Middle Eastern food has supplanted tacos as Toronto’s flavour du jour. Ezra’s Pound morphed into a hummuseria, the Khabouth/Harji duo opened Byblos, and now we have Fat Pasha from Anthony Rose (ex-Drake Hotel exec chef, owner of Rose and Sons and Big Crow). This happened because the Indian Rice Factory closed, and Mr. Rose was offered the lease at a rate he couldn’t refuse.
It’s a sweet space. Cool filament lights in varied shapes, a big mural with three hookahs. Communal tables. Cool double-sided bar. Nice patio. The staff, though harried by the restaurant’s instant popularity (good luck getting a table) are friendly and helpful.
But this is no Byblos. Fat Pasha is fun and flavourful, but it lacks the elegance of place or palate that Byblos exemplifies. This is Middle Eastern Bubby food. The latkes, while not quite as crisp as we like in my family, are inventive: They’re topped with pastrami salmon (tastes smoked) wrapped in a circlet around smoked whitefish, and lightly pickled egg with a dollop of sour cream. An entertaining reconstruction of the roots food I grew up on at my Bubby’s table.
But Bubby never roasted cauliflower. Who knew that cauliflower could be so sweet if you brown it deeply? Adding pomegranate seeds, fried haloumi cheese and a chimicurrhi-like sauce just gilds that scrumptious lily. Another Pasha veg delight is the daily salad platter (called salatim), a clever compendium of vegetable delights: Lightly creamed beets, barely pickled cucumbers, red cabbage slaw with caraway, smoked eggplant cubes, spiced carrots and iconoclastic tabbouleh made with big crunchy wheat berries for mellow and rapini for bitter.
Middle Eastern food is of course veg-intensive, so no surprise that they also do a grand fattoush platter of lightly pickled onions, kale, chopped olives, grilled haloumi, radish and pita. And couscous never had it so good. It’s smooth from butter, hot from harissa and garnished with apricots, figs, dates, prunes, charred onions and olives.
Meat fares less well at the house of the Pasha. We find precious little lamb in the lamb shoulder dish for $15. Nice hummus under the lamb, but we wanted lamb. And pastrami shawarma is gristly meat with no discernible pastrami spicing. Good fixin’s like pickled onion and grilled potato.
The Pasha has one great dessert: Milk and honey pudding is a lighter-than-air creamy confection topped with crunchy crumble of whatever fruit is in season that week. The crunch and the cream go together like Brad and Angelina and are about that pretty too. This pudding will keep the Pasha well padded.
