lime – Around the World in 196 Plates

Location: 104 Portland Street, Toronto
Website: http://chubbysjamaican.com/

No, technically Chubby’s doesn’t qualify as a restaurant from Antigua and Barbuda. It’s Jamaican. It’s right there in the name.

But there are a bunch of tiny Caribbean countries, and for the purposes of this blog, compromises are going to have to be made. Jamaican cuisine is probably going to stand in for pretty much every country in that area, because Jamaican restaurants are everywhere. The rest of the Caribbean? Not so much.

Chubby’s is a bit of an odd one. It’s a far cry from the typical hole-in-the-wall Jamaican place you’re expecting, with a twee, hipster-friendly dining room that looks like it’s been scientifically engineered for social media appeal (and indeed, if you look up the restaurant on Instagram, there are far more twenty-somethings taking selfies than pictures of the food).

I was worried that the food might be an afterthought, but I tried a couple of things and they were both great.

First up: the saltfish fritters, which are lightly crispy on the outside, with a chewy texture that’s reminiscent of glutinous rice. True to its name it’s both salty and fishy, but not excessively so; it’s nicely balanced. The strong flavours are complimented well by the mango-lime-papaya salsa, which is sweet and surprisingly spicy.

I also tried the curry goat, which features a generous amount of fall-off-the-bone tender meat in a fragrant curry sauce. It comes with a side of rice and a small helping of sugary-sweet mango chutney. The chutney seems way too sweet at first, but it kind of has the same appeal as eating cranberry sauce with turkey. It grew on me.

Location: 1120 College Street, Toronto
Website: http://pomegranaterestaurant.ca/tavoos/

I think I’ve mentioned before that I love lamb. Beef is great, obviously, but there’s something about the intense flavour of a good piece of lamb that I find irresistible.

Takht-e Tavoos’s version of kalleh pacheh — an Iranian soup made with chunks of lamb hoof, tongue, and cheek — is almost certainly the lambiest dish that I’ve ever had. The flavour was intense. I loved it.

The broth is thick and rich, with a really pronounced meaty flavour. There’s a Middle Eastern dish that consists of rice and lamb (I had a version of this at Reyan in Mississauga), and this was almost like a soup version of that; there’s no rice here, but the spices are very similar. It’s almost too rich, but a spritz of lime adds some brightness and helps to round things out.

And the chunks of lamb (which were generous) were so good. Certainly, with its hodge-podge of face and feet, it might be a bit of a tough sell. But, for the most part, the meat here was amazingly well prepared.

The cheek, which was unctuous and luxurious, was the best of the bunch. It was melt-in-your-mouth tender, with a face-punch of amazingly lamby flavour.

The tongue was almost as good. It certainly looks a bit off-putting (it’s a full tongue, so there’s no mistaking what it is), but the meat was amazing. It doesn’t have the intense fattiness of the cheek, so if you’re fat-averse, this might be more your speed.

The hoof was easily my least favourite of the three. This is a harder cut of meat to get right — it’s mostly just a lot of really thick skin and collagen, without a whole lot of actual meat. The skin here was a bit too rubbery, and the meat almost non-existent.

Still, given how good the other two cuts of meat were, it’s hard to complain too much. Plus, the dish comes with some fresh, tasty flatbread on the side. It tastes just as good on its own as it does dipped into the soup.

Honestly, my biggest complaint about this dish? It’s an absurd amount of food. Between the heaping bowl of rich soup, the substantial pile of meat, and the two sizable slices of flatbread, it feels more like something that The Rock should be eating during a training regimen than a meal for a normal person. I (mostly) finished it, and I felt obscenely full for the rest of the day.

Tag: lime

Country 076 – Antigua and Barbuda (Chubby’s Jamaican Kitchen)

Country 069 – Iran (Takht-e Tavoos)