Jolee

5495 Avenue Victoria

Montreal, QC
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6 out of 10

Sri Lankan/South Indian/South Asian

Kind of fuzzy on the type of food, I know, but International boundaries don't really bind culinary traditions in places whose interconnected histories go back thousands of years. For example, everything on the thali plate above looks like standard Indian except the noodles. Even the restaurant's sign says "Indian" but the Sri Lankan influences are huge, and there's definitely a combination of Northern and Southern Indian fare being offered here.

That being said, here's what this restaurant/take-away serves: dosa, idli, vada, biryani and uttappam - all South Indian specialties - as well as pittu, string hoppers and kottu, Sri Lankan dishes.

But Wait! There's more! Butter chicken, spicy vegetable and non-vegetable curries, naan, all served as part of thalis, and appetizers like pakoras - very much Northern Indian fare. Then, just in case you don't like any of these foods, there are the Chinese dishes of noodles and meat, vegetables or seafood with shrimp, egg, oyster sauce and soy sauce, reminiscent of Cantonese chow mein. There's nothing called "fried rice" on the menu, but between the biryani and the string hoppers kottu you'd probably never know the difference unless you were from one of the places listed above.
Because of all the selection, this restaurant does a mean take-out business with all the different people living in the Cote-Ste-Catherine area. With a buffet-style counter at the front, you can get your crab leg curry and chicken roti to go, along with samosa-type deep-fried pastries or vats of over-cooked meats in spiced oil. Yes, they've been sitting there for awhile, but the turn-over can be pretty good depending on the dish. I actually saw a fresh chafing dish of beef put out between the time I entered the restaurant and the time I left. Impressive, and the highlight of my whole trip was the take-away roti of ungreasy sweet baked dough wrapped around spicy chicken and potatoes, the whole thing the size of a kids hot dog, but much more delicious. I like spicy and despite my requests for spicy dishes, this was the only thing that came close to satisfying my tongue.
That's not to say that they didn't try to spike my string hoppers kottu with diced fresh green chiles. Unfortunately, it just didn't work very well. I could see mustard seeds and fennel mixed into the home-made diced noodles, onions, chili, egg and fried seafood mixture, but it just didn't taste like much. Turns out the trick with this dish is to order beef or lamb since the fat of those cheap pieces of meat flavours the entire dish. The seafood was tough, chewy and bland, and therefore so was the rest of the dish. The interesting part was that it was served with lime on the side, which is definitely a Thai influence on the Sri Lankan dish, not Indian. The lime added a lot to the enormous platter of food ($8.00 for the seafood option, $6.50 for lamb, chicken or beef, $5.50 for vegetarian), but there wasn't enough lime to flavour three meals of the stuff, which is how many meals I made out of it. God bless take-out containers and tupperware.
I really couldn't expect the Idly to be spicy. It's not supposed to be. 5 discs of steamed dessicated rice and lentils ($5.50) aren't supposed to be extremely tasty by themselves. It's their accompanying sambar and coconut chutney that should do the work. Unfortunately the sambar, a mix of carrots, okra (another less common ingredient), lentils and spices, ended up pretty watery and bland. I couldn't taste fenugreek or cumin or mustard seed (despite seeing them again) or coriander. The coconut chutney was worse. It tasted metallic and a little salty. It should be a little sweet, even the unsweetened variety. This probably means the coconut was not fresh, but it also means no spices or flavourings were added to help.
Sambar is served with just about all the South Indian appetizers and dosas, so there were a few more disappointments. The vada, deep-fried balls of lentils, coriander, onions and chilies sit in a soup of the stuff (thoguh they may be saved by the oil from the balls leeching into the liquid (think Gulf of Mexico oil spill but delicious), and the masala dosa - giant, thin, crepe-like cones of lentil and spices wrapped around potato and other unidentifiable, kind of spiced oily vegetables, all fried in more oil - didn't really have a chance.
The dosas themselves (we tried the regular masala version - masala just means spice blend, like curry means Indian spices to a lot of Westerners - and the onion version, which was exactly the same but added raw chopped red onions to the inside of the lentil wrap). The dosa shell was tasty, slightly fermented and lemony, but the inside was nothing to write home about. It needed a whole lot more fresh spice and heat, and less oil.

I'd never had stringhoppers before, so I was looking forward to trying the Sri Lankan specialty. These home-made noodles are very fun. They're a little brownish-red in colour and once steamed, stick together in small circular bundles, that are easily removed from on top of each other. They were served in a thali, a mixed metal plate separated into sections of different cooked vegetables, lentils and meats. The vegetarian version came with beautifully squishy (thanks to all the oil) eggplant, boring potatoes in a turmeric-based heat-less spicing, and a very respectable daal. I liked the daal because it didn't cheat by using salt to add flavour. I could actually taste the fennel, FINALLY! The noodles themselves don't taste like much, they're just noodles, after all, but there's something very comforting about noodles, and it's very different to be eating noodles, and not rice with what you think will be a rice-heavy South Indian meal.

Of course, the standard Indian thali is just like, but maybe a little worse, than any North Indian place in Parc Extension. For almost no money you get a ton of food - the same eggplant, daal and potato, along with rice, a piece of thin, sub-par naan and a curry of beef, lamb or chicken. The lamb was over-cooked and chewy, since I think it came from the counter-top buffet in front instead of the fresh pan I saw put out.

So there were problems here. The restaurant was dirty. Apparently they violated a whole lot of health codes in the past. There were hairs in some of the food. The bathrooms weren't clean, nothing seemed sanitized. Most importantly, the food was just so-so, but as a restaurant experience it was really fun. If you're the type of person who likes to try a new dish, a new style of cuisine, and learn about a different culinary tradition, this is a great place to come. Just ask what's fresh, order what the locals order and don't expect anything to be amazing. It will be very, very good for the meagre amount of money that you spend, though. I would go back for the chicken roti.

Hours: Noon-11pm, daily
Expect to Pay: Vegetarian - $7, Meat - $7.50-$13 including tax and tip, less on take-out.
Licensed: In theory, yes, but they don't sell alcohol and you can't BYOB, so probably they don't have a license anymore.
514-733-6362