Life of Ling

Having been away for the past 4 weekends, we decided that the family needed a break from travelling but not from doing the food thing. We decided to try out some local restaurants that I’ve had on my list.

The Smoque Shack

We decided to go here on the hottest day of the weekend. It is another restaurant in a converted house on York Street. The air conditioning was certainly limping on this day. It definitely could not keep up. This restaurant has 2 rooms. You enter into the bar area and then up a few stairs into the main dining area. It is not a large place; able to fit about 50 people.

On to the menu. You can choose your BBQ meat by the 1/4 lb, 1/2lb and 1lb increments. Each BBQ meat comes with a homemade bun. Sides are separate. Oh the beer menu is very extensive; a large selection of local microbewery beer (Mill St., Kitchissipi, Beau’s).

For the vegetarian, they have the usual salad selection and tofu!!

There is a choice of pork back ribs;pork st Louis ribs; brisket; pulled pork; jerk pork; BBQ chicken; Jerk chicken;Beef ribs. The sides come in 2 sizes; individual or sharing. Sides are real mac and cheese, sweet potato fries, poutine, collard greens,corn bread,fries, mash potatoes…I’m sure there was more.

The analysis…the Jerk pork is very jerky and spicy with the pork a bit fatty. The smoked chicken was tasty and fall off the bone with a sweet tomato based BBQ sauce. I assume it is their signature sauce as the brisket which was melt in your mouth was also topped with the BBQ sauce. The St Louis ribs were small and dry. The beef rib was nothing to write home about. The mac and cheese was baked with extra cheese melted on top. The sharing portion is very large as my son was only able to eat half of it.  The poutine used mozzarella cheese and the fries were dusted with a spicy spice mixture; there was nothing exceptional about this dish…something I would not order again.

All in all the food was ok but nothing special that couldn’t be done in a backyard smoker. If you were looking a different taste this is not the place. Definitely not like a southern BBQ place like Annie and Clydes on Bank Street.

Cafe Cognac

It was time to try a new breakfast place. I was tired of the couple places we usual frequent. I had noticed a review about Cafe Cognac while browsing on the internet looking for local restaurant for our kidless week.

Cafe Cognac is in Gatineau on corner of St Joseph and Montcalm. When we drove up on Sunday morning I was initially worried that it wasn’t open as there were very few cars parked on the street. Well was I wrong…I place was packed. Apparently, there is a parking lot behind the restaurant. We only waited a few minutes before being seated. This place is quite large with patio seating out back.

I was very impressed with the service and the food. What grabbed my attention on the menu was that there were 5 kinds of Eggs Benedict. My son is an eggs benedict lover. You can order a 1 egg or 1 egg eggs benedict. My son had the eggs benedict with black forest ham and gruyere cheese. My other half had the pacific eggs benedict (smoked salmon). I had the normal 2 egg breakfast (poached) with crispy bacon.

I have to say the hollandaise sauce was to die for. The richness and flavour was better than mine (probably had a higher ratio of butter to eggs than what I make!). It was the best I’ve had to date. All 6 poached eggs were done to perfection; runny without being too runny.

Along with the eggs was a half a plate of home fries; crispy deep fried cubes of potatoes without being greasy. Each plate came with 2 pieces of fruit for garnish.

I had a Higgins Earl Grey tea (which she didn’t charge me an extra premium as coffee came with my breakfast). She made a special chocolate milk for my son…chocolate milk with whipped cream. Rick had a cappicinno and a coffee. He described the coffee as pretty decent…he didn’t need to put cream in it.

Definitely a place to come back.

This week has been an interesting week of restaurant discoveries. As we are “kid” free for the week, we indulged in one of our favourite past times…trying new restaurants.

1. Mill Street Brew Pub
We were there on a Monday night in between thunderstorms at 8PM and we still had to wait for 15 minutes. They only reserve 1/3 of their tables; the rest are for walk ins.

I really liked the flight of beer. 4X 6ounces or 4X8ounces. I really enjoyed the Lemon Tea beer…light and refreshing, a great summer beer.

Mondays are 5 appetizers each at 5 dollars. The choices are calamari, sweet potato fries, smoked chicken poutine, cheesy crab dip, and pull pork soft tacos (3).

The calamari was beer batter with lemon and herbs. It came with a tartar sauce and a tomato basil sauce.

The smoked chicken poutine had quite a bit of shredded smoked chicken with curds and a bland gravy. The curds were not squeaky and the gravy was not piping hot.

The pulled pork soft tacos were very tasty with a black bean and corn salsa…It seemed the same bbq sauce was used for the pulled pork and the smoked chicken.

The best dish was the beef dip. A large braised piece of beef between 1/3 of a french stick that melted in your mouth. The sandwich was large. The au jus was wonderful…real au jus!!. We had the strawberry spinach salad which was nice as it had lots of goat cheese. The dressing was a little heavy and they could have tossed the salad in the dressing.

I found the service a bit spotty … not attentive enough in my opinion.

2. Ekko Brazil
First impression is that they need more signs to point to where the restaurant entrance is with respect to the Cartier hotel and Golf course. The entrance is near the back of the parking lot on the east side of the building.

This is a unique style buffet. There is an extensive salad bar with pate and sliced cold meat; green and black olives. The other side of the buffet had the hot sides such as rice, potatoes, chilean black bean stew and a soup.

At each place setting there is a coaster. Red means no more please, and green more meat please. The servers go around to each table with a large skewer of meat and serve the customers who request more meat. Our night, there were 8 types of meat; pork tenderloin chunks crusted in parmesan; brazilian beef (I think it was boneless prime rib cut) seared and sliced thin; marinated sirloin seared and sliced thin; strip loin steak cut in chunks; chicken breast wrapped in bacon; sausage chunks; garlic marinated beef kabob; leg of lamb; roasted chicken drumsticks. For dessert, it was pineapple rolled in cinnamon and sugar grilled.

The service was very attentive. We were able to get the servers to bring seconds of certain types of meat that we were looking for. Our water was always refilled and the wine was topped up.

This is not an inexpensive place but worthwhile if you like your meat. Not a place for a vegetarian!!

3. 222 Lyon Tapas Bar
This is a restaurant in a converted house. It only seats 20 comfortably. The service was very attentive. Each tapas dish is quite large; count on 2 tapas dishes to equate to 1 entree. We had 5 dishes (ok so we over ordered). The shrimp sauteed with chorizo dish was tasty; chicken in white wine sauce; calamari and the scallops of the day (white wine and fennel). There was plenty of bread served with these dishes so you could sop up the sauces. Ordered the salad with shrimp but got grilled chicken instead…glad they made the mistake as the shrimp would have been salad shrimp instead of this nice warm slices of grilled chicken. Chicken was much better with the salad. The salad dressing was a homemade thousand islands which matched very well with the chicken.

The venue can be very noisy as it is only 2 rooms; one with tables and chair seating and the other with a bar with seating.

My largest criticism is that the hot water was not hot for my tea. The lattes/espresso came from an automatic machine.

4. Sweet Pea
This is a small northern chinese restaurant off of Carling avenue just west of Woodroffe in the old Singapore location (for the people who have lived in Ottawa for a while). One of their special foods is the spicy chicken over handmade noodles. This dish is chinese comfort food. We ordered a half chicken worth and it was a huge platter of chicken pieces that were braised with carrots and potatoes in a spicy sauce over top of a load of wide hand cut noodles. Note the chicken pieces have bones in it.

The ma po tofu is tasty and very spicy.

The spicy green beans were quickly deep fried and then stir fried with chilies.

The Lamb burger was pieces of curried lamb with onions and bean sprouts sauteed with curry in a thin bun.

The dumplings in peanut sauce is 8 wontons in a sweet and spicy peanut sauce.

Each of the dishes were larger than I expected so we had leftovers to take home.

The highlight is the handmade noodles!