We went for a walk this beautiful morning, my beautiful wife and I – a long walk, westwards on College to Dufferin and up to Bloor and back again. Once upon a time we would have had a restaurant in mind as a destination but I’m beginning to understand that there’s more to life than food. Until you get hungry. Suddenly, it was a matter of some urgency to find a place offering sustenance and wine. We had passed through entire cuisines on our peripatetic perambulation – Chinese, Caplanskish, Italian, Portuguese, the global smorgasbord of Ossington, a passim proliferation of brunch places (but we have never been brunch people), Eritrean, Ethiopian, and were almost at Little Korea when we spotted La Bella Managua, a Nicaraguan restaurant at 872 Bloor Street West, just west of Grace. We went in.
In the old days, when I used to review restaurants for Toronto Life magazine, I would have described the place as “unpretentious” and readers would have understood precisely what to expect. But I would also have made mention that there were tablecloths on the tables (so unusual in these hipster times), polite and efficient service (ditto) and a cheerful colour scheme of yellow, white and blue. I had been there once before, years ago, when writing a column on Latin restaurants for the aforementioned city magazine, but La Bella Managua had not made the cut.
Walking in there this morning brought those far-off times flooding back! I remember that column. I had decided it would be hilariously funny if I pretended to the reader that I had misunderstood the assignment and had therefore gone to Opus, Splendido, Terra, Ultra, Edo, Grano, IV Lounge (you get the joke by now?), Ampeli, Bella Vista, Centro, Citrus, Domani, Ferro, Flava, Insomnia, Messis, Musa, Oro, Serra, Sono, Teatro, Tempo, and Veni Vidi Vici! Restaurants with Latin names!!! Hahahahahahahahaha!!! But it was not to be. John Macfarlane was polite but firm. No. Our Latin category meant something else. As I very well knew.
Good times.
Anyway. This morning… Wendy and I sat down and ordered the mixed house ceviche that you see in the photograph above. It was really good. Okay, we were hungry, but it was very well done. Shrimp and whitefish chopped up with raw onion, red and green pepper, cilantro and a marinade of acid and mild chili heat suspended in a sort of V8- or tomato juice-enriched dressing. The balance was beautifully judged – and balance is everything in a ceviche. I recall a trip to New York, 12 years ago, to taste the ceviche Douglas Rodriguez was serving at some wacko outlet called Chicama, in the ABC Carpet & Home department store. I had eaten Rodriguez’s cooking before at Yuca in Miama and loved the exuberant Cuban-American vibe. His New York ceviche was awesome – easily the best thing on the menu. It was Peruvian style, made to order from finely chopped raw scallops, shrimp, octopus, calamari and peppers bathed in a startlingly tart marinade of citrus juices, saffron and chilies, served in a martini glass. Acid and heat battled it out while the sweet tastes of the seafood slipped quietly by. It would have been the ultimate Platonic ceviche except that they overdid the chili heat. It’s hard to appreciate balance when your tongue is literally being dissolved by C18H27NO3.
And here in Toronto I have had truly great ceviche from Claudio Aprile over the years, and some almost-as-good dishes from El Fogon, where they salt the whitefish then marinate it for a few hours in lemon juice and serve it (oh so authentically Peruvianly) with big chunks of potato and corn on the cob, chopped onion and cilantro.
As I was trying to say, the mixed ceviche at La Bella Managua is another good one. It’s daintily served in a pretty modern bowl, with a heap of greaseless fried plantain chips, a polite but authoritative side of avocado, garnishes of raw tomato and lemon (if you want to add more acid) and a bottle of green El Yucateco habanero sauce (if you want to rev up the capsaicin). Would I fly to New york to taste it? Not any more. That is no longer my mandate. But it’s much more fun than yer average, eggy Toronto brunch.