CapitalDining.ca

Review date: 2009-05-28

The day after I submitted my largely happy review of Hot Peppers number two - open on Queen Street in the space that was once a Mayflower Pub - my husband rang from his bus stop.

"Hey, you know that Hot Peppers restaurant you like? Well I'm watching these guys putting up a Green Papaya sign."

Spike that review.

It's taken me a year to forgive them, but hunger has driven me back to Hot Peppers, the original, and now one and only, owned by the mother of the daughter who runs the Green Papaya chain.

This Hot Peppers occupies a space that was once the trendy Italian restaurant Zibibbo, and is now well embedded. If you aren't familiar with Hot Peppers, or the space it occupies, you might be surprised by the dark, designery look, or the eclectic blend of music it plays.

You might also be pleased by the wine list, which actually makes an effort to match the character of this complex food with the bottles on offer.

You can look at the Hot Peppers menu as either yawningly familiar or you can approach it licking your lips in anticipation of all those familiar favourites. There's the usual list of appetizers, noodle and rice dishes, curries of various colour and intensity, stir-fries featuring various proteins, including lamb, and sometimes specials that seem like the same specials offered everywhere.

We start with squid. It's not unlike everyone else's calamari - a frozen product, chewy, bathed in a peppery garlic sauce. The crab cakes are better, served with the usual too-sweet chilli sauce. There are decent spring rolls, and tender enough satay, rubbery but well seasoned fish cakes, and too-fishy mussels with that same chilli sauce.

Tom yum is always a good test. Hot Peppers' version of this classic Thai soup can boast a solid broth - fragrant, perfectly seasoned, with straw mushrooms, coriander, scallions, and a fiery finish. I'd start with it. And then I'd highly recommend a salad. The beef salad is a winner, featuring rare strips (a rare treat) of well-marinated steak, and so is the mango salad, with juicy ribbons of sweet, perfectly ripe mango in a spiced-up jumble of crunchy cashews and shrimp.

Seafood tends to be weak in Ottawa's Thai restaurants, and Hot Peppers isn't an exception here. One night the weakest dish is the salmon - steamed to dry, tough, tasting of its frozen start. But I give it another go a few weeks later, after extracting a promise from our delightful server Celeste that it is fresh, and my second stab at it reveals a much happier fish, moist and yielding in its gingery broth.

Noodle dishes, like the crowd-pleasing pad Thai, are moist and tasty, though tend to be on the sweet side. I prefer the racier pad ki mow.

It may not be very Thai, but the green curry with lamb curry is very tasty, the meat pleasantly muttony, the vegetables bright, the Thai basil and lime leaves in balance with the coconut milk, not deluged by it. The pad ped tar leay (seafood with chilli paste, basil, lime leaf) is described as hot, and for once this is not an understatement. Guaranteed to bring sweat to the brow.

There is a decent mango cheesecake with coconut ice cream if you want something sweet to temper the heat.

Service provided by Celeste is a monumental drawing card here - though at the close of my final visit here, she announces the menu is about to be completely revamped. These Hot Peppers People seem to delight in sabotaging accurate reporting at every turn. Let's hope the new menu steers away from the usual stuff, and gives us a short list of novel, vibrant and deliciously unfamiliar dishes. I think this kitchen is up to it. The stylish dining room, intelligent service, and cut-above wine list all suggest an adventurous spirit at play.

Cuisine: Thai
Cost: $$: Starters, $4 to $7.50; main dishes, $10 to $15 description

Hours: Open for lunch, Monday to Friday; daily for dinner

Accessibility: Steps to entrance; washrooms upstairs.

495 Somerset Street West, Ottawa, ON
613-233-4687
website

Review date: 2009-05-21

This, over the phone with Hino restaurant.

Me: Would you have a table for four people at seven o'clock this evening?

Long pause.

Me: Hello?

Male voice: Yeah, I guess so. (Dial tone.)

Me: Hello? Hello?

We arrive at seven. Five tables are filled, one of them with a group of eight. The besieged-looking waitress glances up at us and immediately buries her head in her order book. We wait. We wait some more. And still we wait. Chef/owner Terry Hino eventually leaves his open kitchen and approaches us. "One hour wait. Minimum. No service for one hour."

He then turns on his heels and walks back to his stove: the bodily equivalent of a dial tone.

Twenty pairs of eyes fix on ours. They've been through this, and they've clearly decided to wait it out. We don't. We head to a place half a kilometre east, also on my list of restaurants to be reviewed. It's packed. "Hello, hello, how are you? Yes, yes, certainly, there is a table upstairs for you. Please follow me."

And we have a fine evening.

The problem with Hino, as far as I'm concerned, is Terry Hino. For close to 25 years, he's been chef, owner, bartender, usually sole server, sometimes chatty, sometimes in a funk, usually cooking for a largely empty room, most often a one-man show.

"I work for me. Nobody wants to work, so I work for myself," he tells us, as he hands out menus at our second visit a few weeks later. (I would suggest the help has fled.)

To be sure, the man has fans. I've seen them. I know some of them. This restaurant is their Cheers. They sit at the bar in front of the open kitchen and chat with the man, laugh, have a beer, a plate of food.

To be kind, Terry Hino is what you'd call a character and if you like your restaurants to be run by characters, you'll like this place. But in the eighteen years I have known Hino Restaurant, I remain baffled by its mercurial nature. Yet I return, sometimes to confirm my bafflement, sometimes because I'm hungry and I know I can get a good meal here for a good price, and if I take a good book, I won't notice the cheerlessness.

I certainly don't return for the décor. It's not unattractive from the outside - with its smart black and grey exterior and stylized Hino sign - but inside it remains a dive. Worn black benches, tired carpet, stained ceiling, bare Formica tables with chipped edges and sticky spots, poster art. The same black Hino shirt hanging on the same grey wall. "Shabby chic" is how chef Hino describes his place. "Neglected" would be my word.

The menu - which hasn't changed in years - is unremarkable. It's the specials that elevate it. We always order the gyoza, pork-filled dumplings, steamed, then fried to crisp, the filling moist and well seasoned, the dipping sauce spiked with chili sauce. The hot and sour soup, whenever offered, is a winner, and there is usually a daily sushi choice, when it isn't California rolls, worth ordering. Scallops are luscious beneath a ginger sauce, the shrimp have some flavour, the chicken kara-age are tender, crisp morsels, just greasy enough to be fun.

For lunch, a warm teriyaki beef salad served over bouncy greens hits the spot. At dinner, the steak with brandy peppercorn sauce is perfectly cooked, the meat crusted, rare and yielding, the sauce balanced. Salmon is fresh and nicely underdone, bathed in a wine sauce studded with capers, and the miso curries with their French-flourishes and Japanese-finishings are reliably tasty. There is usually a decent cheesecake on offer, or a slice of chocolate cake, and always banana fritters with ice cream, sometimes in a cinnamon dusted orange sauce, sometimes less interestingly on their own.

The wine list remains pitiable - French plonk, white or red, full stop. Better to order a Japanese beer.

So the food at Hino is pretty good and the prices are in line. But whatever you may think about eating his food, it's nothing compared to what's eating Hino.

When and if Terry Hino decides to bury himself in his kitchen and stay there, hire some staff (God help them) to take phone calls and welcome folk (all folk) with some grace and civility, I will be back.

Cuisine: Japanese - Sushi
Cost: $$: Starters, $6 to $8; main dishes, $12 to $17 description

Hours: Open for lunch and dinner Monday to Friday, dinner only Saturday.

Accessibility: Fully accessible.

1013 Wellington St., Ottawa, ON
613-722-1129

Review date: 2009-05-14

Le Panaché has always seemed to me a safe, reliable choice for French dining. It doesn't have the suave look of the big boys - it is, in fact, quite drab-looking, nothing much from the outside, and not much more from the in - but if you're in the market for competent French cooking, smooth service and a fair price, Le Panaché works pretty well.

But this time round I find myself conflicted. How to describe Le Panaché? Solidly reliable and timeless? Dated and coasting? Probably both. The name suggests innovation and flair, but you won't find much of either here.

"And of course, Madame, we have our signature dishes, the tulipe of snail in a Gorgonzola cream sauce, and the house rack of lamb, with Dijon garlic and rosemary." I stifle a yawn. These have been Panaché signature dishes for a decade. And here arrives is the same herb bread with its trio of flavoured butters. The same veal kidneys with two-mustard sauce, the same 'decadent' crepe.

I ask if the signature lamb is from a local farm? No, it's from New Zealand. Is the ostrich from the area? He's not sure, but doubts it. I'm curious about the sea bass. "Well, Greenpeace might not like it, but it's actually delicious."

One evening we order the seven-course 'Menu Surprise' and find ourselves re-eating much of the menu we've sampled over two previous dinners, just in smaller portions.

But perhaps you are reading this thinking if it ain't broke…. So what if the place is dated looking and the food is largely unchanging? They treat me well, I know what to expect from dinner, and the decor suits me fine. Which is what Le Panaché does. It suits. It's fine. Most of the opening moves appeal. The foie gras "torchon" is buttery and of good liver flavour. It comes with rounds of toast and a prune and onion marmalade. The giant shrimp with ginger, coriander and chili sauce is nicely balanced, the shrimp crunchy-good. (We re-taste it two weeks later on the Menu Surprise, where it comes with a shot glass of a lovely shrimp bisque.) Le Panaché's salad has always been a pleasure - a mountain of fresh, hand-torn greens piled up with treats, well dressed.

Still, we find the celery root soup too salty. The sweetbreads, though a generous portion and well cooked, are set in a dark brown sauce with a floury finish, and without any evidence of the promised Calvados to provide a bit of welcoming sweetness to the meat. And the tuna tartar is too heavily roused with soy sauce. The character of the fish is lost under the onslaught.

Of the main dishes, the venison (with a spiced plum and port sauce) has the greatest appeal. On the Menu Surprise, there is roasted duck, luscious pink slices, with the same plum sauce, served with squares of roasted golden beets and caramelized parsnip. After duck, a granitée, and then we are served a course of sea bass, with a smoked salmon and dill butter (also a mainstay on the regular menu.)

It was a good meal, but it didn't feel carefully thought out, (fish after duck and after a fruit ice) and for $70 per person, it seems to me it should have been. It was five courses of protein followed by chocolate cake, and none of it would be much of a 'surprise' to anyone familiar with the Panaché menu.

It strikes me that Le Panaché is lacking a feminine touch. A woman might suggest re-locating the notice about gift certificates from the back of the toilet. She might point out that the booths across from the bar are too low for their tables; she would surely arrange the blinds (some are up, some down, some on a slant), set straight the brown table cloths over the densely arranged tables. She might even suggest that the Menu Surprise contain some greens at some point. Le Panaché, in short, could use a bit more panache.

Cuisine: French
Cost: $$$: Starters, $10 to $18; main dishes, $24 to $31; Table d’hote, $42 to $49;

Hours: Open for lunch, Tuesday to Friday; dinner, Tuesday to Saturday

Features: Wine list worth noting.
Accessibility: Call ahead. Washrooms accessible..

201 rue Eddy, Gatineau, Quebec
819-777-7771
website