FFWD Weekly
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Food by Beth Weisberg There’s a new restaurant on 4th Street S.W. that brings a familiar face back to the strip of small restaurants and shops. Aida, who used to run Café Med on the same block, is back with Aida's Mediterranean Bistro, and her new venture deserves to be around for a good long time. The Bistro, open since March, has Lebanese mainstays like falafel and hummus, but the menu also carries you into new territory. Dishes that made my mouth water just to read about? A cardamom-seasoned soup of tender chicken, vegetables and smoked wheat. A paté of red pepper paste, puréed with walnuts and onions. Fattoush salad – romaine, vegetables and pita chips in a sumak and olive oil dressing. Halibut steak baked in tahini and cumin, and topped with pine nuts. Meat balls sauteed in pomengranate juice with zucchini, eggplant and peppers. At $12.95, prawns sauteed with feta in a tomato wine sauce is the most expensive single dish. To share, the mezza for two ($20.95) lets you sample hummus, baba gannouj, grape leaf rolls, chicken wings baked in garlic and cilantro, fatayer (pastry triangles filled with spinach and feta), falafel and kibby (beef and bulgar shells stuffed with meat and nuts). Our visit yielded food so good that Aida's bulleted to the top of our list for places to go with a group of friends. First, Aida's iced tea with rose water is hands down my favourite new beverage. And Aida's grape leaf rolls are right up there with the mouthwatering version from the Istanbul Cafe. The zingy heat of the mouhammara, the starter of red pepper paste with walnuts and onions, produced a couple of heat-buzz eye rolls – and so we noticed the gold-leaf detail on the high ceiling. Gilt, posters of Lebanon and an attractive wall painting of an olive tree give the non-smoking restaurant a light elegance. The L-shaped room, slightly overfilled with tables (of course, I won't be saying that when I get the last one some warm spring evening), runs up to a set of sliding windows. It's a perfect place to take in the passing people parade. We also tried the rookaak – two shatteringly crisp phyllo cigars filled with sensuously melting cheese. If there's an odd number of you at the table, round up your order. Why make it difficult to share? Next, the entrées. I don't usually enjoy lamb, but a bite of my friend's lamb kabob was enough to convert me. Marinated in curry and oregano, it was pink in the centre, tender and sensationally delicious. I would have swapped dishes if I hadn't liked my own so well, so we just kept up a happy negotiation for more. My friend was after my plate of Dajaj Mishwi – a delicious broiled chicken breast marinated in a garlic and lemon paste. As much as I recommend heading for Aida's (2208 - 4th Street S.W., phone 541-1189), I would also warn that you do not need to order this much food! But in an effort to sample as much of the menu as possible, we tried a couple of the five "made from scratch" desserts (from $2.50 for the baklava to $4.25 for dutch apple cinnamon, lemon or marble cheesecake). Burma is one of those syrup-soaked shredded pastry concoctions, this one with a layer of pistachios, that are often teeth-rattlingly sweet, but Aida's version is nicely balanced. My friend's layali loubnan – "the Lebanese version of tiramisu" ($3.95) – was a modest square of cream and cake, with no alcohol, no cheese. Both were a nice finish to the meal. Arabic coffee ($2.95) was a tempting accompaniment, but we put it off for a lunchtime visit. Our advice? Go to Aida's while you can still get a table.

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