Rustic dim sum classics at Cafe Orient

• Name + address: Cafe Orient, 808 Somerset St W.

• Diet: Meat, seafood, vegetarian

• Appetizers: $4.25-$8.25

• Mains: $9.25-$22.50

• Wheelchair accessibility: No

• Licensed: Yes

• Website: www.cafeorient.ca

We all grew up subjected to any number of falsehoods, myths and outright lies about all manner of things in life. Often these fabrications, borne out of ignorance, were just plain silly and others had more serious consequences for our brothers and sisters from other cultures.

One myth, long debunked by science, is that MSG is bad. In fact, dozens of articles (like the one in the link) have been written on the subject suggesting that this was more a product of bigotry than anything else.

Of course it is possible to overdo the use of the flavour enhancer as I’ve experienced at too many Pho joints. When you end up drinking more water than the amount of soup you’ve consumed, that’s a telltale sign you have excess sodium in your system.

Neither should fans of Asian cuisines be comforted by any sort of signage proclaiming “We do NOT use MSG in our food”. This just means they don’t use any extra MSG. There’s still MSG in pretty much all the sauces these restaurants use.

The question then becomes, other than “is this dish well made” but how much MSG has been used? At Cafe Orient they have enough experience to nicely bring out dish after dish, while not overly being overly seasoned.

In addition to hundreds of dishes, they also offer 30 different dim sum bites and I started with a few favourites.

The fried “footballs,” as some have called them, are named “deep-fried savoury triangles” on the menu. Not a little misleading as I was expecting triangles that often have curried minced beef. 

Still I happen to like these little footballs and it turns out this dish, which is often very oily, was perhaps the most oil-free version I’ve had. Minced pork is encased in a sticky rice batter and then fried. The kitchen handled this execution extremely well.

I ordered both pork and beef shiu mai and both were inartfully constructed as if someone was distracted when forming them. 

They were certainly meaty, with the pork having a nicer flavour profile. The beef version had a dominant flavour of orange zest, which was, again, an unexpected surprise as it was not described on the menu. There wasn’t enough balance with the beef being more sweet than savoury.

Steamed pork ribs are fun to eat but you do need to watch out for bone shards that form when the chopping blade isn’t sharp enough. 

The portion here was a little more generous than at other establishments. It also had a black bean sauce that had a large bitter profile from the overuse of black beans. These meaty morsels could also have been steamed just that much longer to elicit a little more tenderness.

The eggplant with minced pork came already served over a bed of perfectly cooked rice. No clumped stodge here. 

The joy of the more slender Asian eggplant is that it’s ready to cook without the salting to remove bitterness required of its larger Mediterranean cousin. It’s also a little sweeter and more luscious in texture.

All in all this was a very pleasant dish both in terms of texture and flavours, although I could have done with a little more of that nice sauce as there was so much rice.

As I’m always keen to find Ottawa’s best Singapore noodles, that was up next. When done right, this is a highly flavoured curried dry stir fry of great colour and diverse flavours courtesy of the chicken, char siu pork, shrimp, carrot, bean sprouts, scallions, egg and bell peppers.

Their version was missing a few ingredients, and it was alright, but the curry powder they used tasted tired. The char siu pork was better than expected, but the shrimp had not been deveined and I mistakenly bit into one and was met with the grit from its digestive tract. My Singapore noodle search continues.

Cafe Orient is a safe bet when you’re craving this type of food. They know what they’re doing but need to practice a little more care in the execution, presentation and freshness of ingredients.