“Opened a few months before the pandemic began, Idriss is Ottawa’s only Algerian restaurant, and so it immediately piqued my curiosity.”
Idriss Mediterranean
319 St-Laurent Blvd., 613-421-4008, idrissmediterranean.com
Open: Monday and then Wednesday to Sunday 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., closed Tuesday
Prices: main dishes $17.99 to $24.99
Access: steps to front door
At Idriss Mediterranean restaurant, the conical pottery beside the cash is both decorative and functional.
It’s one of many tagines used to cook some of the flavourful Algerian dishes that emerge from Idriss’s kitchen, placed in front of hungry customers with steam still wafting. As I paid for my takeout order, I commented to co-owner Wafa Abouhadjar that it was too bad I had to bring home the food her husband had cooked, in its much less evocative styrofoam packaging, rather than enjoying it as freshly made as possible in Idriss’s 30-seat dining room.
In the last week, I’ve had lunch and dinner made at Idriss. Both meals were commendably homey and comforting. I made my visits after stumbling across Idriss on a Google map. Opened a few months before the pandemic began, Idriss is Ottawa’s only Algerian restaurant, and so it immediately piqued my curiosity.
Of course, Ottawa has had Moroccan restaurants since at least the mid-1980s, and there’s an overlap, at least in menu descriptions, between the dishes of all North African neighbouring states. You’ll find couscous, tagines and other fare from that region of the world on both Moroccan and Algerian menus. Meanwhile, there’s a Merivale Road food truck called Couscous that serves similar Libyan items worth sampling.
When I asked Abouhadjar for the simplest distinction between Moroccan and Algerian food, she replied that Moroccan cooks would mix sweet and salty tastes in the same dish. “For us, sweet is by itself and salty by itself. That’s the main thing,” she said. “We share a lot of common names, but we don’t share the taste.”
I made other Algerian discoveries large and small thanks to Idriss.
A very pleasant first for me was a main course of rechta ($17.99), which was a heaping serving of light and toothsome house-made Algerian noodles that came topped with a flavourful and tender chicken leg, slabs of turnip and chickpeas. On the side was a cinnamon-scented sauce that we could choose to add or not. Abouhadjar said that, in Algeria, some rechta eaters will add more cinnamon or even orange blossom water at the table.
Mahjeb (two for $5.99) was a square, stuffed crepe-like flatbread filled with sweet onions and a zesty tomato sauce. While the Eastern European bouraks I’ve had before were delicious filo-based pastries stuffed with meat or spinach, the Algerian versions from Idriss were much closer to spring rolls in terms of their appearance and wrappers, and they contained melted mild cheese as well as ground beef (two for $4.99) or chicken (two for $4.99).
At dinner, we received containers of what struck us as something like salsa. Consulting Idriss’s menu, we learned the containers held hmiss, a loose and spicy salad of roasted peppers, tomatoes, garlic and olive oil meant to accompany our tagines.
We tried two of Idriss’s four tagines. The kafta tagine ($18.99) studded another superior tomato sauce with delectable meatballs and two eggs. The very different olive tagine ($18.99) starred another top-notch piece of chicken in a sauce rich with green olives and carrots.
Of three mains featuring grilled meats, we opted for the very satisfying royal grill ($20.99), which loaded marinated grilled chicken, lightly spicy beef merguez sausage and kafta meat patties on fluffy rice mixed with vermicelli. Accompanying this dish were small containers of hummus and an intriguing pumpkin-based sauce.
Idriss’s couscous royal ($24.99) was another protein-heavy winner, with another well-bronzed chicken leg, merguez and fall-off-the-bone lamb ribs plus chunks of vegetables on a bed of soft, savoury couscous. More of that cinnamon-scented broth came on the side.
Idriss also offers two vegetable gratins: one with eggplant, ground beef, eggs and cheese in a tomato sauce; and another with cauliflower and ground beef in a bechamel sauce ($16.99). The gratin-lover among us gave two thumbs up, but I preferred the other mains.
I have a short list of items to try when I eat in Idriss’s dining room. The restaurant serves shakshouka, the Maghrebi dish of eggs poached in a spiced tomato sauce that has spread across the Middle East and can be had elsewhere in Ottawa for breakfast or brunch. I wish I had caught on earlier that desserts such as baklava, lemon cookies and chocolate pie were house-made. Algerian mint tea at Idriss comes with roasted peanuts and sweet sesame halwa, the Persian confection that went global centuries ago, Abouhadjar told me.
Given the confidence that Idriss’s dishes inspired when we took them home, we expect to be even more pleased when we pay a proper visit.
