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City Bites

FOOD BUZZ: Meet food culture advocate Jeannie Marshall at Stella Luna on Thursday Apr. 19, 7:30 p.m.

Author Jeannie Marshall has ignited a conversation about the importance of food cultures — old and new.

Full disclosure: Jeannie Marshall is my friend. She is also the author of a fascinating new book that deals with a topic that is very near and dear to my heart: Italian food and food culture. She is a journalist from Toronto and we have mutual friends who connected us when I found myself in Rome — where she now lives — during my sabbatical year in 2009.

When I found out Jeannie was coming to Canada to promote her new book, Outside the Box, I quickly convinced her to make a stop in Ottawa. I knew she would feel right at home at Stella Luna Gelateria, where the owners hail from Rome and have dedicated their lives to transporting an aspect of Italian food culture to the nation’s capital.

Outside the Box is Jeannie’s personal investigation into why diets around the world are converging. Why are they becoming more alike? Why are diet-related illnesses increasing around the world, especially among children? The short answer is that this is happening because of the breakdown of local food systems and food cultures.

I asked her a few basic questions to get the conversation started with City Bites readers. I invite you all to come out on Thursday evening to meet Jeannie and join in an important discussion about our ability to help shape the future of eating, starting with nourishing our children. She says parents, not corporations, know what’s best for kids.

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City Bites

DON’T MISS OUT! Grab a friend and book a table. A Taste for Life is happening on April 25

Are you looking for an excuse to go out for dinner? Join thousands of other diners next Wednesday who will be filling up dozens of Ottawa restaurants and doing good at the same time.

A Taste for Life, a fundraising initiative, invites us to select a restaurant from a list of more than 40 participants and simply dine out on April 25th. The restaurants then donate 25% of sales (food and alcohol, before tax) from that evening to Bruce House and The Snowy Owl AIDS Foundation. The funds are used to support and assist people living with and affected by HIV/AIDS. In 2011, the proceeds were more than $90,000.

Now in its 14th year, the event has been so successful in Ottawa that the idea has been shared with 24 other communities across Ontario and Alberta in support of AIDS services. That’s makes it a Made-in-Ottawa idea that we can be proud of.

Apparently reservations are highly recommended as tables fill up fast!

WEEKLY LUNCH PICK: Sampling the Sampler Plate at Sausage Kitchen

Anne DesBrisay describes the Sampler Plate as "quite brown, a bit messy, very tasty — and there’s enough of it to fill me for a week."

By Anne DesBrisay

In the queue in front of me they know exactly what they want and the line moves in obedient fashion at a good clip. The woman directly ahead of me, with whom I had been chatting, orders her weekly indulgence, a Falscher Hase (slabs cut from a loaf of pork and beef bound with eggs, tucked in a bun). She tells me it’s a chomp down memory lane for her, harkening back to her days as a Munich grad student, forever hungry, forever broke.

The Sausage Kitchen server working the lunch line overhears my questions about this Munich meatloaf and before I can say Menschenskind I have a fat forkful of the thing suspended in front of my nose. “Here, try it!” It’s probably three bites worth, but I manage to pop the entire generous hunk of it and am accordingly chewingly mute by the time it’s my turn at the counter. All I can do is nod as she points to the items that go in The Sampler Plate.

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TASTING NOTES: Argentinian wines are gaining elegance — and momentum — try these good-value picks from the LCBO

In the wake of the huge success of Fuzion, the versatile wine country strives to move beyond the bold malbecs that made it famous  By David Lawrason

A few years ago, Argentina’s bold malbecs swaggered into town, offering bags of flavour at unbelievably low prices. And they caught on like wildfire, with the now ubiquitous Fuzion — a malbec-shiraz blend priced at just $7.75 — becoming the largest-selling brand in LCBO history. With the LCBO shelves now bursting with dense (though often coarse and simple) malbecs priced under $12, it seemed that a visit to Argentina was in order to find out what’s on the horizon from the world’s fifth largest wine-producing nation.

With about 30 percent of Argentina’s vast, arid Andean vineyard planted with malbec, it’s obvious that this variety is not going away anytime soon. But there is a reservoir of upgraded malbecs — plush, creamy, and more complex wines that still offer great value in the $15-to-$30 range. These wines come from more narrowly defined regions, with differences in style based on vineyard altitude. Though Argentina is dragging its feet on the creation and marketing of appellations, within Mendoza (the country’s largest region, with over 75 percent of the production) the malbecs of higher Uco Valley areas such as La Consulta, Tupungato, and Altamira display a more floral character, better acidity, and greater elegance. Conversely, malbecs from medium-altitude Luján de Cuyo and the lower altitudes of Maipú tend to be dense, soft, very ripe, and a touch earthier.

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LAUNCHING! Ottawa Magazine’s Eating & Drinking guide hits newsstands April 19

It’s an ever-changing dining landscape out there. Why, just a year ago, if you’d said you were planning to head to Hintonburg for an evening of fine food and drink, your friends would have wondered what you were talking about. And just three or four years ago, if you’d floated the idea of joining the gang for small plates, few would have understood the concept.

Trends change fast. Chefs move around, restaurants revamp their menus and dining rooms, and the city’s ever more cosmopolitan diners are always on the hunt for restaurants — and food shops — that reflect their evolving tastes and knowledge. Older notions of fine dining have given way in 2012 to a more casual approach to eating. Though we still respect the great cooking techniques, we’re also looking for food that offers comfort and whose provenance can be traced to local producers.

The premier issue of Ottawa Magazine’s Eating & Drinking Guide regales you with a list of 300+ enthusiastic recommendations — food shops that stand above the crowd, new restaurants we hope will prosper and older ones we’d recommend to our best friends, and great wines from near and far. Think of this book as your culinary go-to guide for the city — a compendium to inspire your eating, drinking, and food sourcing choices for 2012. Bon appétit!

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MY CITY: The lowdown according to Beckta Chef de Cuisine Dirk McCabe

Good egg: McCabe’s brunch of choice is this two-egg poutine from Elgin Street Diner. Photography by Angela Gordon.

Dirk McCabe, Chef de Cuisine at Beckta: Where the fine-dining chef goes to indulge his eclectic cravings

By Shawna Wagman

My favourite brunch
Brunch for me is at 2 a.m. after my shift at work. I order the Elgin Street Diner poutine — the one with bacon and caramelized onions — with extra curds, extra gravy — two sunny side up eggs, a side of ranch dressing, Frank’s RedHot Sauce, and turkey gravy.

My splurge
My order from So Good Restaurant would include Shanghai dumplings, hot and sour soup, crispy beef, General Tso’s chicken, mu shu pork, Cantonese fried noodles, and squid with pepper-salt.

My farm friends
I go to Rideau Pines Farm for pick-your-own fresh fruits and vegetables. It’s a short 15-minute drive outside the city, and I can hang out with Matt (a.k.a. Spicoli), John, and Sondra Vandenberg.

My burger fix
At Bank Street Diner, you can order the Burger Breakfast, which includes a burger on the side with your breakfast platter.

My go-to grocer
I never walk out of Njaim Mid-East Food Centre on Belfast without zaatar bread.

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SPOTLIGHT: Owner/chef Sue Jung offers up Korean- and Japanese-inspired treats on Beechwood

The Cinderella roll is made with black rice for a unique — and healthy — twist. Photography by Gordon King.

With Sushime, owner/chef Sue Jung turns a rice roll into a verb and a command — and her neighbours in the Beechwood area love her for it already. Since the doors first opened in December, a steadily increasing stream of diners is checking in for both the food and the atmosphere of this friendly, contemporary sushi restaurant.

“In Korea, where I grew up, you wrap anything good up into a rice roll and eat it,” Jung says. Which explains the presence on the menu of both orthodox hosomaki and sashimi, as well as more whimsical offerings. The mermaid roll, for example, has a shrimp for a tail and avocado scales, while the Cinderella roll is made with black rice for a unique — and healthy — twist.

For those few who aren’t smitten with seafood, there are meat and veggie dishes inspired by Japanese and Korean recipes. What you won’t find at Sushime are the super-long menus found at serious sushi restaurants or the all-you-can-eat sushi buffet at “sushi lite” establishments. Jung’s goal is to offer Ottawans a middle ground — “So far, so good,” she says with a grin.

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WEEKLY LUNCH PICK: Succumb to the lure of lemongrass at Pookie’s Thai

Forget the calories! DesBrisay calls prawn toast a "happy making" treat

By Anne DesBrisay

Is there a longing more desperate than the one for lemongrass? Particularly when the day is dreary and the wind is numbing and a tickle in the throat suggests bothersome things are brewing? Let others crave a burger or a chocolate bar, my rumblings tend to be for Thai green curry, a spicy yum salad, a really good pad Thai.

I find that when you need Thai food, you simply need Thai food and no amount of pretending otherwise is going to work. Trouble is, in this city — indeed in most northern cities — Thai food isn’t all it might be. It’s full of subtle aromatics, layered complexity, mushrooming intensity, masses of bursting-fresh herbs, that don’t translate — poor us — to a climate where all those good things come from afar and everything gets refrigerated. It means everything also suffers from a diminished vibrancy.

A vegetable-filled stir fry with tilapia is a colourful main, with shredded cabbage and carrot on the side

Whatever. We take what we can get, and in Ottawa West, it doesn’t get much better than Pookie’s. Prawn toast is my weakness. Yes, it’s caloric, but still it’s happy making and what begins lunch here. Perfumed with lime leaf, scallion, cilantro, the chopped shrimp and egg mixture is spread on thin toast, fried to crisp and brown and served with a sweet chili sauce.

Next, a palate cleansing tom yum soup, with eye stinging heat, followed by a wet stir fry of tilapia with peppers, mushroom, garlic, Thai basil, and red chilies. It has less oomph than we want, but less sugar than we usually get in other places that overdo the sweet, and we find it totally pleasant, the fish moist and soft, the veg with crunch and colour. It comes with a mound of Thai sweet rice and a little bit of green and cabbage-carrot crunch and costs a respectable $10.50

Total cost: $17.50 for prawn toast we didn’t need and soup, stir fry, and rice we did.

Hours: Open Tuesday to Friday for lunch and daily for dinner.

Pookie’s Thai Restaurant, 2280 Carling Ave., 613-321-1733. 

 

 

Anne DesBrisay

www.capitaldining.ca

 

STICKY BUN OF THE DAY! The ‘Morning Bun’ from Bridgehead

Photography by Leeanne Munn

By Cindy Deachman

Like a high-topped kugelhopf, this is quite a different style of cinnamon bun. Here’s introducing the Morning Bun. Such delicate flavour! Wonderfully dredged in brown sugar and cinnamon, this flaky pastry tastes faintly of orange. Reminiscent of a Danish — the one you’ve wanted all your life. Coffee klatch, anyone? $2.50 each. 

224 Dalhousie St., 613-562-9996; plus 12 other Ottawa locations, www.bridgehead.ca. 

This concludes our series of five sticky buns in five days. Happy sampling.

STICKY BUN OF THE DAY! A light cocoa and butter creation from Bread & Sons

Photography by Leeanne Munn

By Cindy Deachman

BREAD & SONS BAKERY 

A Chocolate Cinnamon Swirl will get you twirling any morning — or any time, really. Undeniably. It’s buttery, it’s crisp, and it’s ever so crumbly. Then the filling, rich and deep. Luxurious cocoa and butter keep sweet cinnamon in abeyance. Perfect balance. As for lightness — almost unbearable. $2.25 each.

195 Bank St., 613-230-5302, www.breadandsons.ca. 

Stay tuned for a new sticky bun to try every day this week… just because…

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