Tag Archives: ginger

Ottawa: more pho

If you read my post yesterday, you’ll have read about my love for Pho Bo Ga LA’s beef broth. Their salad rolls were pretty good, too. But there were other places in Ottawa’s Chinatown that I visited, for very specific things.

Just across the street from Pho Bo Ga LA, Meexim is a Vietnamese restaurant that’s run by Cantonese people. This means that their pho broth isn’t nearly as good, and that their menu features more rice and non-soup noodle dishes.

I ate one thing, and one thing only, at Meexim: their noodle soup with pork. The noodles are decent, the broth is passable – but the pork is out of this world. On first taste, you get sweetness, which mellows to the zing of ginger and the savouriness of soy. 

I’m having phantom taste bud pains right now. And phantom stomach pains. My God, I would kill for some of that pork right now. 

Meexim Restaurant
781 Somerset Street West
Ottawa, ON
613-567-1188

Jerk this, mon.

One of my favourite memories of New York was when Nrinder, my lovely host, took me to a hole-in-the-wall Caribbean restaurant called Taste of the Islands. I don’t have a hope in hell of finding it again, much less telling you where it is, but I know that it’s within a few blocks of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, there’s no sign outside, and I probably would have walked right by it had Nrinder not gone inside.

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Tea and scones

I’ve been running around like a madwoman for the past couple of days, fueled by coffee, coffee, and more coffee.  In an attempt to shake things up, I stopped in at T for, erm, a cup of tea.  They’ve got a great selection of teas from all over the world, with little sample jars to sniff.  It’s lots of fun, but it’s really hard to pick just one.

My favourite is the vanilla Earl Grey ($23.95 for a 3.5 oz tin) which tastes even better than it sounds.  It’s like the tea leaves walked into a pastry shop, ate whole Tahitian vanilla beans, and rolled around in a tub of dark caramel. It’s not too sweet, though – you can still taste the tea underneath all the sweetness.  If you’re craving a little snack, you can get a scone and tea for $5.80 plus tax.  Try the ginger-currant scone – it has little chunks of candied ginger in it, which makes an otherwise lovely scone just a little more special.

They also sell tea accessories: teapots, teacups, tea strainers, tea cozies…you get the idea.

T
1568 W. Broadway
Vancouver, BC
(604) 730-8390
http://www.tealeaves.com