Like an Old Master

Pho ‘95 is a place that’s managed itself as an effigy in front of my eyes for a long time. A place that, to me, seemed like a kind of Byzantium, shrouded in legend, in urban mystique. An obscure, yet pervasive place that’s existed in the mythos of Kitchener-Waterloo for so long. And yet, for so long, I’ve kept myself out. There were never any real objections to the spot, everyone I spoke with who ate or didn’t eat there always told me that, “Yeah, the food’s pretty alright.” Was that why I never even bothered visiting it, having eaten at literally every other Vietnamese spot in town? Maybe there were more pressing places to go, places readers would value more. Maybe Pho ‘95 is too obvious, and maybe too much of my reputation as a gastronome is at stake. But I’ll be honest, my stomach is tired; tired of hamburgers, Chinese food, café fare, places too barefaced and unfamiliar to my old hungry heart. So I thought, as an homage to myself, and to my humble beginnings, I’d visit a place with the dish that ushered me into food appreciation. Anyway, it only seems fair that this column pay homage to Vietnamese cuisine at least once in its lifetime. And what better place than Pho ‘95? It’s like an old master. One of the oldest, rooted places in town.

Its size stupefying, its small exterior a humbling declaration of its banquet hall interior. It was uncanny. But casing the joint made me wonder, before Pho ‘95 was Pho ‘95, what could it have possibly been? Its yellowed stucco archways and faux stucco maroon wallpaper reminded me of the Mediterranean reception halls of my youth. Through time, it seemed to rearticulate itself into something more static and culturally performative: fish tanks, Buddha statues, shiny Japanese prints, and those oh so typical fake emerald cushioned chairs and tables that set themselves up in every other Vietnamese place around. It screamed Chinese restaurant, but served Viet food. There were even water coolers with signs pointing in things’ direction in case people were tired of the courtesy of tea. Yes, Pho ‘95 seemed a watering hole for all walks of life; where you could get together with hipster and salary-man alike, have a Styrofoam cup of distilled or spring and make trivial talk about Ray Bands, or the Smith reports.
I was impressed by the clientele that came and went. My eavesdropping even led me to discover that there were a lot of regulars, and valued ones at that, because the staff knew exactly what they wanted right when they came in. I was touched by the sincerity of the staff, the novelty of the space, the suits who came for lunch, the vibrant, yet calm atmosphere. I was more than ready to eat.Pho ‘95’s menu is able to bear even the tiniest of wallets, the most expensive dish being 13 dollars, and even an inexpensive bowl of small beef noodle soup, a meal all its own. That said, I sought that which encouraged me into food-dom, choosing to have the beef noodle soup with raw beef, flank, and cow’s stomach. Why go to a pho place and not get pho? I think I did the right thing.Accompanying that, I chose an appetizer of shredded pork skin rolls; a choice, I find in retrospect, for more tolerant palettes. And, as I am the critical gastronome that I am, I made it my responsibility to purchase that most notable of Vietnamese drinks: coffee with condensed milk.


Like a proper meal, my rolls came first. Stuffed with vermicelli noodles, resilient pieces of translucent pork skin, dull iceberg lettuce, and peanuts wrapped tightly in rice sheets, the starchy rolls were accompanied with a thick sauce of what seemed to be Hoisin and more peanuts. The thick sauce adhered well to the rolls; however, the dry elastic nature of each made eating tedious. The sauce did nothing to temper the nature of something so dry. At a time, I found myself taking them apart and placing them in my soup’s broth as if dumplings. I thought they needed some moisture. The sauce wasn’t bad; however, I felt that old, musty Hoisin huzzah could have been paired better with something a little less torrid.
When my soup arrived, I dove in. It had been a long time since I slurped on the dusty flavor of rice noodles in a salty beef broth. A little cloudier than memory served, probably the most intriguing quality of the broth was the grit of separated fat rowing through the bowl. Usually, one would expect fatty pearls in a nice clear broth, but not here; I took it as a sign that the broth, though not strained to an exorbitant degree, had at least been made from scratch. I hoped, anyway. The raw beef didn’t put up much of a fight, separating easily as I chewed. The flank sunk to the bottom of the bowl, tough as usual and lending spirit to the dish. The slices of cow stomach gave perfect balance to a trio of chewy, tough, and tender. Overall, it was well received.

My coffee completed my meal, arriving as lukewarm as I had expected. Something that percolates so long should be served with ice, so I couldn’t complain, because I requested it without.


It was familiar: creamy with a mouth puckering sweetness that fought off the deep tannic character that came with a long brew. Bracing myself for each sip, I made note of the minute eyes of oil reflected in the coffee’s surface- another symptom of a long extraction. I found myself tempering the coffee’s richness with alternating sips from the cheapest of luxuries: tea.By the end, I was rubbing the sugar crystals that settled as sediment in those last few swallows on the back of my teeth. I loved the stuff, and every minute I spent at Pho '95.
Pho ‘95
Tel: (519) 744-0199
331 West King St
Kitchener, ON N2G1B8

Every day 1030-10

Any method of payment

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O Brother, Where Art Thou?

Today, I mourned the loss of a brother. Don’t worry, no one died. Unless, of course, you consider my spirit. Can you even anthropomorphize a spirit? Anyway, these are hardly culinary questions that need answering. Although at times, food can do a good job of putting our hearts at ease.

Some days, I get really down on myself. Some days, I get really hungry. And some days, I remember that if I don’t eat, I can get really down on myself. Today was starting to be one of those days. Remembering the terrible news of my dear brother’s decision to move out of town and in with the love of his life made me desperate to fill the emptiness that hung where my own heart once was. Yes, dear listeners, even one thousand crescent kicks under the still moon the night before weren’t nearly enough to quell the feeling that I had been left alone, platonically sojourned in a city where a close comrade and I had drank tea, learned kung fu, and eaten copious amounts of bad Chinese food. Those were my salad days.

And if I can aggrandize this story of brotherhood any further I will mention that I intended to eat my pain away with the worst, most dangerous Chinese-Canadian food I could find. Fortunately for me, a pang of recollection prevented me from ordering the stuff I know sits so heavily in my stomach and not so happily in my heart. And like that, I was called, as if by the Buddha himself, to a place I had been years before, where my dear brother once tried vegetarianism, and your dear narrator came to be comforted by him, all while stuck in an abyss of graduate work. It was then, after some tea and pickled cabbage when I realized that no matter what the world was like at least there was food; and that no matter how hard things may be to take, when everything’s all said and done, the world is still there. And, if we’re lucky enough, the places we go to eat are still there too, offering sanctuary like temples in some kung fu flick.

I won’t keep you in anymore suspense; I’m speaking pretty tongue in cheek at this point anyway. Just let me say this, everything I write is true and comes from what little heart I have left. Tenterhooks, my friends, tenterhooks.

If you’re feeling a little bit of spiritual abandon, or looking, like I did today, for some connection to a more nostalgic past, it might suit your poor spirit to visit Lotus Tea House, a vegetarian restaurant with an already stellar following. It has a quaint townhouse location and, of all things, a retrofitted Buddhist temple, as anachronistic as that sounds. Why bore you with any other trivialities? What with the urbaneness of wicker chairs and somewhat unaccommodating wooden tables (if you’re a group of four), pacifying classical music, creaky wooden floors, salmon coloured, stucco walls, and botany pictures- I must be heartbroken, because I am being far too harsh in this instance.

What makes the Lotus Tea House matchless in quality is the knowledge it offers the masses; shelves where diners can read books about the Buddha, and even donate any Buddhist teachings themselves if they so choose. Upstairs there’s an empty room with a lone Buddha statue where you can even bow three times, if YOU so choose. And of course, there’s its fait accompli: its originally brewed teas. Pots that run the price of, at most, 4.95. Well worth it, if not for the novelty of having a tea that doesn’t steep dried goods, but boils everything together fresh. So I am told, so I have seen. I’ve never looked in the kitchen though. But, the proof in this case is in the pot, because there are instances of whole oranges, mashed up almonds, even apples left in clear glass pots. Of course, there are dried leaf teas if the heart so chooses. I myself am a staunch disqualifier of tea almost anywhere, my old master teaching my dear brother and I about tea when we were young kung fu adherents (he never believed in drinking cold water, only boiling oolongs), so I like to push my snobbery onto the world. Anyway, the tea certainly is unique, and warrants mindful drinking, the almond tea, for example, will gelatinize if you let it sit long enough.

I was intrigued by the icy cold fruit tea: iced tea I assumed to be rhetorically done up on the menu and underwhelmed by in person. I was wrong. It was the best iced tea I’ve ever had in town. It had pieces of fruit, apples, oranges, pineapple, elevating the Ceylon brew to something ambrosial (yeah, I’ve used the word before; but this time, I mean it). And it wasn’t just put there to humour an aesthetic seeking drinker. The lemon undertone I’d usually expect was replaced by an awesome orange citric sweetness, a syrupy pineapple pungency, mixed so well that the beverage had its own frothy head! Never have I come across anything like it.

Healthy Soy Bean was the next item to order; boiled soy bean with a dash of sea salt. In my mind I envisioned it as a block of mere tofu smothered in salt, something I hoped for, my Philippine grandmother lovingly feeding it to me for breakfast in my youth. Alas, I was met with a plate of Edamame beans, that dull, popular Japanese appetizer. Nutty, salty, clean. I can’t complain more than that.

My entree was an exciting array of cranberries, cashew nuts, tofu and vegetable stir-fry, paired with a simple soup and bowl of bean sprouts with a simple spicy, savoury sauce. The soup itself was a humble thing. Its broth, a quiet familiar vegetable flavor, with the odd tomato skin floating about, something I have come to know in the culinary world as always out of place.

I was underwhelmed by my stir-fry. A serving set around a dome of light and aromatically nutty rice, I was disappointed by what I saw in front of me. There was nothing wrong with the portion, there was a substantial amount of food, but I couldn’t hold truck with the lack of cranberries and cashews. I wonder why so many places do this? Highlight dishes with unique ingredient ideas and then give dishes a sparse sprinkling. The combination of sweet cranberries and savoury cashews would have given perfect balance to the already salty and starchy nut sauce that coated the stir-fry. I thought that maybe Lotus Tea House could have been the prodigal son that escaped the banality of Chinese food, but the features of the dish were absolutely overwhelmed with so much traditional flavor. I threw my puritan caution to the wind. I was tired, I was heartbroken, I mashed my rice with my stir-fry, I didn’t care to keep it separate, I turned it to mush, I ate furiously, the waiters couldn’t stop staring. I didn’t care. I blamed it on those one thousand crescent kicks, I blamed it on my broken heart, I was still trying desperately to fill a void. Was it my lost brother I was crying over? Or my food? I didn’t even know anymore.

The Lotus Teahouse

79 Regina St. North

Waterloo, Ont. N2J 3A7

Monday: 11:00 am – 3 pm

Tuesday to Thursday: 11 am – 7 pm

Friday & Saturday 11 am – 8 pm

Sunday Closed

CASH, VISA, OR DEBIT.

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Love Trial

*I feel obligated to tell you all that this fabulous place no longer exists.*

This city needs more places like Lovenest. Shoot, if you ask me, the name even manifests exactly what the world should be: one big, old, giant love nest. With good food. Aw, yes, just thinking about it warms the cockles of my heart; and thinking about it still warms the cockles –if there are cockles there- of my stomach.

Now, I must be honest, dear readers, I’m an amateur when it comes to the food offered at Lovenest: Ethiopian and East African. Heck, I can’t even call myself an amateur, because even amateurs have some sort of casual participation. I’ve only ever heard about this kind of cuisine from others who have eaten it in their lives. If anything, I was merely a newcomer into the world of Ethiopian cuisine. I had read the theory beforehand, and took two dear, but equally new colts along for yet another expedition in the field of gastronomic anthropology.

It was an overwhelming undertaking entering a room thick with foggy incense, deep red walls, dim lighting, and straw tables we had never before seen. Heck, I even confused a table with coffee for a shrine of some sort. Don’t worry; I am ashamed of myself. But that was as extraneous as the place got; it had tables that seated multiple diners, a bar where one could pay and order a drink, and the typical foreign tapestries that always play to the illusion of the authenticity of the places we eat in. Themes, I tells ya. There was even a flat screen television hung on the wall tuned into not the news, not the weather, but that ever so lovable bald boy, Caillou. Oh, you don’t know? Well, maybe you should be a little more like your juvenile narrator.

Greeted assuredly, we were taken to a table that accommodated all three of us (appetites included) and were pointed to the simple menus that sat under the glass. For both lunch and dinner we were given the option of nine manageable items. It was, as far as I was concerned, paradise. Now, if I may allude to my opening statement, more places should be like Lovenest. Menus today, I tells ya, they’re too complicated, too overbearing, too full of too many choices; perhaps a symptom of the free market? We only have one stomach after all, and though stomachs may get hungry many-a-time in our lives, we never visit a place multiple times in attempt to try every item on the menu, but instead go back for favourites, thus becoming regulars. Right? Well, at Lovenest, you can have it all. Regularity and menu mastery. A characteristic of the Ethiopian restaurant, I am told, is the small menu. That, and the ritual of eating without cutlery, a sourdough flatbread resembling a thicker more voluptuous crepe taking its place.

My company and I ordered our respective dishes, vegetarian for a third of us, and whatever else had meat in it for the rest. In retrospect, the menu being the size that it was, offered a substantial choice for vegetarians and was affordable. The most expensive plate, a full vegetarian meal, was 15.99 and the least a mere ten dollars.

We were dazzled when our meals arrived: chopped meats, salads, and vegetarian purees decorated atop capacious pieces of the flat, acidic, sour dough bread, with even more of said bread on separate plates and rolled into convenient bales. The bigger the bale, the bigger the friendship I’m told.

My own meal was a dry stew of tenderloin lamb and beef with spiced butter, onion, and other pungent seasonings like chili pepper, garlic, and ginger- to name only a few in the medley of Ethiopian jumble. Tearing off a piece of bread made from wheat, barley and teff, I grabbed as much stew as I could for every mouthful. The flavours were fresh. The acidity of the bread combined with the savoury spices of the stew were bright, and an expectedly heavy dish actually tasted very clean, characteristic of a tart and simple tomato sauce. And though there were no tomatoes in the dish, the garlic, cooked just until tender on the cusp of being raw and caramelized along with the basil used to pepper the dish made it seem so. The meat itself was somewhat tough, but its small, diced character made it manageable, and though I felt the salad to be a mere courtesy, chopped romaine lettuce with a supermarket dressing, it was outshined by the better qualities of the dish.

And if we weren’t being hedonistic enough struggling to finish our enormous portions, we made sure to ask the host if there was anything good to drink, to which we were answered with by three bottles of Ethiopian stout: a beer with a strong molasses aroma, fruity body and caramel head. Its most intriguing quality however, was that it managed to hold its own full flavor without being hoppy; instead, it was plummy and rich.

My party and I were more than satisfied, though feeling a little guilty at not having been able to finish our plates. We were invited to come back for some Ethiopian coffee soon, and calling ahead for our orders so we could avoid any wait for future meals and of course, the coffee, which takes a slow twenty minutes to brew, our host being very apologetic for not having been able to get our food to us sooner. That’s right, nothing but courtesy at Lovenest. But it was over our heads, because we were more excited about coming back.

Lovenest
183 King St.East Kitchener,
ON N2G 2K8
(519) 570-0990

Tuesday 12:00pm - 10:00pm
Wednesday & Thursday 12:00pm - 09:00pm
Friday 12:00 - 10:00pm
Saturday 12:00pm - 11:00pm Sunday 01:00pm - 10:00pm

Payment methods: Debit card, visa, master and cash

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