To celebrate turning a year old, Queen West’s Ursa restaurant (924 Queen St. W., at Shaw) is launching a small late-night snack menu. You can thank their bartender for that.
“Robin has been asking me to put out some late-night food for him for months now,” says co-owner and head chef Jacob Sharkey Pearce. “Part of this is for him, but it’s also because we’ve been getting more whole animals in. Right now we have a lamb dish as a main course and we want to treat the animal as best we can so we don’t waste anything.”
The chef adds that the small late-night menu consists of three to five plates (priced at $9–$12), and is also a way for him to use up other foods he canned this summer, like tomatoes and peaches. “It’s giving people a more accessible way to taste the food we’re currently doing. It all draws from our current menu, but it’s repurposed in a smaller, relatively more affordable format.”
Examples include a dry-cured lamb loin tartare with fresh and burnt roses; lamb neck gyozas with white soy foam and pea shoots; as well as vegetarian gyozas made of porchini and shitake mushrooms and okara, a pulpy by-product that comes from making soy milk.
For now the late-night menu is available Friday through Monday from 11:30 p.m. till 2 a.m., though the kitchen staff is pushing to have it seven nights a week in the near future.—Karon Liu
