T-Basil, Kettle Chips

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Good morning,

Welcome. Hopefully the long weekend was good to you and brought with it some outdoor activities. It was still a bit brisk but perfect for gardening. 

Today we make a brief stop at a Thai spot in Orléans recommended by one of our readers, so thank you to Jean-Paul.

I also feature the start of a new addition to the newsletter: Food Finds. Items that have struck me as particularly good and worthy of your dollar. 

Let’s begin.

Ralf Joneikies, food and drink editor. [email protected]

REVIEW

Some of the best Ottawa food is in strip malls. T-Basil is no expection

Admittedly I was a little shy about visiting T-Basil when it was recommended because I was under the impression that this was a restaurant I’d been to and had left a rather unpleasant impression. Sometimes you’re relieved to be wrong. 

It was a quiet Sunday afternoon when I popped in for some take-away and was welcomed by a rather spirited individual who, as it turned out, was the owner. She mentioned that the ‘T’ in T-Basil stood for her first name but before I could ask for the spelling she’d disappeared into the kitchen.

You may have noticed over the years that some of the better eateries happen to be located in strip malls. It's this that makes them difficult to identify when you’re driving along a main thoroughfare. You can only do so much rubber-necking and remain safe. Luckily we have engaged readers whp are ready to help with suggestions.

It’s become a practice when visiting Thai and Vietnamese restaurants to sample items on the menu I’ve not seen often, if at all, on other menus around town. 

T-Basil had a few such dishes and I also went with a standard spring roll appetizer as that was the mood I was in.

It was a nicely prepared roll firmly bound with a mix of pork, shrimp, mushrooms and assorted other veggies. The flavours were nice and the roll was as good as those of other restaurants. Just nothing very memorable.

Neua Ta-Krai is an explosion of lemongrass, ginger and onion stir-fried with beef. Every mouthful released plumes of spice perfume and it was a heady affair. 

The beef was very tender and the soft onions added a little creamy sweetness but the spicing here was very bold and I felt it was a little too aggressive. All that lemongrass and ginger was also texturally distracting as I felt the need to spit out all those hard splinters of cellulose.

Go figure that it would take a trip to Orléans to introduce me to a Thai noodle dish I’d never come across before but that made a kind of sense.

Thai basil is the other most commonly known variety of basil outside of the type used in Italian cooking. Most of us enjoy pesto on pizza or pasta so why not use the Thai variety for pesto? That’s the common-sense idea this kitchen had for this tasty dish.

The tangle of noodles was luminous with green and as I slurped away, I shook my head as to why this simple, yet novel, idea had never occurred to me. Delicious and even the menu mentions that this is their “chefs ultimate pride”. 

It’s meant to come with bean sprouts and egg but those were missing from my dish and I felt that all that basil sauce would have benefitted from an extra splash of salt via fish sauce and a little extra brightness courtesy of fresh lime.

This was a convincing introduction for me to T-Basil and I know that I’ll be back to take a deeper look at the menu. 

As it stands, there’s a reason that this restaurant has been impressing locals for 17 years: it has the recipes and the culinary techniques to impress newcomers and aficionados alike.

Suggested stories

• Good Pad Thai (and more) at Charm Thai (members-only)

• Chopp Chop is a Thai street food winner

• Thailicious is a food truck worth a return trip

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FOOD FINDS

Chipping away at the snack market

If there’s a snack food difficult to resist, it’s certainly the potato chip. I happen to not be particularly partial to most North American brands, but of course, they’ll do when that craving hits.

As it happens my mouth easily suffers lacerations when eating hard foods like kettle-cooked chips, especially those chips that curl and fold when fried making for even harder edges. 

So when a new brand landed in Ottawa shops, I had to try them. Kettle Cooked Chips come to us from Denmark and it’s one of the best chips I’ve had in years. 

They may be kettle cooked but what you’ll find is that almost every single chip is flat and not curled and for me that’s a blessing. They’re certainly crisp but not as hard as your standard kettle chip and the flavour is superior.

This is a clean label product and the potato flavour, to this palate, is just nicer than that of North American brands. 

These come in six different flavours: Sweet BBQ, Salt and Vinegar, Sea Salt, Jalapeno, Balsamico-Tomato and Sour Cream and Onion. Try the Balsamico-Tomato and tell me if this is not what all ketchup flavoured chips should aspire to be.

They are currently available at Farmer’s Pick at a sale price of two 150 gram bags for $5.  A delightful bargain for this quality snack.

As with the Danish chips, Brets are a clean label product and once again, it’s the flavour of the potato that stands out. There are hundreds of potato varieties throughout the world and it’s nice to have a change from the bog standard North American potato flavour. 

Brets boasts more than 30 flavours in their line up and once I’d tried their butter (yup butter) flavoured chip I realized I’d eaten, what must be, one of the finest chip inventions of all time. Plain chips the world over should immediately have real butter added as it’s a most logical pairing. With the right application, Brets butter flavoured chips might even qualify for a Nobel Peace Prize.

Okay, that might be overstating things a bit but this company obviously takes the snack thing very seriously and they do a terrific job offering unique flavour combinations that taste like the name on the package.

Brets are available at various shops throughout Ottawa but be careful as to where you buy. La Bottega in the ByWard sells these at $4.99 a bag but I’ve seen shops try to get away with charging as much as $8.99. 

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