Lovely food in Lowertown
Das Lokal offers dining worth the detour
Just a few hundred metres separate the ByWard Market from the heart of Lowertown. But in dining-out terms, the gulf could scarcely be greater.
The go-go, tourist-wooing Market, Clarence, Murray and Dalhousie streets are packed cheek by jowl with restaurants, including some of Ottawa’s most chi-chi examples. A Google map that designates the area’s eateries has more red dots than a child with measles.
Meanwhile, venerable, residential Lowertown, a few blocks to the north, is practically a restaurant-free zone.
But since it opened in late September, a warm and cosy outlier recently emerged on Dalhousie Street at St. Andrew Street. Das Lokal Kitchen + Bar has been attracting neighbours, and guests from further away, with well-crafted, distinctive food that nods smartly but not single-mindedly to German and European influences.
Its chef is Harriet Clunie, 28, who was recently in charge at Back Lane Café and before that in several kitchen brigades on Murray Street (chef de cuisine at Navarra, stints at Murray Street and Sweetgrass Aboriginal Bistro).
At Das Lokal, her concise fall dinner menu — six appetizers, seven mains and four desserts — strives for homey-but-elevated dishes that balance an appealing range of comforting and bracing flavours, textures and colours. Her best plates are interesting, sustaining and comforting, with myriad, impeccably cooked, seasonal vegetables vying for attention with carefully prepared, fully flavoured proteins.
I could be perfectly happy to return for the starter, main and dessert that I had last week.
Corn soup ($8) was thick and wholesome, with a dollop of crème fraîche, some assertive smoked paprika and streaks of leek oil fancying up its surface.
A bowl of braised rabbit ($26) was perfect fall fare, with meat that was moist and mellow after a beer-enhanced soak mounded on top of nubbly, crisped spaetzle. With its cavalcade of scenestealing accompaniments (earthy shiitake mushrooms, discs of pickled radish, shallot and carrot, a ring of herbs and a thick slice of seared, caramelized, salted king oyster mushroom topping it all), this generous dish has the makings of a signature item.
Naturally, Black Forest Ice Cream Cake ($9) was a layered confection, topping a superior brownie with macerated cherries and a scoop of lightly salted chocolate ice cream. Whole cocoa nibs were tucked in, providing some surprising and bitter crunch.
Other diners at my table received equally impressive plates, beginning with some veg-heavy appetizers. A tomato plate ($13) starred superior heirloom and fried-green specimens, accented by a puddle of aioli, crisped pancetta and basil. Clunie paid tribute to all things oniony when she heaped sweet braised onions and chèvre on a tightly proportioned, crisp, flaky slab of pastry (“tartelette” is Clunie’s preferred term), and offset this item with pickled onions, curls of scallion, crisp shallots, fried capers and toasted onion seeds. A mound of frisée completed the $12 app.
A salad of organic greens ($11) pointed to the European inspirations beloved by Das Lokal’s co-owners Frédérique Tsai-Klassen and Barbara Wery-Boole, with rye croutons, birch syrup and a dressing spiked with caraway seeds.
Clunie’s pickerel main course ($25) was one of the better fish dishes I’ve sampled recently. Its seared star item was juicy and clean-flavoured, while more aioli was an optional flavour boost. Florets of romanesco, made toothsome and then seared, sparked conversation. Green beans and sautéed greens added heft. A helping of German fingerling potato salad drew thieving forks from around the table.
The vegetarians at the table appreciated two fully loaded plates. In one, a puck-sized but nicely textured rosti of spaghetti squash ($18) was crowned with a poached egg and nestled with a raw kale salad, beets and other seasonal veg. In the other, Clunie had layered wild rice, braised leeks, mushrooms several ways, a herb pistou and topped the dish with a haystack of crispy fried leeks and toasted pecans to create a complex meat-free winner ($19).
Our table tried two other desserts ($8) — a sweetened tartelette with caramelized apple slices and a creamy, vanilla-spiced panna cotta — but to me, neither topped the Black Forest-themed mealender.
Das Lokal’s lunch menu features 10 items and those three desserts. It’s another compact list, with some lighter, simplified spins on dinner-menu mains, such as a duck confit salad and a more constrained pickerel dish (both $16). I had the flat iron steak ($18) and a buddy had the German pork hamburger ($14). Both were well-made and came with fine, stubby fries and salad.
Service for both meals was chatty, enthusiastic, and, it must be said, too familiar. At my dinner visit last week, it turned out that an acquaintance I’d known for years was working his first night as a server. He greeted me by name, and, from that point, I was, of course, busted.
For her part, Clunie wrote me this week that while the kitchen was naturally attentive about my table’s dinner, the food was not substantially different from what other guests ate. “The food we send out is prepared with my guidance to my very high standard,” she wrote, and that rings true for me.
On both of my visits, Das Lokal was packed. Clunie’s lovely food aside, it’s an inviting and even feminine space, stylish thanks to its funky red lamps over the bar and deer’s head mounted on the far wall, but softened by Doozy candles, white walls and curtains.
There’s a white upright piano beneath the deer’s head, which I’m told is played on weekend evenings. Otherwise, there’s plenty of ambient noise in this 48-seater, generated when it’s filled with happy, chatting diners.
Some extra attention to the acoustics would be nice. But otherwise, Das Lokal, very early in its game, is getting so many details — from the welcoming vibe to the captivating food — just right.
It even has its own parking lot, dating back, I think, to when Colonel Sanders was the address’s commanding officer. So, if you’re not a Lowertown local, you have no excuse not to bypass the ByWard Market and make Das Lokal your destination.