Around the World in 196 Plates

Country 045 – Yemen (Almonasabah)

Published on November 13, 2016 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 2340 Council Ring Road #107, Mississauga
Website: https://www.facebook.com/Almonasabah/

I’ve been on quite a roll with Middle Eastern restaurants — so far I’ve checked out Syria, Turkey, and Lebanon, and they’ve all been seriously tasty. And now here’s Yemen to continue that streak.

Alonasabah’s menu is laser-focused — they have a handful of appetizers and desserts, but for the most part there’s only one dish on the menu. If you want something other than mandi? Go somewhere else, that’s all they’ve got here.

Mandi is a deceptively simple dish: it’s just rice and meat (with the choice between chicken and lamb). It’s topped with almonds, raisins, and fried onions.

It’s so good.

The rice is fragrant, richly spiced and deeply flavourful; it’s delicious enough that I’d happily eat a big bowl of it just on its own.

I tried both the chicken and lamb, and both types of meat were super tender and packed with flavour. They’ve obviously been cooked for a very long time at a very low temperature; the chicken was so incredibly tender that the cartilage had completely broken down, essentially turning into cartilage butter.

The rice and the meat are both super tasty, but it’s the toppings that help put this dish over the top. The almonds add some nuttiness and crunch, and even the raisins work surprisingly well. I’m generally not a fan of raisins in any context, so I was shocked by how much I enjoyed them here. Unlike qabuli palau, the somewhat similar dish I tried from Afghanistan, the raisins go really well with everything else. They add subtle pops of sweetness that compliment the dish perfectly and never overwhelm.

As for the onions, they were dark and intense, with a flavour somewhere between caramelized and fried. They were sweet, but with an edge — almost bordering on burnt but never crossing that line.

It seems kind of odd at first that this place only really serves the one dish, but if you do something this well? Why the hell should you waste your time doing anything else?

Country 044 – Lebanon (Acacia Fine Foods)

Published on October 30, 2016 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 1170 Burnhamthorpe Road West, Mississauga
Website: http://www.acaciafinefoodsmississauga.com/

Thanks, Twitter — or more specifically, thanks, Suresh Doss (for the unaware, Doss has become the GTA’s go-to guy for recommendations on ethnic joints like this one). I visited this place entirely thanks to this tweet, and I’m really glad that I did.

It’s a big place, and was almost completely empty when I showed up at around 12:30 on a Sunday (which, as will soon become clear, I think is a travesty). I ordered the arayess, which I had never even heard of before, let alone tried.

It was amazing. It’s ridiculously simple — it’s essentially just a fairly thin layer of spiced ground beef sandwiched inside a piece of pita bread. It’s grilled over charcoal, which gives it a nice exterior char without making the bread overly crispy or crackly.

Whatever they’ve spiced the beef with tastes so good, and the juices soak into the bread so that the whole thing becomes an irresistible medley of beefy, perfectly spiced flavour. It comes with two sauces for dipping — tahini and garlic — and while they’re both quite tasty, it was the garlic sauce that really got me all hot and bothered. It was pretty much the standard thick white sauce that you get at most shawarma joints, but something about it made me want to grab a spoon and eat it straight-up from the container like pudding.

They gave us a couple of pieces of puffy, fresh-from-the-oven pita bread, and by the end of the meal I was tearing pieces off and dipping them straight into that amazing garlic sauce.

You can choose between fries, rice, or salad — since the tweet that brought me here specifically mentioned the rice, that’s what I got.

The rice, like everything else, was not kidding around. Great flavour, and it complimented everything else perfectly.

I should also mention that my dining companion got the chicken and beef shawarma plate, and based only on the couple of mouthfuls I had, it seemed like some seriously top-shelf shawarma (I actually enjoyed it so much that I returned a few days later to try a chicken shawarma sandwich — it was quite good, though it was missing the crispy bits that made the shawarma on the first day so amazing).

I’m really not sure why the place was so empty — I’ve been doing this blog for almost a couple of years now, and this was easily one of the best meals I’ve had so far. It was so good.

Country 043 – Venezuela (El Arepazo)

Published on October 21, 2016 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 181 Augusta Avenue, Toronto
Website: http://arepazo.ca/

A good way of figuring out what to order for this blog is Googling “[Insert country here] national dish.” In the case of Venezuela, their national dish is pabellón criollo, which consists of braised beef, rice and beans, and is typically served with fried plantain.

The version at El Arepazo is a bit untraditional– for one thing, it’s served on an arepa, which is essentially like a corn tortilla and a pita had a baby. Steak is substituted for shredded beef, and given that it’s served in bread, rice has been taken out of the equation entirely.

I quite enjoyed it, though any notion that it could be eaten like a sandwich went out the window almost immediately. The arepa itself isn’t exactly substantial, and they’ve filled it with a lot of stuff. I took one bite and the whole thing collapsed into bits like a meat-and-bean-filled pinata.

Still, however you eat it, it’s good. The steak is a bit on the tough side and all the flavours are probably more muted than they should be (though the two sauces that come on the side — a red and a green salsa — add some needed zip), but it’s otherwise pretty tasty. The beans, the beef, and the creamy plantains are a good combo, and the gooey cheese helps to bring it all together.

Country 042 – Sweden (Fika Cafe)

Published on October 2, 2016 by Michael Nusair1 Comment

Location: 28 Kensington Avenue, Toronto
Website: http://fika.ca/

This is one of those things I saw on Instagram and pretty much instantly had to try. I mean, if you can look at that and tell me that you don’t immediately want to eat it, that’s good for you, but you and me are clearly two very different people.

I guess the obvious choice for Sweden would have been meatballs, but I think the Swedish cream puff is probably a bit more interesting.

It’s called a semla (or semlor in the plural — thanks, Wikipedia), and Fika Cafe’s menu describes it like this: “our take on the swedish classic – cardamom bun, seasonal jam, almond paste topped with honey sweetened whipped cream.”

It’s good (of course it’s good, look at it). The bun itself is sort of like a doughnut, but with a denser, breadier texture. The cardamom gives it a distinct, floral pop that stays in the background without overwhelming the other flavours.

It’s not as sweet as you’d expect — the bun isn’t particularly sweet, nor is the cream. Most of the sweetness comes from the jam (some kind of berry when I went, though I guess it changes). It’s a bit odd at first, though the more subtle sweetness definitely wins you over after a couple of bites.

My only real complaint is that if there was almond paste in there, I couldn’t taste it. It’s a shame, because I could definitely see it matching well with the bun’s other flavours.

Country 041 – Serbia (Mississauga Serbian Food Festival)

Published on September 7, 2016September 7, 2016 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 2520 Dixie Road, Mississauga
Website: http://www.msff.ca/

Well, they can’t all be winners.

It’s probably my own fault. Impressed by the notion of roasting an entire bull on a spit, I decided to check this festival out. I showed up at around 7:00, which was an hour before they were due to close. This is probably where I went wrong.

The bull on a spit was nowhere to be seen (it had clearly been carved up and disposed of by then) — a warming tray full of meat was all that remained.

I ordered a roast bull sandwich and went on my way.

There were a couple of fairly big issues here. For one thing, I’m pretty sure the aforementioned warming tray wasn’t actually being warmed by anything, so the very fatty beef was lukewarm and congealed. That wasn’t the best.

The other, more pressing issue was that the bun — which tasted like a variation on an Eastern European flatbread called lepinja — was cold, stale, and unyielding. I’m sure it was okay at some point much earlier in its life, but by the time it got to me it was better suited to be a doorstop, or to weigh down documents on a very windy day, or as a chew toy for an overactive dog.

I took a couple of bites, then brought the remainder of the sandwich home, tossed the bun, warmed up the beef, and ate the rest in bread that was actually suitable for human consumption.

It was a fine sandwich, I guess. It was a bit on the tough side, and there didn’t seem to be much to the spicing of the meat other than it being vaguely salty, but it was alright.

Country 040 – India (Sweet India)

Published on August 21, 2016August 21, 2016 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 7126 Airport Road, Mississauga
Website: http://www.sweetindia.com/

Remember when I was saying that a nicer-looking restaurant and a clientele that doesn’t match its ethnicity were both tell-tale signs that a place like this might not be all that great? Well, here’s a definite exception to that rule: Sweet India is both very nicely designed and, when I went at least, around halfway full of people who looked like they’d fit in comfortably with the cast of Friends.

It was also one of the best meals I’ve had since starting this blog.

The restaurant is laid out like any number of food court joints; they’ve got food in warming trays, and you can pick what you want. I went with the vegetarian thali, which comes with your choice of three different dishes, raita (a cold yogurt-based cucumber salad), rice, and a basket of naan bread.

I think it’s hard to tell from the picture what an obscene amount of food that is, but seriously: look at the fork and knife for scale. The plate is about the size of a cafeteria tray, and it was crammed with food. Not to mention the basket full of naan, and the generous serving of dessert.

Suffice it to say, after eating all that I was ready to lie down and go into a food coma. And for less than ten bucks, it’s a pretty amazing deal.

The three dishes in the top row of that tray are: aloo baingan, a flavourful mixture of eggplant and potato; chana masala, a chickpea curry; and aloo methi, a potato dish cooked with methi leaves (also known as fenugreek).

It was all really good, though with its fragrant intensity, the aloo baingan was clearly the star of the show. It was a flavour bomb in the best way possible. It helps that the accompanying ultra-fresh naan was superb; it was the perfect combo of lightly crispy outside and chewy inside.

The dessert was moong ka halwa, a creamy, pudding-like dish made mostly from lentils. Indian desserts tend to be a bit of an acquired taste, and I was so full at that point that I was kind of hoping I wouldn’t like it so I could take one bite and throw the rest out. But it was so good. So of course I had to eat the whole thing, food coma be damned.

If I had one small complaint, it would be that while everything was fairly spicy, it does feel like the spice level has been toned down to accommodate the aforementioned Friends-like clientele. A bit more of a fiery kick would have been nice, but everything was so amazingly tasty that it really didn’t matter.

Country 039 – Turkey (Kabab 49)

Published on August 7, 2016 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 5308 Dundas Street West, Etobicoke
Website: http://kebab49.com/

So, here’s a fun fact (an actual fun fact, not E!’s version of a fun fact): Turkish doner was actually the first version of that particular type of vertically-rotisseried meat, preceding the similar shawarma and gyro by at least a few decades. I always assumed that shawarma was the O.G. vertical rotating meat-stack, but nope, apparently it’s doner.

And the version they serve at Kabab 49? It’s superb. I ordered the mixed doner plate, which comes with a salad, a big pile of sliced onions, a generous portion of delightfully greasy rice, a few slices of freshly-baked bread, and of course, enough shaved meat to feed a small family.

Everything on the plate is quite good (well, except for the onions — raw onions are the worst thing in the world, and no one is ever going to convince me otherwise), but the highlight is that amazing doner. The mixed plate features chicken and a mix of veal and lamb, and both were fantastic. The veal and lamb was a bit better than the chicken, but both were moist, had plenty of the crispy bits you’re looking for in this type of thing, and were really well seasoned.

The meat works just as well with the rice as with the fluffy, fresh bread. Eventually, you eat enough of the doner and discover a couple of bonus slices of bread at the bottom of the plate, suffused with tasty meat grease. And then you walk out of the restaurant clutching your stomach and wondering how and why you finished the whole thing, because seriously: that plate is enormous. But you kept eating it well past the point that common sense would dictate that you stop. That’s how you know it’s something special.

Country 038 – North Korea (Chaban)

Published on July 24, 2016July 24, 2016 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 872 The Queensway, Etobicoke
Website: http://chabantoronto.com/

No, this technically isn’t a North Korean restaurant — I think it’s safe to say that all Korean restaurants in Toronto (or any city, really) are South Korean. But I painstakingly researched how the cuisines in North and South Korea have diverged since their split in 1945, and I tried to order a dish that’s closest to what North Koreans actually eat.

Actually no, I didn’t do that at all; I just went to a Korean restaurant and ordered what looked good. Because I’m lazy, you see.

I ordered the Chaban Dolsot Bibimbap (it’s always a safe bet to order a dish that features the restaurant’s name). For the uninitiated, bibimbap is a dish in which plain rice is topped with various vegetables and meat, an egg, and is usually served with a tasty Korean hot sauce called gochujang on the side.

This particularly version is served in a piping hot stone bowl (which is where “dolsot” in the name comes from), which makes the rice along the edges delightfully crispy.

I’m generally a pretty big fan of this dish, and this might just be the best version of it that I’ve had. It has a really nice balance of flavours, and just the right amount of kick from the hot sauce. It’s one of those dishes where every bite is a little bit different. It’s pretty great.

Country 037 – Nigeria (Village Suya)

Published on July 10, 2016 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 900 Rathburn Road West, Mississauga
Website: http://www.villagesuya.com/

I think I should preface this review by saying that Village Suya has only been up and running for a few weeks; I wasn’t too crazy about the meal I had here, but it’s quite possible that they still have some kinks to work out. So you might want to take this review with a grain of salt.

For the uninitiated, Suya is Nigerian-style grilled meat, typically sold by street vendors on skewers. This particular restaurant serves beef and chicken; I went with beef, and got it with a side of fried rice.

The rice was easily the highlight. Though it looks fairly similar to Chinese-style fried rice, it definitely has a personality of its own. It’s a touch on the oily side (my mouth felt grease-slicked for at least an hour or two after eating), but it has a satisfying curry-tinged flavour, and just enough of a kick to put some sweat on your brow.

And whatever they’ve marinated the beef in is actually pretty tasty; it’s nicely seasoned, with another solid dose of spice. But (and this is a fairly big but) the beef was excessively chewy and dry — it’s kind of unpleasant (of course, this didn’t stop me from eating almost all of it, but I digress).

The meat was either severely overcooked, or they’re using a cheaper cut of beef that’s meant to be stewed (or, more likely, a little from column A, a little from column B). It’s too bad, because if the meat were a little bit more tender (or, more accurately, tender at all), it would probably be pretty good. The elements, otherwise, are all there. But when the beef is that jerky-like in its consistency, it’s kind of tough to enjoy — even if the flavour is pretty good.

Country 036 – Afghanistan (Naan and Kabob)

Published on June 26, 2016November 12, 2016 by Michael NusairLeave a comment

Location: 30 Bristol Road East, Mississauga
Website: http://nandk.ca/mississauga/

This is a probably a bit of a generalization, but there are a couple of pretty dependable rules of thumb for judging if an ethnic place is worth your time:

A nicer looking restaurant probably doesn’t mean you’re going to get better food. Don’t ask me why, but when it comes to non-Western eats, the tastiest stuff tends to come from sketchy little hole-in-the-wall joints.
This one is super obvious — a place filled with people who come from the country of the restaurant’s cuisine is always a good sign. If people who know what the real deal tastes like think the food is good, then the food is probably good.

Now, it doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but Naan and Kabob fails both tests.

For number one in particular, this seems like a particularly unfair complaint to make. What? Your restaurant is bright, clean, and stylishly designed? Ugh, no thanks. Kind of an insane critique, isn’t it?

Of course, arbitrary rules aside, the easiest way to determine if a restaurant is worth your time is to eat the food. Which I did, obviously.

I ordered the Qabuli Palau, Afghanistan’s national dish (according to Wikipedia, at least).

It’s pretty simple: spiced rice, topped with shredded carrots and raisins, and served with meat (in this case, braised veal, though you can upgrade to lamb for a couple of bucks). They also serve it with a bowl of chicken curry on the side.

It’s not bad. The rice is a little bit bland, and the sweet carrots combined with the even sweeter raisins makes for a dish that’s a bit more cloying than it probably should be, though the savoury chunks of braised veal help to offset some of the sweetness. However, while about half of the meat was unctuous and fork-tender, the other half was stringy and dry.

There’s the curry, too — and it’s not bad — though to be honest, I’m not sure why it was even there. It felt a bit out of place with the other flavours in this dish.

The whole thing is decent enough, but I can’t imagine anyone walking out of the restaurant raving about it.

Maybe there is something to those generalizations after all…