Cantina Gia
749 Bank St., 613-569-0464,
instagram.com/cantinagia/
Open:
Wednesday to Sunday 11 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., closed Monday and Tuesday
Prices:
sandwiches $10 to $12, pasta dishes $12 to $18
Shelby Burger
11 William St., 613-562-4978,
instagram.com/eatshelbyburger
Open:
Monday to Saturday 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., closed Sunday
Prices:
burgers $4 to $16.50
On Wednesday afternoon, feeling a mix of relief, disgust and sleep deprivation, I marked the latest developments in U.S. politics with a quintessentially American lunch, namely a really good smash burger.
Off I went to the ByWard Market to order from Shelby Burger, the recently opened William Street joint where smash burgers rule.
What’s a smash burger, you say? It’s an au courant style of hamburger made with smaller, three-ounce beef patties (balls, actually) that are smashed flat so that their exteriors develop a tasty crust. The revered U.S. burger chains Shake Shack and In-N-Out Burger swear by smash burgers.
While Shelby Burger wasn’t the first to offer smash burgers in Ottawa — that honour might go to The Third in Hintonburg — it does serve some mighty compelling specimens, I’ve found, made with grass-fed beef from P.E.I. farms sitting pretty between the requisite soft and squishy potato buns.
With visions of flipping states in mind, I ordered a two-patty double onion Shelby burger ($9.25). It was the best item that I’ve yet tasted at Shelby Burger — deliciously juicy but also lightly crusty, additionally moistened by special sauce and oozy American cheese, and bolstered by onions that had been fried with the beef, plus pickles. While I don’t think I’m a glutton, single-patty burgers from Shelby Burger felt a little undersized to me.
The crispy chicken burger ($10) that I tried from Shelby Burger was admirably crisp, but also joltingly salty. Herb-dusted fries and sweet potato fries were solidly made and all the more enjoyable when we ate them immediately on the William Street sidewalk. (Shelby burger’s dining room could open as soon as Saturday, following the relaxation of the Ontario government’s current pandemic restrictions.)
I had high expectations for Shelby Burger’s fare, which includes a celery root schnitzel and an Impossible Burger as vegetarian options, given that a top Ottawa chef oversees its food, even if he isn’t smashing its burgers. Jordan Holley, executive chef at the Spark Street fine-dining hotspot Riviera, is a Shelby Burger partner.
Similarly, Cantina Gia in the Glebe is a new casual eatery under a leading Ottawa chef’s direction. Opened a month ago at the address where Pomeroy House and then Nosh had been, Gia is a new venture by chef Adam Vettorel and his business partner Chris Schlesak, who launched the fine-dining Italian restaurant North & Navy in Centretown five years ago.
For now, Gia offers sandwiches, pasta dishes and more to go through its window onto Bank Street. Last week, a colleague and I took our eggplant parmigiana and porchetta sandwiches to a picnic table on a side street and dug in.
The vegetarian sandwich ($12) was enjoyable, although it had lost some appeal because it had cooled down by the time we were seated and eating. But the porchetta sandwich ($12) was outstanding, thanks to its heap of thinly sliced, moist and fennel-tinged roast pork. It did lack the crisp, crackling skin that makes me adore a similar sandwich at Pesto’s Deli in Kanata. But Gia did substitute slices of pear for sweetness as well as crunch, and its focaccia was studded with grapes that gave the sandwich extra personality.
We had room for dessert after our sandwiches. Tiramisu ($8) was classically good and quickly devoured. Gia’s small, stuffed doughnuts called bomboloni ($7) came in three varieties — chocolate, dulce de leche and pumpkin spice — that made choosing a favourite difficult.
Last weekend, I sampled Gia’s dinner-time pastas and found they were as good or better than the sandwiches, with straight-forward, authentic underpinnings, fresh al dente noodles and big, clear flavours.
Rigatoni bolognese featured a stripped-down version of that much-loved but often too tomato-y sauce. The dish put its minced meat front and centre and like some of Gia’s other pasta dishes resonated with a bright, lemony note that seems like a signature move.
Orechiette with sausage and rapini balanced its meatiness and bitterness on top of its tender, ear-shaped pasta. Linguini vongole packed the proper clammy punch, although I would have liked it even more if its sauce had been based on white wine rather than tomatoes. Bucatini all’amatriciana let me down a little, as I wanted a more tubular texture from its thick noodles and more porkiness from its sauce.
Our dinner’s meaty splurge was a crisply breaded pork “Milanese” cutlet ($22), impressively flattened and attached to its bone, supported by arugula, a roasted lemon and cherry tomatoes whose flavours had been intensely concentrated.
We preceded the mains with some ricotta-stuffed zucchini blossoms ($12 for four), which were delicate indulgences. We also split Gia’s Caesar salad, which was enlivened by fried garlic chips and fried capers and whose dressing had an assertive savouriness.
Because Gia’s dining room has yet to be finished, I can only look forward to the night when I’ll be able to eat under its roof — perhaps when the next U.S. president is inaugurated.