OTTAWA ASIAN FEST
It was most likely the smells that visitors first noticed as they walked around Ottawa’s Chinatown during the last weekend in July.
Cooks frantically worked over blazing hot skillets and sizzling vats produced a gastro-bouquet of exotic Asian fare, from fried squid with kimchi fries to okonomiyaki aka (Japanese pancakes), and there was no shortage of people lining up for a taste.
Some dishes – squid-on-a-stick and stinky tofu, common in Toronto’s much larger Chinatown – were only available for the three days of Ottawa Asian Fest, which is designed as a traditional Asian night market that the late US celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain popularized on his Emmy Award-winning CNN series, Parts Unknown.
“We want to expand people’s horizons and experience food from different cultures,” said Simon Huang, project coordinator of the annual festival that ended on Sunday.
Chinese-born Huang, who owns a bubble-tea shop in Ottawa’s Chinatown and helped start Ottawa Asian Fest three years ago, told the Xinhua News Agency in an interview that the goal was to hold an event not focused on one Asian culture and, like similar night markets in Toronto and Vancouver, showcase dishes from China, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam and Nepal, along with entertainment from Asian-Canadian singers and a traditional dragon dance.
Ottawa has a modest East and Southeast Asian population of nearly 80,000, according to the latest Statistics Canada figures from the 2016 census. Most of those, or almost 48,000 residents, are of Chinese descent.
But Ottawa Asian Fest’s appeal clearly crosses over those ethnic lines, as Huang observed on the opening night on Friday when he was struck by the many “non-Asian” faces he saw in the mainly young crowd hopping from one food kiosk to another.
“Food draws people, and we’re using food as a hook,” he said. “We’re definitely bringing a lot of people to Chinatown who’ve never been here before.”