Reigning Iranian

>> Châteaukabab does the usual
fare with unusual flair

by A.J. Kinik

Versailles, Fontainebleau, Laurier, Frontenac, Kabab. If that last name seems out of place, then you obviously haven’t experienced the charms of Guy street’s Châteaukabab.

I hadn’t either until quite recently. Funny how you walk by a place a million times (give or take a few hundred thousand) and never notice it, and then one day you walk by, the stars align, and suddenly you see a place with new eyes. I spend my fair share of time in Centre-Ville, and Guy was one of the streets downtown that I thought I knew the best—until one recent Sunday, that is.

On that particular night there were two of us wandering down Guy, hungry and busily going through the relative dearth of dining options that is Centre-Ville, when we glanced inside Châteaukabab and saw something unexpected: a considerable number of families having their Sunday dinner within the Château’s highly informal setting. This was not the usual ragtag assortment of students and other ne’er-do-wells (joke, comrade, joke) that frequent the Concordia ghetto’s cheap-eats establishments—these were honest-to-goodness families and they were out on the town.

We sat there gaping through the window as a waiter—yes, a waiter—brought a table its order and we liked the looks of what we saw. Sure, there was your requisite slab of spinning shawarma behind the counter, but this was no mere sandwich joint. Most everyone was sitting down to a full-fledged meal, complete with soup, salad and rice. This begged a closer look, so that’s exactly what we gave Châteaukabab.

Check out their menu and you’ll notice that they’ve got all the sandwiches and sandwich combos that you’d expect of a Montreal Middle Eastern fast food restaurant. The house specialties, however, are an assortment of grilled and stewed meat dishes that come served in the Iranian style. And they’re good too. Good enough that I actually visited Châteaukabab two nights in a row and was seriously tempted to go for the triple crown.

As mentioned above, all the house specialties at Châteaukabab come with soup or salad, and both are a cut above. The soup is a mild, flavourful lentil soup that’s made fresh daily, while the salad is a romaine lettuce and cucumber number that comes with a tangy mint-yogurt dressing. On day one, my favourite was the aptly named Kabab Spicy ($9.99) and the dish that arrived consisted of two ample, lightly spiced and perfectly seasoned kofta kababs, a generous side of saffron rice and a grilled tomato. On day two, the champ was Chicken Zereshk ($8.99)—two pieces of chicken so tender that it was literally falling off the bone, accompanied by a lively red sauce and a side of rice studded with zereshk, or barberries, those tart almost cranberry-like berries so typical of Iranian cuisine. Of course, Châteaukabab’s is not exactly the ultra-fragrant, even perfumed, and reverently prepared rice one might hope for from an Iranian restaurant, but at these prices, you can’t have it all (much as you might like to).

Less impressive, strangely, was the Shish Kabab sandwich ($3.99)—though it came stuffed with an above-average salad and an above-average yogurt dressing, the cubed lamb itself was decidedly average, too tough to qualify as a first-rate shish.

I’d also advise steering clear of Châteaukabab’s handful of concessions to Western tastes—including a hamburger option (made with either beef or, more uniquely, chicken) and a poutine—and stick to their specialties of the house. That is, of course, unless you’re absolutely jonesing for a hamburger and/or a poutine and you’re adhering to a strict Halal diet—everything at Châteaukabab being “Halal 100 per cent,” as their menu proudly states.

One final point: I’ve eaten kebabs, kabobs and kababs at quite a number of Montreal’s restaurants—Iranian and otherwise—and I’ve come to the conclusion that, for me at least, the more informal, the better. The origins of the kabab are as a street food, after all—bring out the candles and the linen and you give your poor kabab an identity crisis. In other words, thank God the folks at Châteaukabab take their kababs more seriously than they’ve taken their name.