Asian fest offers taste of the exotic to Ottawa

OTTAWA — It is the smells that first hit you in Ottawa’s Chinatown on the last weekend in July.

Cooks frantically working over blazing hot skillets and sizzling vats produce a gastro bouquet of exotic Asian fare, from fried squid with kimchi fries to (Japanese pancakes), and there is no shortage of lineups of people waiting to buy and taste.

Some dishes — squid-on-astick 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 ran until Sunday.

Chinese-born Huang, who owns a bubble-tea shop in Ottawa’s Chinatown and helped start Ottawa Asian Fest three years ago, said 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. Most of those — nearly 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.”