Asian fest offers taste of the exotic to Ottawa

OTTAWA - It is the smells that first hit you in Ottawa's Chinatown on the last weekend in July.

Cooks frantically working over blazing hot skillets and sizzling vats produce a gastrobouquet of exotic Asian fare, from fried squid with kimchi fries to okonomiyaki aka (Japanese pancakes), and there is no shortage of lineups of people waiting to buy and taste.

Some dishes - squid-on-a-stick and stinky tofu, common in Toronto's much larger Chinatown - were only available for the three days of Ottawa Asian Fest, which is designed as a traditional Asian night market that the late US celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain popularized on his Emmy Award-winning CNN series Parts Unknown.