Mekong

Four regional kitchens share one menu at Mekong. Cantonese, Szechwan, Vietnamese, and Thai dishes run side by side, which means a mixed table rarely has to negotiate — the diner who wants something sauced and familiar and the one chasing a sharper heat both order from the same page. That breadth is the point of the place rather than a footnote to it. Mekong sits on Somerset Street West, in the heart of Ottawa's Chinatown, and it works less like a single-region specialist than like a broad Asian dining room a neighbourhood can return to again and again without exhausting the menu.

The ordering spine is easy to read. Crispy Beef and General Tao Chicken anchor the sauced-main end, the plates most tables build a meal around, while Spring Rolls and Fresh Rice Paper Rolls open things on the lighter side. Between them sits a run of dumplings — Hunan Dumplings, Pork Siu Mai, Pot Stickers, Shrimp Dumplings — that works as a shared course before the mains arrive. Salt and Pepper Pork, Spicy Ginger Chicken, Chicken with Black Bean Sauce, and Sweet and Sour Pork fill out the protein range, and Chinese Broccoli with Roasted Garlic and Eggplant with Minced Pork in Black Bean Sauce give the table its vegetable footing. It is a familiar vocabulary of Chinese and Southeast Asian cooking, run broad rather than narrow.

What that range tells you is a restaurant built for sharing rather than for the solo plate. The dishes are portioned to cross the table, and they reward a group that orders across the menu instead of settling on one plate each. The practical move is to open with rolls, set a dumpling course in the middle, build the centre around Crispy Beef or General Tao Chicken, and bring in the garlic broccoli to cut the richer plates — a sequence that moves a dinner through crisp, soft, sauced, and fresh instead of repeating a single texture. None of it is precious. The kitchen's job here is range, and the menu is long enough that a second or third visit lands differently from the first.

The setting is arranged to match the way people eat here. Mekong runs across two floors and seats about fifty, with a summer patio when the weather turns and beer and wine alongside the food. It is a full-service dining lounge, paced for a sit-down dinner rather than a quick counter stop, and it handles larger parties and catering by phone. Reservations work the same way — taken by a call to the restaurant rather than an online booking service, a small tell that Mekong keeps to its own tempo. When a table dinner is not the plan, the same menu travels by takeout and delivery.

Continuity is part of the draw. Mekong has cooked this menu on Somerset Street West since 1990, more than thirty years in the same Chinatown stretch, long enough that dishes like the crispy beef, the black-bean eggplant, and the dumplings read as fixtures rather than trends passing through. The free parking beside the building and the two-floor room are unglamorous details, but they are the kind a working restaurant accumulates and holds onto — the practical footing that has kept Mekong a dependable group-dinner option through the changes in the neighbourhood around it.

That is what a mixed table actually comes for. Someone wants dumplings, someone wants heat, someone wants the familiar sauced chicken, and one menu holds all three without anyone settling. Order several plates to share, add the garlic broccoli to cut the richer dishes, and dinner arranges itself — the unshowy kind of usefulness a Chinatown dining room trades on when it means to be there for the next table, and the one after that.