author of Ottawa Cooks, food & travel writer, culinary judge.
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Articles by Anne DesBrisay
Taste&Travel Magazine •
There… that’s the jerk tree,” Samuel told me, gesturing at a small, quite elegant-looking shrub, festooned in spikey white blossoms. We were winding our way along the rutted road from coastal San San to our Rio Grande destination in the interior of Portland, Jamaica. Samuel was my driver for a planned river rafting adventure and, as it turned out, for much of the week I spent in the north-east of this beautiful island.
Taste&Travel Magazine •
Chef Garth Lewis, affectionately known as the “jerk chef” at Geejam Hotel, gifted me a jar of his signature jerk sauce for which I later secured the recipe. Garth tells me the secret, other than the meat’s long marinade (at least 24 hours) and the pimento wood for smoking and roasting, is to source Jamaican wild cinnamon, also known as cassia or cinnamon bark. The sauce will keep in the fridge for 6 months.
Great Scoops: Recipes from a Neighborhood Ice Cream Shop: Haley, Marlene, Ryan, Amelia, DesBrisay, Anne: 9781773271651: Books
Nut-free * Sesame-free * Soy lecithin-free * Guilt-free * Ice cream for all Ice cream really does make everything better. Compiled with love by the team at The Merry Dairy, Great Scoops features a cheerful collection of 80 easy, custard-style and vegan ice creams and delectable desserts.
Kim Thúy among finalists for Taste Canada awards, which recognize Canadian cookbooks and food writing
The Montreal writer is nominated in the regional/cultural cookbook category for Secrets from My Vietnamese Kitchen. Kim Thuy is a Montreal writer and is the author of the cookbook Secrets from My Vietnamese Kitchen. (Appetite by Random House, Jean-François Brière) The Taste Canada Awards annually celebrate the year's best in Canadian food writing. Gold and silver medal winners were awarded across five English-language and five French-language categories.
Taste&Travel Magazine •
Chef Nelly Buleje started at the Grand Geneva Resort right out of high school as the late night room service cook. He stayed for seven years working his way up to chef de cuisine, before leaving to cook around the world. Seventeen years later, he’s back, now as Executive Chef in charge of nine resort restaurants and 11 kitchens. I had a stunning meal of many plates in a Grand Geneva private dining room, but this warm salad, which Buleje served with succulent lamb, was a favourite.
Greener Grape Growing
I sometimes envy farmers. I appreciate I’d likely make a lousy one, but surely the satisfaction of physical labour, outdoorsy living and tending to things that grow would be real and rewarding? Particularly rewarding when those things could end up in a wine glass. Jordan Winery Then I meet Klarissa Kruse. And any fanciful city-girl notion of what that life is like gets firmly shaken out of me by one who knows it well.
Taste&Travel Magazine •
A lovely light, fluffy cake served at Jordan Winery, with a scoop of the house olive oil ice cream, fresh berries and whipped cream. I used Jordan’s wonderful estate olive oil that I brought home with me for the recipe, but whichever oil you use, make sure it’s of a high quality.
Figure 1 Publishing
Award-winning food writer Anne DesBrisay brings together recipes from forty-one of the Capital region’s most inspiring cooks. From fine restaurants, food trucks, and farmhouse kitchens, here are signature dishes, favourite staff meals, and traditional family recipes from one of the most interesting and diverse food cultures in the country. Beautifully photographed by Christian Lalonde, Ottawa Cooks showcases more than eighty delicious recipes—and the gifted chefs who create them.
The Wickaninnish Cookbook: Rustic Elegance on Nature’s Edge
Of the cookbook covers on my kitchen shelves few shout ‘place’ more forcefully than this one. It has no pretty picture of its subject, The Wickaninnish Inn, or of its food, or of the eight chefs who have contributed recipes to its pages. Instead, the cover image is of wood, a dimpled imprint of the cedar that dominates the design of this family-owned hotel, hand-adzed by local craftsmen. The introductory photographs of The Wickaninnish Cookbook also set the stage — a place that knows it place.
My 17 Favourite Dishes of 2017 | Ottawa Magazine
I ate this in the last gasps of last December, too late to include in my roundup of good plates of 2016, so it’s being squeezed into this one. There aren’t many chefs who can dream up a vegan dish with such complexity of flavours and textures, and plate, just as well, a kick-ass, fully-loaded beef burger. West de Castro of Clover is that chef.
Ben Baird teams up with Inuk chef Trudy Metcalfe at Flavours of the North | Ottawa Magazine
Ben Baird has been busy. And the chef has got some nasty burns to show for it. “What are those?” I ask the co-owner of Ottawa Streat Gourmet. I’ve come to his prep kitchen on Sheffield Road to meet Inuk chef Trudy Metcalfe and learn more about the Flavours of the North event for which they are collaborating. And maybe to charm my way to tasting whatever it is that’s making the kitchen smell so fabulous. “Roasting bones,” was the answer to the burning question. But not just any old bones.
DesBrisay Dines: Das Lokal | Ottawa Magazine
News of a new chef has brought me back to Das Lokal. That, and the thought of a steaming mug of Gluhwein by the outdoor firepit on a cold November night. Austrian-born Christian Wallner, by my (rough and possibly inaccurate) count, is head chef number four at the four-year-old Dalhousie Avenue, German-leaning restaurant. He’s been in place since last spring. I’ve always found the food at Das Lokal to be reliably filling and tasty, but also reliably uneven.
DesBrisay Dines: Capital Fare Cafe | Ottawa Magazine
If you only knew chef Resa Solomon-St. Lewis from her catering company Baccanelle, or from various farmers’ markets, a good number of charitable events, and a bunch of food festivals around town, you will be pleased to know she’s found a home base for her terrific Caribbean food. Tucked into the ground floor of the Phenix Professional Building on Montreal Road, the Capital Fare Café is bright green, small and windowless.
Briana Kim of Café My House wins at Gold Medal Plates | Ottawa Magazine
The twelfth annual Canadian culinary road trip known as Gold Medal Plates rolled into Ottawa last night. Our city was the ninth of 11 cities to hold the competition — only Toronto now remains in the national campaign. More than six hundred guests, chefs, sommeliers, brewmasters, winemakers, athletes, musicians, and volunteers packed the Shaw Centre to eat, drink and make merry.
DesBrisay Dines: MeNa | Ottawa Magazine
MeNa opened in 2014. Last year, the Preston Street restaurant shut down and papered-up for a six-month renovation. When it reopened in July, the L-shaped room held a longer bar and an exposed kitchen, prettied for viewing. The grey-brown of its rough plank walls had been whitewashed. If the tiles behind the bar weren’t white before, they’re white now. The balance is black — the floors, tables, chairs, and the open bar shelves.
DesBrisay Dines: The Albion Rooms | Ottawa Magazine
The general wisdom is that hotels, other than the super posh ones, don’t have good restaurants. Or at least they don’t have restaurants you would seek out if you weren’t bedding down in a room above them. But The Albion Rooms in the Novotel Hotel on Nicholas Street, serves food, drink and good times and is a drawing card in its own right. It’s assisted by a separate, street entrance – a rare treat for a hotel dining room.
DesBrisay Dines: Oz Kafe | Ottawa Magazine
There were nuisances, as I remember, along the road to the literary land of Oz — wicked witches, flying monkeys, a field of poisoned poppies — difficulties that can’t really be compared to our search for Oz in Ottawa. While we might not have to contend with flying monkeys, finding Oz is still challenging. The new home of the 13-year-old Oz Kafe, relocated from Elgin Street to 10 York Street, is not on York proper.
DesBrisay Dines: Tamis Cafe | Ottawa Magazine
You need to look pretty hard to find restaurants that serve food from the Philippines in this city — even in Toronto, where the Filipino population is sizeable. Why, I asked my Filipina-Canadian friend Margarita, can I find Vietnamese or Thai food in every corner, and yet there are so few Filipino restaurants? “Well, that’s easy,” she told me. “You’ll never ever make it as good as your mother’s, so why try?” Tamis Café cleverly brings mum to the kitchen.
DesBrisay Dines: Le Hibou | Ottawa Magazine
Just suppose you have promised out-of-towners some stunning fall colours on the first day of October. So you set off for a hike in the Gatineau Hills and… all is shades of green. Not a splash anywhere of autumnal splendour. In your humiliation you offer a second guarantee — a good lunch, at least! And there, in a Wakefield café you find the colour you had promised: more electric blue than autumnal, but still… Le Hibou has recently emerged from a complete makeover, and its new walls vibrate.
DesBrisay Dines: Hung Sum | Ottawa Magazine
The recent re-opening of Hung Sum has been greeted with mixed emotion, judging from what I’ve read online. Some writers are delighted by the food, the service; others are mad as hell for having to wait too long to receive either. I’m more in the first camp, though I’ll admit to heeding the warnings/whinging about queues and delays, and planning my Hung Sum visits carefully. No weekends, no Labour Day Monday, no peak hours.
DesBrisay Dines: Bite This | Ottawa Magazine
For the many who have already bitten, this won’t be news but I’ll say it anyway: Bite This is about as perfect a place for lunch as the western end of the city can muster on a stunning September afternoon. The last time I ate at this ‘cook shack’ on Richmond Road (tucked in behind ‘Urban Turf’, across from the Superstore, just west of Kirkwood) the place was more outhouse in size, attached to a food truck.
DesBrisay Dines: Nikosi | Ottawa Magazine
It was one of those unusual summer-of-‘17 evenings when the skies were clear, the winds soft and bugs were in hiding, and we felt lucky to be where we were: in Wakefield, on the large front deck of Nikosi, a ‘Bistro-Pub’ on Riverside, open since January. Our table allowed a clear view of the Gatineau River, and that, combined with good pub food starters, and a well-made gin and soda with spruce syrup made us mighty happy.
DesBrisay Dines: Burrito Sensei | Ottawa Magazine
So, let’s try to sort this out. Sensei is Japanese for teacher. A burrito is a (Tex-)Mexican tortilla wrap. Poké (which rhymes with okay and means ‘to cut’ or ‘section’) is a centuries-old dish from the Aloha State — and it is mostly what the four-month old Burrito Sensei on Bank Street is about. Food is served either in a bowl or (essentially the same ingredients) wrapped in nori, like a fat maki roll, but eaten with hands like a burrito — minus the pinto beans, sour cream and jack cheese.
Antipazzo makes slow progress in Old Ottawa South | Ottawa Magazine
In a 2008 review, I described Napo Farm to Table as “a cozy little keeper in Ottawa South.” The Bank Street restaurant was a strong entry in a list of the best new restaurants back then, and I still recall, with some pleasure, its panzanella salad with grilled squid. I closed the report with this: “Napo is off to a grand start. May it stay put.” It didn’t. Napo joined a string of restaurants that have tried to make a go of it at 1542 Bank St. but failed.
Anne DesBrisay: Chez Anh | Ottawa Magazine
Chez Anh is a tiny, modest restaurant of lime green walls with blackboard and bookcase, filled, respectively, with the day’s specials and a motley collection of garage sale cookbooks. Outside is made cheery with hanging flower baskets and smart grey awnings. Garage doors let in the summer breeze. Dogs are parked on the sidewalk most days, patiently whining, while owners pick up banh mi to go.
DesBrisay Dines: Meat Press | Ottawa Magazine
It’s been a summer of feeding my vegetarian nieces, so I was primed for a meal at Meat Press. Chef and co-owner, Étienne Cuerrier, is a wizard with all things flesh, bone and fat, and his hours and menu are now extended beyond lunch to include evenings, three days a week. Dinner is the reason I’ve returned to this little Armstrong Road sandwich shop/boucherie, just off main street Hintonburg. Now with a liquor license. I wrote about the family run Meat Press in late 2015, when it was pretty new.
DesBrisay Dines: Dumpling Park | Ottawa Magazine
Have you ever made dumplings? They are a pain in the neck. Good ones, anyway, require patience and dexterity – all that stuffing, dampening, folding, crimping, steaming, frying. Especially the crimping bit. I’m very bad. Which is why I tend to let others make them for me. Lately, I’ve been letting the women at Dumpling Park do the work, and I recommend you do likewise. Their dumplings are divine and the space they’ve created is darling.
DesBrisay Dines: Bella’s Bistro Italiano | Ottawa Magazine
When I’m empty and feeling due for some pampering, I head to Island Park Esso. There, on the corner of Wellington Street West and Island Park Drive, a trio of chipper young men descend upon my car at a gallop while I stay in it, dry and cosy, justifying the extra cost with cheering thoughts about supporting nice kids hired to pump gas.
Bye Bye Black Cat — Anne looks back at the Cafe's 'nine' lives | Ottawa Magazine
“The best thing going in Ottawa – maybe the only thing going in Ottawa – is the Black Cat Café. Make sure you get there your first week. It will make the unbearable seem less so.” Ahem. Yes. The “unbearable” referred to was my impending move to Ottawa. The year was 1990 and the speaker was a friend who had lived in Ottawa, in her words, “six hellish months” before scurrying back to Toronto.
DesBrisay Dines: Beechwood Gastropub | Ottawa Magazine
I figure five restaurants have called 18 Beechwood Avenue home over the past two decades. For me, it was known as the Michael restaurant: operated, since 1997, by a string of them. Trattoria Zingaro (chef Michael Cummings), Ambiente (chef Michael Guy), Farbs Kitchen and Wine Bar (chef Michael Farber), and now, finally, by a Harriet.
DesBrisay Dines: Le Resto | Ottawa Magazine
You would be forgiven for judging this little Chelsea Plaza bistro, sandwiched between a Freshmart and a Rona, as somehow unworthy of your dining out dollar – simply by the look of it off Route 105, and by virtue of its place in the world. It even has a lame name.
DesBrisay Dines: Aunt Thelma’s jerk pork pie | Ottawa Magazine
According to celebrity telly chef Jamie Oliver, jerk pork is Usain Bolt’s favourite meal. It says so in Oliver’s intro to the Caribbean classic stew, a recipe I clipped a while ago. Apparently, Bolt is a sap for his Aunt Lilly’s version. I’ve developed a fondness for Aunt Thelma’s. She pulls her pork and stuffs it in a pie. You probably know the traditional Jamaican patties – hand held turnovers filled with spicy ground beef (they make terrific ones at The Piggy Market).
DesBrisay Dines: Coconut Lagoon (chapter two) | Ottawa Magazine
Indian restaurants in this city are known mostly for their all-you-can-mound-on-a-plate buffets – fairly affordable, unquestionably filling, and overwhelmingly northern India-inspired. A la carte, their menus are pages long, sealed in plastic, and organized either by the sauce or the protein. You chose the style of curry and apply the meat, with a separate section for vegetarian dishes. Other than tweaks to prices, the bill of fare rarely changes.
DesBrisay Dines: Mezze Mondays at Fairouz (and elsewhere) | Ottawa Magazine
Let’s talk about Monday: it could be the new Friday when it comes to dining out. More and more restaurants are finding creative ways of filling seats on the long considered most wretched day of the week. When I think of chefs who first started shaking things up on Mondays, I think of Arup Jana of Allium. A fire above his Holland Avenue restaurant forced him to close and renovate. That was 10 years ago. When he reopened, he made Monday nights tapas-only.
DesBrisay's Top Picks for Diverse Dining | Ottawa Magazine
Back in the day, “ethnic” dining in Ottawa meant pizza and chop suey or some sort of gloppy Tex-Mex creation. Today, new culinary trends in the capital include northern Chinese, West African, Cambodian, and South Indian. With any luck, Syrian will be next. As new groups arrive in Ottawa, many set up restaurants: small, humble places for the homesick to share food. Some gain wider appeal. Many quietly disappear.
DesBrisay Dines: Sur Lie | Ottawa Magazine
Sur Lie is the new venture for sommelier Neil Gowe and chef Nick Berolo. It’s found in the space where Murray Street Kitchen used to feed us (very well, and for nine years, thank you). Prior to MSK, it was Bistro 115. With Sur Lie, French cuisine has been restored, minus the pink walls and lace curtains. It was the bitter end of December when Murray Street served its last supper. Sur Lie opened in early February, after what must have been a nutty five-week renovation.
DesBrisay Dines: OCCO Kitchen | Ottawa Magazine
OCCO: it sounds… I don’t know, Portuguese. Or maybe Italian. And then there’s the matter of the flag that brands this 200-seater in Orléans. It’s green, white and red. So yes, Italian. Though upon closer inspection, the red is really more pink. Curious. Then we notice the photos on the walls: white clapboard homes, lighthouses, a frigid ocean. There’s also the matter of the menu – burgers, cod cakes, chowder, tacos, fish and chips. No veal saltimbocca in sight. Something doesn’t jibe.
Chefs & Shows pairs top chefs with great theatre | Ottawa Magazine
“Come hungry; leave entertained.” That’s the thinking behind the GCTC’s Chefs & Shows, a marriage of the culinary and theatre arts where the dining foreshadows the drama. It’s the brainchild of Sheila Whyte of Thyme & Again Creative Catering and Michael Moffatt, chef/partner of Beckta, Play, and Gezellig restaurants. For one performance of each of the GCTC’s six mainstage productions this theatre season, the first act of the evening is a pop-up, prix-fixe communal dinner.
DesBrisay Dines: Growing Futures | Ottawa Magazine
“The most frightening words we hear at the mayor’s office,” Jim Watson told the crowd at the Innovation Centre on April 6, “is ‘Karen Secord is on line one.’” That got a laugh. Anyone who knows Karen Secord, manager of The Parkdale Food Centre, knows she is a woman of many ideas and much energy, and delights in finding the right people to carry out those ideas. The crowd was there to celebrate the community building project called Growing Futures, launched in 2015.
DesBrisay Dines: Citizen | Ottawa Magazine
For much of our date night at the new Citizen, my husband’s eyes looked longingly at the women seated next to us. (Practically cuddled next to us: tables are snugly spaced here.) Both were chomping down on the Spicy Fried Chicken Sandwich, a teetering tower of brown crunch and pale goo tucked in a puffy bun. It had, I allow, serious eye appeal. And sound appeal: it makes noises, this construct, that blends with the sound of women moaning. Our table was covered largely with vegetables and raw fish.
DesBrisay Dines: Sutherland | Ottawa Magazine
Sutherland is the latest venture for chef Warren Sutherland. His four-month-old restaurant is a big, airy, industrial-looking space, with an open kitchen and coffee/cocktail bar, found on the ground level of the Kavanaugh Condominiums on the northern fringes of Beechwood Avenue. It’s a full-service place, open every day for coffee, breakfast, brunch, lunch, tapas, cocktails, dinner and afters. Which means Sutherland’s neighbours living up above need never leave home.
DesBrisay Dines: The Pho Shack | Ottawa Magazine
This column is about hunching over a really good bowl of soup on a wintry-spring day, chopsticks in one hand, spoon in the other, and feeling the gloom I walked in with evaporate. The parking ticket just received? Whatever. The snow that won’t go? This too shall pass. All seemed well with the world again. Such is the power of good soup and kind service.
DesBrisay Dines: Pookie’s Thai | Ottawa Magazine
In its tenth year of service, Pookie’s Thai is hardly a secret. Still, the little Thai restaurant has always felt tucked away, found, if you know where to look, at the end unit of a mini mall alleyway just west of Woodroffe. The awkward location – Unit 7 at 2280 Carling Avenue – was traditionally something of a restaurant killer. My earliest memories are of an eastern European restaurant in that space. Then it was the home, for a short time, of the long running Lebanese restaurant Kamals.
DesBrisay Dines: The Moonroom | Ottawa Magazine
I’m still thirsty three days later. Bacon-wrapped olives were my undoing. They were fine snacks for encouraging cocktails – which they do very well at The Moonroom – or just guzzling water, which is replenished often by a busy, friendly staff. But man, they were salty. Though anyone who orders bacon-wrapped olives should expect as much. Considering The Moonroom has no kitchen (snacks/tapas/pintxos/small plates are prepared in the bar space during the day) food isn’t the real draw.
DesBrisay Dines: The Poor Chefs Competition 2017 | Ottawa Magazine
What does $3.15 get you? If you’re Harriet Clunie, winner of this year’s Poor Chefs Competition, it gets you a year’s worth of free knife sharpening from the fine folks at Knifewear. It also gives you the glory of seeing your name on a shiny silver cup. And probably bragging rights that a plate of butternut squash, brown rice, and a poached egg can get you the trophy.
ANNE'S PICKS: Anne DesBrisay swoons for the Whalesbone Sammich | Ottawa Magazine
Growing up, Fridays were fish nights in my family. Lots of you may also have grown up with this culinary custom, centred on the Lenten belief in atonement and privation. I guess the thinking was that meat was a treat, and since no treats were allowed during Lent, or on Fridays during Lent, or — heck — let’s just say no treat-meats on Fridays ever, folks were forced to eat fish.
WEEKLY LUNCH PICK: A delightful club sandwich at Hintonburg Public House (shame about the price) | Ottawa Magazine
Although it’s been a few years since the culinary gentrification of this corner of the city began in earnest, it still must be startling for Hintonburg’s old timers to see the steady flow of well-dressed uptowners stopping in for a bite — to see Volvos where Volvos never parked before. I’m trying to remember the order of things. It seems to me Tennessy Willems, Burnt Butter, Alpha Soul, and Back Lane launched the foodie revolution in this hood.
FINGER-LICKING GOOD: The wonders of spicy West African barbecue chicken | Ottawa Magazine
If you’ve a hankering for spice-rubbed, wood charcoal-roasted spatchcock chicken like you used to find in the tiny Charlotte Street joint called Yre’s’ (neon orange and lime green slapped on crumbling plaster walls, demolished in 2010) — head to Vanier. Yre’s seems to have been reborn in two places: YKO on McArthur Avenue (where Yre’s chef Moussa Coulibaly first landed, I understand) and the new Pili Pili on Montreal Road where Coulibaly now cooks. Or so I’m told. No sign of him at my visit.
DESBRISAY DINES: The Canadian Culinary Championships Edition | Ottawa Magazine
Anne DesBrisay is the restaurant critic for Ottawa Magazine. She has been writing about food and restaurants in Ottawa-Gatineau for 25 years and is the author of three bestselling books on dining out. She is head judge for Gold Medal Plates and a member of the judging panel at the Canadian Culinary Championships. Eleven Canadian chefs from eleven Canadian cities converged in Kelowna, BC this past weekend and cooked their hearts out.
DesBrisay Dines: Clarkstown Kitchen & Bar | Ottawa Magazine
“El Meson,” I wrote in a review of it in 2007, “is an old-fashioned neighbourhood restaurant, gracious, comfortably-kitschy, and largely unchanged in all the years I’ve known it.” I suppose I’d known it for the twenty-some years José Alves ran it (with neighbourly care, dressed in traditional penguin suit). The food was Iberian – Spanish and Portuguese – and though not what you’d call exciting, it was steady and reliable, and the wine cellar was well stocked.
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