CapitalDining.ca

Review date: 2009-10-29

Ju Xiang Yuan is a Chinese restaurant on the eastern fringes of Chinatown. My first visit was a few months ago, when its neighbour, the Mekong, was booked solid. Standing ravenous in the rain, having already plugged the meter, we dashed in.

Since then, we've dashed in a few more times, and each time walked out feeling well-fed, well-looked-after, not much poorer and happily burdened with leftovers for lunchboxes.

Though hardly suave, Ju Xian Yuan has taken some pains to pretty up. Here are the iconic red lanterns and paper wall hangings, but here, too, is a bit of glass block, chairs that match, an upholstered banquette and tables draped with gold-braided cloths, covered with clingy sheets of heavy plastic.

The Ju Xiang Yuan menu, contained in a red leathery cover, is a thick photo album of sorts - glossy pictures of a few of the 200 or so dishes accompany the names. You are given a sheet of paper and pen and invited to order by code. It can take hours. And you can sometimes find a photograph that looks just exactly what you want, only to discover it has been deleted from the menu with a swipe of white out.

This is a smorgasbord of mostly northern Chinese food - pickled things feature, as do hot pots, congee and dumplings - but there's a big range here. There are the dishes my parents would recognize, or you can venture into more traditional offal offerings - stir-fried pork intestine with stomach and kidney, say.

I'm a sap for dumplings - steamed dough wrapped around a little ball of seasoned ground pork - so simple, so moreish. The siu mai arrive in a traditional dim sum steamer, and have a gentle flavour. In the northern-style dumplings we enjoy chunks of shrimp within the minced pork, though we scrape off the icky peanut sauce, gritty with raw sugar.

The noodles, called jar cheung on the menu, are squared, dense and chewy - handmade in house. They're spread with a nubbly pork and soybean paste sauce, laced with green onions and served with shredded cucumber.

Some might find the fried lamb too oily. I found it perfect, as the fat still clinging to the meat gave the dish its flavour, the cumin and caraway seeds gave it pow and the meat was tender, threaded with onion, garlic, greens and myriad dried red chilies. Not as menacing as you might think.

Menacing arrives next - sizzling kidneys in an iron pot, with chilies competing for the role of main ingredient (and mostly winning). I'm still sweating.

Don't start with the skewered barbecue beef. I'm still chewing.

Better the barbecue squid, coated with the same chili-cumin rub you find clinging to many things here.

Enormous quantities of minced garlic flavour the deep fried lengths of tofu with peas and enoki mushrooms, as well as a dish of roasted eggplant with pork, peppers, chillies and diced tomato. There is barbecue duck, quite tender, its bronzed skin not as crisp as we'd like, but tasty enough. Chunks of chicken are moist and fragrant in a pot roast plump with mung bean noodles, and flavoured with cilantro, five spice powder, chillies and Chinese mushrooms.

There is a better selection of beer than wine and a wide assortment of fruit shakes. Try the avocado.

Cuisine: Chinese
Cost: $: Main dishes, $8 to $16

Hours: Open Monday, 4 p.m. to 11 p.m.; Tuesday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m.

Accessibility: Two steps to entrance; washrooms small.

641 Somerset St. W., Ottawa, ON
613-321-3669

Review date: 2009-10-22

Prices are low at Topkapi, portions are large, and the food is very good. (Let's see if that doesn't get people through the front door.)

Mind you, you have to walk a bit through the muck of the Preston Street construction to get to it. But if there is a restaurant deserving of your patronage during these torn-up times, this is it.

It seems to me there has been a Turkish option on the Preston Street strip for a very long time. Even before Little Italy became more culinarily diverse, when it was almost exclusively a neighbourhood of pizza-pasta-pollo, there was the Istanbul Bosphorous (in the space where you now find the Black Cat Bistro). In 2004, a restaurant called Efes opened in the space vacated by Italian restaurant Modo Mio. I liked Efes well enough, though at the dinner hour it seemed clear that patrons - or the lack of them - missed the liquor licence.

Last year, Efes changed hands. Its new owner, Nail Erdogan, worked with the name for a bit, then renovated and reopened as Topkapi in the spring.

Topkapi is the name of an ancient palace in the city of Istanbul. But it is also the name of a 1974 mostly take-away restaurant that stood at Kent and Gloucester streets, owned by the Erdogan family, and where the young Nail used to scrub pots.

(And if anyone is the slightest bit interested, Topkapi is the title of a 1960s film starring Melina Mercouri, Maximilian Schell and Peter Ustinov, but no one who runs the place had heard of it and only my husband seemed to care. A lot. Damn that BlackBerry.)

Where the portrait of Frank Sinatra once hung when this place was Modo Mio (My Way) you now find one of Raif Erdogan, next to the kitchen where his son now cooks some 35 years later.

So it's a good story. And it's a well-told story, both in written form in the thick, red, bound menu, and by our delightful server with the long red hair, who powerwalks around this place wearing little white gloves, bestowing good food and charming advice.

Start with the house red lentil soup. Lemon, thyme, dried mint and sumac perfume it. Then if you're game or a gang, share the mixed meze platter, which brings a range of cold appetizers - thick, gritty humus, cinnamon-perfumed and pine nut-stuffed grape leaves, a superb aubergine salad rich with onion, roasted red pepper and garlic, a wedge of feta, a blob of thickly herbed yogurt, and a marvellous mash of tomato, peppers and chilies (the spiciest mound on the plate) - the whole presented with a bit more panache than usual. This comes with thick house-made pide - round loaves, an inch deep, cut into triangles, soft in the middle and crisp on the outside, and bearing no resemblance to the industrial pita product sold in supermarkets. Two things: The dish improves as it warms to room temperature, particularly the dolma (I have a horror of fridge-cold rice), and could we please have more olives? One is never a good thing.

For the main dishes, the menu is divided into lamb, chicken, beef, fish and a children's section, but I went straight for the "chef's special." The iskender kebab is remarkably tender doner (thin shavings of vertical spit-roasted lamb and beef) on a bed of toasted pita cubes soaked in a fresh tomato sauce, served with thick, tangy yogurt. A lamb shank falls nicely off the bone, spilling onto a light eggplant mash. Also on the plate - garlicky beans, grilled tomato and green pepper, forgettable rice, and fabulous fried potatoes threaded with caramelized onion. Pilia izgara is a supreme of chicken, flattened, rubbed with oil, lemon and thyme and grilled to juicy goodness.

There is sweet baklava (served sorrily with fake cream and chocolate syrup), which is all very well if that's your thing. For my six bucks, the better bet is the milky custard called muhallabi topped with coconut and crushed pistachio.

Round off the evening with Turkish coffee - just a foamy shot or two of the thick, dark, syrupy brew.

The wine list is limited, mostly mainstream stuff, and with only two Turkish offerings. Unlike the food prices, the price charged for wine is more wincing.

And while I'm whining a bit, the fresh red roses on the linened tables and the white candles in their tall glass stands could have coped better with a softer light, just as the bare walls could cope with just the right art. Food this fresh, this good, and service this warm deserve ambience to match.

Cuisine: Turkish
Cost: $$: Starters, $4 to $9; main dishes, $16 to $24

Hours: Open daily for dinner

Accessibility: Steps to entrance, washrooms in basement.

484 Preston St., Ottawa, ON
613-230-8828