Dining Out: Friendly Tukan serves up hearty Salvadoran fare

But, until his family opened Tukan Restaurant in 2008, Ventura, 52, didn’t get to cook the kind of food that he ate at home. Just one of two Salvadoran restaurants in Ottawa, Tukan is a homey, unpretentious place on Montreal Road where at times three generations of Ventura’s family, including his mother and his children, have worked. 

All of this was told to me by Ventura’s daughter, Carolina Ventura-Merazo, who owns the restaurant. When I visited Tukan twice in the last week, it was her mother, Maria Merazo, waiting on tables and providing relaxed but friendly service.

Merazo was exceptionally hospitable, and not only to paying customers. I watched as she complied with a hungry, impoverished man’s request for a meal. She fed him some chicken with rice and a coffee, and he was back out on Vanier’s main drag.

Here kindness seemed in keeping with the church-basement ambience of Tukan, where the long walls are mirrored, the table cloths are Naugahyde, and modest knick-knacks are decorations. Behind the bar, a TV shows Hispanic programming.

Tukan’s menu offers more than just the hearty dishes of Ventura’s homeland. There are the usual Tex-Mex items, “Canadian plates” and things that are in-between, such as the Mexican hamburger or the yuca poutine. My friends and I stuck to the Salvadoran dishes, which Ventura-Merazo later told me were rooted in her father’s mother’s recipes.

The food has felt very much home-made, unfussy and generous, seasoned but not nearly as spicy as one might get with Mexican food on one hand or Peruvian food on the other. Here, the food’s been meaty and starchy, especially with the prevalence of corn flour, which gluten-abstainers will be glad to know. For heat or extra zing, meals come with jars of home-made green hot sauce and curtido (El Salvador’s lightly fermented cabbage relish — think Central American sauerkraut).

Some small, snack-sized items figure prominently here, including El Salvador’s beloved pupusas, which are thick, pan-fried tortillas made with stuffings such as pork and cheese or beans, or cheese and loroco, a Central American flower bud used as a herb. We’ve enjoyed our warm, lightly stuffed pupusas, offset with curtido, as well as crisp pasteles (corn pastries stuffed with chopped pork and minced vegetables).

We thought less of a platter of four shrimp tacos, which were less distinctive and heavy with chopped coriander.

Four Salvadoran soups grace the menu. Smaller bowls of sopa da pata, made with cow’s foot, pleased two friends who don’t flinch at eating tripe along with cassava and yucca. The less hearty sopa da camarones made us think of Vietnamese pho at first glance, but there were no noodles — only shell-on shrimps, spinach and egg in a broth that tasted of shrimp.   

Once, for our main course, three of us split a platter that showcased three meaty preparations — slices of carne asada (grilled beef) and pollo asado (grilled chicken), plus chunks of chicharron (fried pork) — on top of fried yuca and garnished with curtido. The grilled meats were modestly seasoned and tender, and the pork was flavourful once you bit through its hard exterior.

True carnivores would do better still with Tukan’s long-braised beef ribs, which were fall-apart tender.