Viva Cuban flavours
Havana Cafe offers some solid mains, strong starters
Last month I popped in to the Havana Cafe in Ottawa South on a whim, needing a quick bite before the downbeat at a nearby jazz concert.
For some reason, I thought that the café’s business was sandwiches, and I anticipated having a classic Cuban sandwich of pork, ham, cheese and pickles for dinner. (Sandwiches are offered at lunch, I was told, along with the dinner menu’s items.)
To my surprise, chef /owner Oslaide Guerra’s café and catering business had more to offer in the way of food and ambience. There was pleasant seating for 20 or so people in colourful, decorated surroundings. On the walls were scenes and licence plates from Cuba. Salsa and merengue music wafted. There was a tiny bar that seated three and could keep them loosened up with rum and tropical cocktails in perpetuity.
Within a few minutes, I was tucking in to a platter of ropa vieja ($14), that great Cuban comfort-food dish of braised, shredded beef, mixed with onions and peppers in a piquant, olive-studded tomato sauce. It was a surprisingly good meal in a hurry — its meat tender, its sauce nicely flavoured, its rice and beans sturdily seasoned, its grilled vegetables well prepared and presented on a skewer.
My server commented that the dish was her favourite on the menu, and I decided to make a few more trips to see whether I agreed.
Of the platters that I and others sampled during those followups, nothing quite hit the high of the ropa vieja, although one came close.
From best to worst, here’s how those platters — all served with the same mélange of rice, vegetables, and batons of fried yuca and plantain — stacked up. Cilantro chicken featured tender dark meat in a savoury sauce and was almost as good as the ropa vieja. Pork ribs came with a winning sour-orange sauce but were more than a little chewy. Shrimps with garlic tomato sauce were not bad, although they were just a bit overcooked, and there were too few of them. Roast pork was the least appealing meal — there was too much gristle on the thin slices of pork, and not enough flavour.
So, of Havana Cafe’s mains, I’m enthusiastic about two of five that I’ve sampled — not a great percentage. However, the restaurant’s standing went up with me after my last visit, which focused on appetizers that were consistently strong. Indeed, a tapas approach to our meal that night did the trick just fine.
There was nothing refined about the starters we ordered, most of which were deep-fried to order. Indeed, they came to the table in little paper containers that brought to mind takeout fare from a resort’s beachside snack shack. And yet those items struck us as much more carefully and conscientiously prepared than that.
Garlic pork bites ($9) were addictive little morsels, kidfriendly in the extreme. Slices of fried plantain ($7) were ungreasy and served with a bracing avocado crema that packed a hot and sour punch.
Havana Cafe serves just one kind of empanada ($9), but it’s a winner. Its mince of shrimp was pleasing, its exterior crisp and then yielding, and the shredded slaw, a sweet drizzle and a side serving of chili sauce (surely from a jar, but potent and appreciated) all pitched in.
I’ve never been one to look forward to tamales, but I will now, if only because of what they make at Havana Cafe. The steamed masa ($9) was packed with flavour, unlike the bland tamales I’ve had in the past, and it received a further boost from a topping of toothsome chicken.
Somehow, I’ve been to Havana Cafe three times without trying any of its desserts. Once, there wasn’t enough time. The second visit, I was too full. The third visit, I was again pretty full, and frankly not that excited by the options (coconut lemon square; alfajores, a kind of cookie; and mango ice cream), which our server said were not made in-house. In fact, she pointed us in the direction of Stella Luna Gelato Café down the street.
In Guerra’s repertoire, there’s one other dish — if we can call it that — that I’m curious about, but it’s served off-site. As a caterer, he’ll come by your backyard and throw a pig roast with all the fixings for $25 a person.
Although I had a mixed impression of what I ate at the modest café, I enjoyed the best dishes sufficiently to mull what pretext I could offer to justify Guerra’s hauling a hog over to my place.