Mont Tacos
3059 Carling Ave., 343-984-3927,
mont-tacos.com
Open:
11 a.m. to 11 p.m. daily
Chili Craft Pizza
68 Wylie Ave., 613-828-1111,
chilicraft.ca
Open:
Sunday noon to 11 p.m., Monday to Thursday 11 a.m. to midnight, Friday and Saturday 11 a.m. to 2 a.m.
Seoul Dog
105 B Clarence St. (inside La Catrina), 613-619-1503,
seouldogott.square.site
Open:
Tuesday to Sunday 5 to 10 p.m., closed Monday
A new year brings a yearning for new foods, and few items strike me as more novel than French tacos, Indian pizza and Korean corn dogs.
If you’re part of the foie-gras set or the healthy-eating club, these new fast foods, which touched down in Ottawa in recent months, may be closer to junk food than food. But I resolved to put my curiosity ahead of other predilections and gave these culinary mashups, which as takeout fare are utterly in line with our latest lockdown protocols, an open-minded try.
Mont Tacos, the maker of so-called French tacos, is a Montreal-based franchise operation that opened its first location there in the fall of 2019. The Carling Avenue location opened in October last year, where a Centrale Bergham sandwich shop had been. You can find the new business by looking for the window decorated with a graphic of dripping melted cheese, as that’s a defining feature of a French taco.
According to the chronology on Mont Taco’s website, French tacos became a standard fast food in France in 2013, following their creation in the French alps. Some might say designating French tacos as tacos is a mistake, as what we’re really talking about is a grilled tortilla stuffed with meat, veg, sauce, fries and cheese. They say tacos, but I might equally say burritos or even paninis.
Mont Tacos’ French tacos are custom-designed affairs. You build what you want from nine sauces (from ketchup to harissa to samurai), six proteins (from ground beef to Philly steak to falafel), three kinds of charcuterie (beef bacon, merguez sausage, smoked turkey), six kinds of cheese (from Swiss to cheddar to curds) and seven kinds of vegetables (from fried onions to jalapenos to olives).
As a French taco neophyte, I went for a marinated chicken taco with Algerian (sweet-spicy) sauce, raclette cheese, and a mix of vegetables. It tasted just fine. Perhaps it would have been better still if it were sopping up an excess of alcohol in my gut.
I should say that out of caution, I ordered a small French taco. It’s possible to go bigger — indeed much, much bigger. On Tuesday nights, you can take the “Mont Défi” challenge — order a two-kilogram, five-meat XXL French taco and finish it, and your gluttony is on the house. For indemnification’s sake, I advise against it.
In the same west-end block as Mont Tacos, you’ll find Chili Craft Pizza, the maker of not just “classic” pizzas, burgers, poutine and jalapeno poppers but also pizzas topped with butter chicken, tandoori chicken, shahi paneer and other Indian cuisine staples.
It is no happy coincidence that Chili Craft Pizza, which opened in October, is beside the Little India Cafe, which has attracted a devoted following since the late 1990s. The sauces for Chili Craft’s Indian pizzas come from its neighbour, I was told when I picked up my small tandoori chicken pizza.
Ordered medium spicy, that pizza packed a big punch that lingered in our mouths, and I didn’t feel there was a disconnect between the pizza’s mozzarella and its Indian flavour profile. The chicken, as finely minced as the peppers and onions on the pizza, barely registered, however. More prominent, we’d argue, were the fennel seeds in the pizza crust.
We also tried Chili Craft’s “signature” vegetarian spring rolls, which brought to mind a crispier, oblong version of samosas.
Perhaps the most daunting of my mashup samples were the Korean corn dogs which, flavourings aside, were much more massive than the Pogo dogs of yore, like corn dogs on steroids. Made since last May in the ByWard Market ghost kitchen called Seoul Dog, the corn dogs were almost as extreme in terms of crispiness and taste as they were in size.
By ordering online and toggling various options, we selected the all-beef hot dog with a nubby, potato-flecked coating and the half-beef, half-cheese corn dog, dusted with garlic sugar. I preferred the all-beef dog, but if you’ve read this far in an article about meat-and-cheese fast foods, you probably would prefer the half-beef, half-cheese hybrid dog. I will say this about garlic sugar seasoning — it was not as bad as I thought it would be.
In the end, I like the sheer fact that French tacos, Indian pizzas and Korean corn dogs exist more than I enjoy eating them. While I may prefer Mexican tacos and Italian pizzas (and I may have outgrown corn dogs), I would never want to stifle innovation and the diversification of food, especially at its meatiest and cheesiest.