ENJOY THE FLAVOURS OF INDIA
Try By Ward Market eatery’s treats
Someone at Kochin Kitchen must have a playful sense of humour. At the new South Indian restaurant on Dalhousie Street, salt and pepper shakers grace the tables. But for the life of me, I can’t imagine the eatery’s vibrantly seasoned, enthralling food needing any extra flavour pick-meups.
I’ve been twice and each time was wowed by the potently spiced yet varied and nuanced dishes. The best, most sumptuous fare here delivers stunning, long-lasting flavours, deftly balancing blends of pepper, ginger, cardamom, chilies, curry leaves, turmeric, caramelized onions and much more as required.
Named after a major port city on India’s southwest coast, Kochin Kitchen and the highly regarded Coconut Lagoon on St Laurent Boulevard are the only Ottawa restaurants that specialize in the cuisine from India’s Kerala province. In fact, Kochin Kitchen’s chef and co-owner Anil Oorkolil formerly cooked at Coconut Lagoon, and on paper, their menus are similar.
I’m not in a position though, to find one superior. That’s a call to be made after much delicious research. I can say, based on my two visits to Kochin Kitchen and one off-duty buffet lunch at Coconut Lagoon, that there were some differences between comparable dishes that I ate. For example, pepper lamb, while far from shy at Kochin Kitchen, was more peppery at Coconut Lagoon.
Kochin Kitchen replaces Cafe Spiga, which had served Italian and Portuguese food for more than two decades until it closed Dec. 27. Kochin opened Jan. 10 in turnkey fashion — salt shakers, wine cellar and all, I guess — and it retains Spiga’s clean, contemporary ambience and blond tables. For now, the restaurant stresses its ethnicity with a Keralan wall hanging and piped-in Indian classical music.
Our servers at dinner last weekend, including co-owner Anil Nair, were friendly, attentive and confident, offering dish details and recommendations. Ultimately our curious foursome chose main dishes en masse, limiting ourselves to two suggested starters — five plump, brightly flavoured coriander shrimp ($10) and a massive masala dosa ($10), the comforting, stuffed South Indian crepe — from a larger selection.
Once the main dishes and rices arrived, we were hard-pressed to pick a favourite. Ranking highly with me was the luscious lobster masala ($24), its tail meat respectfully cooked and elevated by a chili-tinted, sweetly oniony sauce. Almost as impressive was a moist, meaty salmon fillet smeared with its own delectable masala, wrapped in a banana leaf and grilled ($20).
Kodanadu chicken ($18) was lick-the-bowl good, but a more polite move was to sop up its sauce with parotta — dense, grilled flatbread. Morsels of fried and, admittedly dry, beef ($18) were more a snack with the Kingfisher beer, winning us over with their dusky flavour profile and the accompanying chunks of coconut.
Roasted eggplant ($9) received the royal treatment, merged with a thick, dark complex sauce that brought heat, acidity and an almost chocolatey richness to the table. Pumpkin ($9) underwent its own alchemy with coconut, green chilies and curry leaves.
Turmeric-stained lemon rice ($4) was a nice change. More intriguing, and soothing, was curd rice ($4), which mixed basmati with lightly seasoned yogurt, like a cross between raita and rice pudding.
Next time, as far as rice goes, I want to try dum biryani ($20), in which rice and meat are baked together, sealed in dough.
For dessert, we opted for the more western scoop of vanilla ice cream with caramelized banana ($4), which nonetheless had small hit of ginger to it, and the old-country lentil payasam ($3), a warm, somewhat sweet slurry of lentils puréed with coconut milk and spices.
I also tried Kochin Kitchen’s lunch buffet ($14.50) for unlimited quantities of the restaurant’s spicy fix. A creamy tomato soup had good gingery bite. Pepper lamb was fall-apart tender and intense. Salmon shone in a bright-yellow curry. Thoran was a fine mince of vegetables. Lemon rice had good freshness and fluff.
The few complaints I’ve had were minor. Some, but not all, okra pods in a bowl of sambar soup and aviyal, a mixed vegetable stew, were fibrous and inedible. The stuffed dosa was just a tiny bit grainy. At dinner, the lamb in the pepper lamb could have been a little better trimmed. At the lunch-buffet steam table, the chicken breast in the otherwise-excellent butter chicken — not just sweet or tomatoey as run-of-the-mill versions are, but complex and nutty — was a bit overcooked.
But I would happily eat around these flaws rather than skip the flavourable pleasures of these items. And as for the other mouth-watering dishes at Kochin Kitchen, I wouldn’t change a single spicy thing.
Once the main dishes and rices arrived, we were hard-pressed to pick a favourite.