Category: Ottawa

I visited the Four Cuisine bistro on Preston Street for dinner tonight and enjoyed it thoroughly. While there was only one vegetarian main course available, it was a very pleasant curry with saffron rice. The non-vegetarian options were appealing and varied, with an especially broad selection of seafood options. Also recommended are the chevre stuffed peppers, cheesecake, and Arrogant Frog Ribet Red Shiraz. The restaurant is elegant, but not stuffy or pretentious.

The number of customers seems to vary widely by night, so reservations on Friday and Saturday nights are recommended. Given how it is located just a few blocks from where Bluesfest, it might complement a day of concert-going nicely.

Full disclosure: a good friend of mine works as a server at the bistro.

When it comes to an incompetent master / manipulative servant comedy (Blackadder, Yes Minister, etc), one generally expects at least two actors to be involved. Wooster Sauce defies this expectation, with John D. Huston playing master, servant, and all other characters together. His versatility is impressive, though you cannot help but lose some of the comedy and drama that would arise from a two-actor interaction.

Huston works his way through a series of anecdotes, with Wooster narrating the first half and Jeeves narrating the second. The characters are skillfully sketched and the vignettes entertaining. That said, the humour is more of the type intellectually appreciated than of the type that induces open laughter.

The show seemed to be among the most popular in the Ottawa Fringe, so people in other venues should be advised to get in line early. That is doubly important if other people stage it in a large and flat-floored room, as was the case here this year.

Keir Cutler’s Teaching the Fringe is an entertaining hour-long monologue, consisting of the elaborate rebuttal of a letter of complaint written by a woman who attended one of his previous shows. While her comments probably didn’t necessitate such an extensive response, amused audiences will be glad they did.

Cutler manages to express his contempt for the position of the complainer largely through self-deprecating humour. He also uses indirect reasoning to make fun of the weaker arguments. While that may not sound like a compelling show, the premise serves as a fine platform for Cutler’s expressiveness and pleasing verbal style. The gradual process of deconstructing the complaint through humour is particularly gratifying to anyone who has thrown some work of their own into the public domain, only to experience mystifying and half-unhinged responses.

The show’s only truly flat moment arrives with a series of jokes about 9/11. It wasn’t really that they were insensitive, they just weren’t funny. Their painless expulsion would render the performance amusing from start to finish.

Those in Ottawa have two more chances to see it and, judging by some of the autiobiographical references therein, it seems likely to tour other Canadian cities.

In anticipation of the season itself, the pervasive heat of summer seems to have arrived. A winter’s worth of unfamiliarity means that, every few minutes, my brain starts assessing just why it is so curiously hot. Am I standing near a burner that has been left on? Am I beside a recently used shower?

One possibility I am considering for this summer is a relatively low-cost, low-energy cooling system of my own devising. My basement is large and markedly cooler than my flat. I am curious whether opening the windows down there and then placing fans at the bottom and top of the stairs might generate a flow of cooling air.

It would be overkill right now, but I may feel differently in August.