Méli-Mélo - May 2023
'A WAFFLE THAT MAKES YOU SING'
Press croissant dough on a waffle grill and voilà, a “croffle” is born. This hybrid popularized in South Korea offers “all the layers of a buttery croissant, but in the shape of a waffle,” says James Choi, owner of Sharpfle Waffle in Hintonburg. While Choi is keen to introduce the novel pastry to Ottawans, for him, it’s less about a gimmick and “more about sharing good flavours and food — the croffle is just the platform.”
Choi opened his doors in December 2021, which coincided with two lockdowns followed by the trucker convoy, which made for a bumpier start than he could have anticipated. Choi enlisted two close friends to help him get things off the ground: Dongman Lee, a Q Grader (the equivalent of a coffee sommelier) and Jay Lee (currently the head chef at Aiana.) Driven by Choi’s love of “really good coffee and really good desserts,” Sharpfle Waffle has since been busy with folks sitting down for a savoury croffle sandwich, picking up a cinnamon sugar croffle to go (Choi’s favourite classic flavour combo) or simply swinging by for their morning coffee. Choi has also been offering coffee cupping sessions led by Lee, during which Lee guides coffee tastings and connects the dots between the roasting and brewing processes.
After sharing a space with a realty office on Wellington West, Choi is planning a springtime move to a larger space in Hintonburg.
Visitors often ask Choi about the shop’s name — what is a Sharpfle Waffle? A self-described wannabe musician, Choi said he was drawn to the symbol for a “sharp” in musical notation (which raises the pitch of a note by a semitone). The sharp, incidentally, reflects the shape of a waffle grid. From there it was just a matter of making it sound fun. “It’s like a waffle that makes you sing,” Choi says with a laugh.
sharpflewaffle.com | @sharpflewaffle
A note post print:
After getting caught in the middle of a dispute between their landlord and a neighbouring tenant, Choi is looking for Sharpfle Waffle's next home, but will be operating as a pop-up business out of 1130 Wellington Street West for the month of May.
TURKISH PIDE
Fatih Anderoglu gained enough of a loyal, local following cooking in his backyard in the summer of 2020, that by September he had rented commercial kitchen space to keep up with demand. A little less than a year later — on his daughter’s birthday — he and his wife, Hatice Nurcan, opened Tava Kitchen in Kanata. The small space has been dishing out big flavour, primarily in the form of pide, a boat-shaped flatbread topped and stuffed with a variety of veggies, meats and cheeses.
The pide menu includes meaty or vegetarian options. Anderoglu highlights the deli pide as a perennially popular choice; filled with Turkish sujuk (beef sausage), salami and pastirma (cured beef.) For a sweet treat, be sure to add Tava Kitchen’s baklava to the order.
Anderoglu went to culinary school in Montreal and went on to work in restaurants there before opening his own. He says becoming a chef and a restaurant owner was undoubtedly influenced by the experience of growing up in a restaurant-owning family in Istanbul. Now in Ottawa, he says he strives “to provide high-quality, authentic Turkish cuisine in a warm and welcoming atmosphere.”
Tava Kitchen
7B Kakulu Rd., Kanata
Wednesday to Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.; Sunday, 12 p.m. to 7 p.m.
613.435.7888 | tava.kitchen | @tava.kitchen
THALI TALES
Following the publication of his first cookbook, Coconut Lagoon, in 2019, chef Joe Thottungal is back with My Thali: A Simple Indian Kitchen. Written in collaboration with Ottawa food critic Anne Desbrisay, the cookbook features 85 recipes tailored for home cooks, inspired by Thottungal’s favourite dishes and stories from his homeland of Kerala, India.
"As an Indian chef, the tradition of thali dominates my life. It is the way I eat at home, it is the way I celebrate life’s big events and it is the style of cooking we offer at my second Ottawa restaurant, Thali," writes Thottungal in the book's introduction.
The thali is a collection of smaller dishes served together on a platter. It offers a range of textures, colours and flavours. It's a complete meal of delicious contrasting flavours — sweet, salty, bitter, sour, astringent and spicy on one single plate.
Find it at Coconut Lagoon, Thali and local bookstores — Black Squirrel Books, Octopus Books and The Spaniel's Tale.
A MOBILE MEAL MISSION
After having to retire its 20-year-old food truck, The Ottawa Mission is back on the road with a new food truck that feeds people in need in the city every day. The mobile Mission meals food truck program launched during the pandemic to bring healthy meals to people who needed them. Responding to increas- ing demand in Ottawa, the food truck’s output is 14 times higher than when it launched in 2020, with more than 7,000 meals being served every week.
Chef Ric Allen-Watson, director of the Mission’s food services, ensures the truck serves a wide variety of “healthy, hearty, great tasting meals” — with the community’s favourite being a shepherd’s pie with garden salad. The truck’s weekly schedule includes several stops per day, seven days a week, at various places across the city. The program relies on community support, with just $3.74 providing enough for a good meal.
The Ottawa Mission | 35 Waller St., Ottawa | @ottawamission
NORTH STATION PROVISIONS
“I was always interested in food, but never could have imagined where my path would take me,” Amanda Cameron says, almost two years after opening North Station Provisions. The butcher shop and bakery came to be as Cameron, shown above, grappled with the havoc wreaked by the COVID-19 pandemic. Happily working as the sous-chef at the Wellington Gastropub when restaurants were forced to shut down, Cameron decided on a career shift rather than waiting for some kind of normalcy to return to the restaurant industry.
Though she had been educated in whole-animal butchering techniques during her degree at the Culinary Institute of Canada on Prince Edward Island, it was working at Around the Block Butcher Shop that got her back into a daily practice. “Little did I know that I would become so passionate about this work,” Cameron says of her time at Around the Block. “I enjoyed butchering on a daily basis more than I had remembered.”
Inspired by her time at Around the Block, Cameron turned her mind to her own space and opened North Station Provisions in Manotick in the fall of 2021. “Manotick is one of those treasures that you don’t realize still exist these days,” Cameron says, “small towns can have the biggest hearts.”
The community has embraced the shop, which Cameron describes as a culmination of her restaurant and butchering experience. It’s a nose-to-tail operation and Cameron and her team have sought out small farms that practise sustainable and ethical farming and animal raising. “A good butcher uses the entire animal, and minimizes waste,” Cameron says, calling her culinary background an advantage when it comes to using the whole animal. “In addition to meat cutting, I am constantly cooking something in the shop,” where the offerings include stocks, sauces, sausages, pâtés, as well as take-home meals. There are also baked goods made daily, including sourdough loaves, cinnamon buns and fluffy milk bread (“so nostalgic,” Cameron says.)
The professional transitions haven’t been without chal- lenges or obstacles, but whether it be as a chef, a butcher or an entrepreneur, Cameron knew she had found her calling years ago. “I love providing delicious food for others and I have made a career of this.”
North Station Provisions
Unit 2, 5556 Main St., Manotick
northstation.ca | 613.692.5533 | @northstationprovisions
