CapitalDining.ca

Review date: 2009-12-10

Hotel restaurants are often overlooked in a catalogue of a city's top eateries. We're programmed to favour - generally with very good reason - chef-owned restaurants, where the dining experience tends to be more intimate. Or at least more stamped with personality.

With their layers of bureaucracy, their financial and behavioural obligations to a distant mother ship, and with their guest-based mandate to please all, hotel dining rooms don't generally measure highly on the gastronomic excitement meter. The food can taste industrial, as though it's been cooked by a committee. And a while ago.

But I have to tell you I had a flawless dinner at Wilfrid's last week.

So as I sat in my spacious armchair at my white-draped, well-spaced table in this elegant dining room overlooking the East Block of Parliament Hill and, as plate after plate of very good food was delivered by a woman of grace and good humour, it did strike me that as hotel dining rooms go, this one should not go unnoticed. It serves food that far outshines that at most chain hotels. Food that can compete with many fine freestanding restaurants, and food that has an admirable local content.

A new-to-me local boy, executive chef Geoffrey Morden, has relocated to the Fairmont Château Laurier from Winnipeg and, before that, from Lake Louise. A Stratford Chef School graduate (I'm always impressed with its alumni), Morden continues the Château's tradition of looking in its neighbourhood as much as possible for supplies of food and wine and, lately, trumpeting sustainable seafood. The Ocean Wise stamp (recommended by the Vancouver Aquarium as an ocean-friendly seafood choice) appears beside half the dishes.

And the stuff is well cooked too. The Dungeness crab cake is dense of crab and swanky flavoured, enhanced with a crunchy fennel-jicama slaw. Pretty pink polka dots of chili oil colour the surface and punch the flavour of a lobster broth, the rich soup enhanced with Kaffir lime leaf and roasted corn. In its middle, you bob for delicious nuggets of lobster meat.

Roasted yellow peppers, avocado and apple chips invigorate a carefully chopped tartare of Ahi tuna, dressed sweetly with a sticky reduction of maple, cider and sesame oil.

And yet more seafood: in a wide bowl, lobster, shrimp, and scallop - each juicy, buttery, really quite perfect specimens - nestled on whipped potatoes, served with a bundle of vegetables, tied with a scallion stem and moistened with a gentle tomato broth perfumed with tarragon.

Lest you think Wilfrid's has turned completely fishy, there is also a section - though we didn't go there - for prime rib and steaks.

And there's boar. Which was, at dinner No. 2, the boring bit. The meat was tough, served too rare, without a nice crusty crust, and largely unseasoned. So we ate instead the hefty cake of chunky potato, thyme and leek (dynamite) and more of those perfectly correct vegetables. Though for $45, one does wish for more than damn good taters.

Also at that second dinner, clearly not as flawless as the first (and revealing some slips in service standards, with long and lonely waits between courses), carpaccio, the thin leaves of meat blackened with peppery edges, the raw flesh melt-in-the-mouth delicious.

A Canadian twist - chunks of local goat cheese feta in place of the usual parmigiano shavings - worked well, as did the arugula, but the dish missed an acid component, and could have used some moistening too. The advertised horseradish cream was no more than a drib, and the capers were missing.

A lunch burger was fine - a bit dry, a bit dull - but OK enough.

Desserts are all made in house and are beauties, and Wilfrid's wine list is impressive in both its Canadian content and its international entries. Those wishing to splurge will have plenty of choice.

Wilfrid's is pricey. This is a hotel dining room, let us not forget. Most mains are priced in the 30s and 40s. Seems to me, if it wants to compete with first-rate free-standing restaurants, and attract more Ottawa locals, it should drop its prices. It might fill more seats - at none of my three visits have there been more than 20 diners.

And the $16 bill for an evening of parking (street parking can be a problem here) contributes to the hefty bottom line.

Cuisine: Canadian
Cost: $$$$: Starters, $10 to $16; main dishes, $25 to $45 description

Hours: Open daily for breakfast, lunch and dinner

Features: Wine list worth noting.
Accessibility: Fully accessible.

1 Rideau St., Ottawa ON
613-562-7043
website

Review date: 2009-12-03

Savana Café

Savana Café is that rare thing. Found on the southern edge of the downtown core, it's an intimate restaurant housed in an old home, a fixture on the dining out landscape in Ottawa for 22 years, and still very much owner-driven for all those years. You still find Cathy Dewar at the door most nights, greeting and settling guests in one of her three small and cheery rooms.

And for nearly all those years I've known and liked this place. Although it's had more to do with the vibe than the food.

You'd have to be a real grump not to love its merry mood, its sunshiny music and the Caribbean palette of colours that cover its dining rooms, particularly on wintry nights, when a rum drink, a reggae sound and a roti wrap may seem just the thing.

And yet, Savana's food has never risen far above OK, some dishes more OK than others.

But this year, Dewar got herself a new chef who has kept - as far as I can tell - two, maybe three familiar favourites. Otherwise young Michael Radford has completely revamped the food.

Radford comes to Savana via a slew of restaurant kitchens in Ottawa, but most lately, he was sous chef at Restaurant E18hteen, under the leadership of Matthew Carmichael. He also brings to Savana some life experience in the tropics. During his teenage years, we learn from the website, he lived with his family in Barbados.

The food at Savana Café is now more ambitious; dishes still look south and east for inspiration - chiefly to the Caribbean and to Thailand, though also to Latin America and Japan - but traditional dishes now come out of his kitchen with well-judged twists.

My first Radford meal at Savana started impeccably. His rendition of the Jamaican classic, salt fish and ackee, was remarkably good. Crack through the panko-crusted cod croquettes, perfectly milked of their saltiness, and a molten middle spilled into a yolk-coloured sauce (ackee purée, apparently) while the tomato sofrito (a Cuban-style tomato sauce) and a vibrant lime cilantro mayo brought balance, depth and colour.

Order his beet salad and you get a parade of pleasures - a rough chop of al dente beets on a bed of arugula and other fresh greens, plus pickled cucumber, queso fresco (fresh cheese), pappadum crisps, and a shallot-raisin-coriander jam round with vanilla.

Scallops are beauts. Crunchy outside, almost raw in, sporting a canopy of chives, they rest on an autumn hash of oyster mushrooms, smoked pork belly and lightly curried fingerling spuds, with an apple and sunchoke slaw. Lime leaves boost the sauce and almonds tint the bubbling foam that finishes the plate. At least that should have finished the plate. The mélange of broccoli and cauliflower florets, though perfectly cooked, seemed amiss, too pedestrian.

Truffle oil perfumed the purée of cauliflower that held the luscious short ribs. These were tamarind-glazed, served off the bone, just fatty enough, topped with deep-fried flakes of fresh horseradish and parsley.

At lunch, the mussels were excellent - small, but fresh-tasting, in a winey broth perfumed with Thai basil, livened with chorizo, and filled in with corn. On the side - a pot of two potato fries, most excellent, and a piquant aioli.

Desserts are accomplished. A deconstructed key lime parfait - really more a semi freddo - features all the parfait-ish elements on the plate: a smart brick of key lime mousse, rich and lusciously puckering, on a long plate with sauces - mint, raspberry, milk chocolate, a swath of caramel - plus a pile of ginger-coconut crumbs and a spring of mint.

A chocolate brownie was deeply chocolatey, its texture perfectly chewy, though the rum raisin ice cream we were promised turned out to be vanilla one night, banana another (both delicious, but not what we wanted). The banana cheesecake that's been on the Savana menu forever has been reconfigured into two cheesecake balls, wrapped in sweet crumbs, and served with a chocolate and a raspberry sauce. For these delights, they charge $6.50, which seems to me a deal and a half. Order two.

A final taste, just to confirm all was swell, didn't go as well. A chicken roti was weighed down with large chunks of too-dry chicken and a glut of chickpeas. And the mahi mahi was uncomfortably fishy, its chipotle-lime lacquer bitter, and the vinaigrette from the side of Savana slaw (which we enjoyed) drifted too much.

But as the song says, two out of three ain't bad.

New chef, new menu, nouveau cooking means new prices, right? Not so. Cost remains at an accessible level with main dishes in the high teens and low twenties. May explain why the rooms are packed.

Cuisine: Caribbean
Cost: $$: Starters, $6 to $13; main dishes, $17 to $23 description

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

Features: Patio dining.
Accessibility: Steps up to front door.

431 Gilmour St., Ottawa, ON
613-233-9159
website