Carben Food + Drink
1100 Wellington St. W., 613-792-4000,
carbenrestaurant.com
,
instagram.com/carbenrestaurant
Open:
Tuesday to Sunday 5 to 9 p.m., plus Saturday and Sunday 10 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Prices:
plates ranging from $14 to $36, eight-course tasting menu $75, small plates $10 or less on Tuesday, Thanksgiving dinner for two to go $80
Last Friday was one of those nights when we felt like giving the middle finger to the novel coronavirus and our latest feelings of growing dread.
That’s not to say we’re Trumpian pandemic deniers. We’d like to think we’re not foolhardy. We practice physical distancing. We wear masks in public. We wash our hands.
But after the day’s glut of bad news — that Ottawa’s health system was in crisis because of COVID-19, that restaurants, bars, gyms and event spaces would further limit their capacities, that social circles would be retired — we wanted to do something other than submit and be hermits.
We wanted a meal out as a morale booster, the more celebratory the better, but not at a break-the-bank price. We put our faith in Carben Food + Drink and were happily rewarded.
I lauded the Hintonburg restaurant in the fall of 2015, a few months after it opened. But I’d not been back since. My visit last week found its owners and chefs, the husband-and-wife team of Kevin Benes and Caroline Ngo, serving fine dining practically on the cheap. At least, that’s what I’d call an eight-course tasting menu for just $75. The parade of dishes delivered a steady flow of surprises and satisfactions and just one dish that fell short.
The courses came from Carben’s 12-item menu of plates ranging from $14 to $36, and diners wanting a scaled-down version of the tasting-menu experience could visit Carben on Tuesday nights, when small plates are $10 or less. If COVID-19 rules out dining-room visits for you, Carben does offer its dishes to go, although some degradation due to the increased time from its kitchen to your table would likely be unavoidable.
Of course, the restaurant takes measures to help quell the pandemic’s spread and anxieties. It maintains a contact tracing list. Its cool, narrow, minimalist interior, which seated 40 before the pandemic, now holds 26 people at eight well-spaced tables.
That said, during our two-hour stay, just two other tables were occupied. But if Carben was feeling blue over such a sparse turnout on a Friday night, its servers, personable and knowledgeable, weren’t letting on.
While complimentary bread service seems like an outdated notion these days, Carben treated us to a Hokkaido milk roll that was puffy, warm and tender and a rosette of butter enriched but not overwhelmed by miso, which lent some subdued but discernible funk.
Our first course proper starred slices of raw tuna, set apart from many similar dishes in the city by its crispy enoki mushrooms and and smoked, powdered coconut oil — two garnishes attesting to Carben’s fondness for playful culinary transformations.
The kitchen’s take on fried Brussels sprouts was also a winner, with vegetables smartly perked by a zesty walnut gremolata and a sprinkling of nutritional yeast.
Next came one of Carben’s signature dishes, which I recall wowed me five years ago. The dish made an unlikely star of smoked wood ear mushrooms, supporting the squidgy-textured fungus with a savoury miso glaze and rich turmeric aioli. Bok choy and edamame added as much colour as flavour to the pretty, edible arc of food, served on dishware by Ottawa’s LOAM Clay Studio.
A big bowl contained a perfectly tender morsel of Humboldt squid, tamed with low, slow, sous-vide cooking and then grilled. Dehydrated olives and the jolting heat of pickled cherry bomb peppers dressed up the squid, which sat on a mound of diced, soft, comforting eggplant.
Sea bass, mild, moist and crisp of skin, was well supported by its turmeric cream, fingerling potatoes, subtle hint of shrimp oil and bits of pickled cucumber.
The final savoury course was the only letdown. The wee serving of short rib, while tender, underwhelmed. The jus mentioned in the menu was absent, and the thin slices of beef paled when compared to the more robust satisfaction of a long-braised slab of on-the-bone short rib.
Two desserts made up for the short-rib misstep. The first starred a big scoop of sweet-tart elderberry ice cream offset by cubes of lemon sponge cake and a scattering of poppy seed crumble. And if we were not yet feeling full, the second dessert, a cream tart with light fruity accents, put a definite stop to our appetites.
This then is why we go out for dinner — not just to feel full, and not just to spare ourselves the effort of cooking, but to treat ourselves to deliciousness, novelty and hospitality, all of which remain strong suits at Carben, five years on and despite the pandemic.
With next weekend’s Thanksgiving dinner at home looking like a more scaled-down affair, I’m even considering leaving the cooking to Carben. COVID-19 has prompted Carben and other smaller restaurants such as the Wellington Gastropub on Wellington Street West, two six {ate} on Preston Street and Town on Elgin Street to offer takeout Thanksgiving dinners for two, while the kitchens at the National Arts Centre, the Brookstreet Hotel in Kanata and NeXT in Stittsville, among others, are preparing turkey feasts for pickup that will serve larger families.