dish or two can also be found. The meats can be grilled, fried, steamed or stewed.
Some menu items were familiar and less specifically Yemeni, including chicken and beef kebabs, chicken tikka, tabbouleh and Greek salad. But most dishes here were Yemeni — lesser known to me and listed with no descriptions. We had to ask about dishes such as chicken mandi and lamb haneed, and we were glad that we did.
Before any of our orders at lunch or dinner arrived, we were given small but appetite-whetting bowls of nicely seasoned lamb broth, served with wedges of lime on the side. “It’s welcome soup,” one of the female staffers told me.
Speaking of appetite-whetting, the only appetizer we tried at Bukhari was its baba ghanouj ($6), which was fresher, more herbal and much less smoky than other renditions I’ve had of that eggplant dip.
Hearty appetites would do well with one of the generous platters that pair a heap of long-grain rice with bone-in lamb or chicken. In chicken bukhari ($18), the tender half-bird was tucked in a mound of mildly spiced rice with slivers of carrot. Lamb haneed ($18) kept its rice, garnished with fried onions, separate from a foil packet filled with delectable pieces of lamb. Lamb mandi ($18) delivered pieces of shank and rib, both flavourful and toothsome, on top of rice garnished with fried onions and slivers of almonds.
All of these dishes came with plates of simply dressed green salad, dusted with tangy sumac, and a spicy, salsa-like condiment also landed on our table.
We didn’t try Bukhari’s biryani rice dishes, which we were told were the spiciest among the menu. Next time.
Bite-sized pieces of lamb figured in two very literally named and spicier dishes — fried lamb meat ($12) and fried lamb liver ($12). The former was accessibly tasty and quick to disappear when scooped up with pita bread. The latter packed some mild mineral tang with its heat.
Of Bukhari’s stews, we tried
ogda chicken ($10), a pleasant mish-mash of bone-in chicken, potatoes, onions, zucchini and more, and fahsa ($13), a brothy and deeply savoury concoction packed with fall-apart chunks of lamb. After we dug into the fahsa, a server came with a frothy concoction that I later learned was made with the bitter herb fenugreek. The accompaniment is called holba, and by itself, it was bracingly bitter. If I order fahsa again, I’ll trying blending some of it into the stew for another layer of flavour.
Bukhari serves breakfast, too, with a few dishes that are specific to the morning meal and some, such as fried lamb and lamb liver, that are served all day.
We ordered shakshouka ($6), which elsewhere has been a dish of eggs in a spicy tomato sauce, and received instead something closer to a scrambled omelet, which was good and homey just the same.
We also had foul ($7), which was a savoury kidney bean dip served with pita. To finish, we had a very splittable dessert of arika ($12), which was a plate filled with a blend of bread, dates, and heavy cream, topped with honey and grated cheese.
Very little at Bukhari is ostentatious. The closest thing to fancy here is adeni tea, from Aden, the Yemeni port city, which came in an attractive gold-and-white tea set. The milky tea, lightly spiced with cardamom, ginger and more, I think, was a fine meal-ender.
The restaurant is not licensed, but it does serve several flavours of Barbican, the non-alcoholic malt beverage popular in the Middle East and North Africa.
Clearly, I’m a novice when it comes to Yemeni food. I know just enough to say I look forward to learning more at Bukhari.
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