SemSem

SemSem takes its name from the Arabic word for sesame, and at this Bank Street address the seed is less a flourish than the organizing principle of the whole menu. It turns up in the breads and the kaak, in the dips and the sweets, even in the coffee, giving a Palestinian and Levantine kitchen a sharper focus than the broad all-day Middle Eastern label usually carries. SemSem cooks breakfast, brunch, and early lunch in Ottawa's South Keys stretch of Bank Street, and the doors close by four — a morning-and-midday restaurant by design, built around family recipes instead of a sprawling dinner card.

The bread program is where that focus shows up first. The Cheese Sunflower is the signature: a soft, pull-apart loaf shaped like its namesake, baked fresh and filled with halloumi, thyme, and sesame, meant to be torn apart across a shared table. Around it sits a real bakery — Kaak Al'Quds, the ring-shaped Jerusalem sesame bread, and Majdoul beside it, so the loaves read as a category rather than a single trick. The fatteh is the other centre of gravity. Fatteh Tahini with Meat layers toasted pita, chickpeas, and tahini into something closer to a main course than a starter, and the kitchen runs the same idea through Fatteh Yogurt, Eggplant Fatteh, and Fattet Al'Quds. Savoury pastries fill out the table — the Popie Spinach and Halloumi Pie, the Sojok Sunflower — and the drinks keep the theme honest, from the spiced karak of the SemSem Drink to a house coffee that carries the same warmth back into the meal.

What that range adds up to is a kitchen that treats the Levantine breakfast as the main event rather than a warm-up to lunch. Many Middle Eastern restaurants in the city run a broad card and tuck a few morning plates into it; here the chickpeas, tahini, yogurt, olive oil, and just-baked bread are the centre of everything. Grandma's Breakfast, the shakshouka, the hummus and mutabal, the falafel plate — they share a pantry and a logic, and the daily baking ties them together instead of propping them up. The four o'clock close says the rest: the oven runs from early in the morning, and dinner was never the point.

By the restaurant's own account, SemSem opened in 2016, founded by Mayssaa Chaltaf and Mohamed Al Abed and built around recipes carried from home rather than a concept worked out on paper. The Palestinian thread is specific, not decorative — Kaak Al'Quds and Fattet Al'Quds both carry the Arabic name for Jerusalem, and the menu reads as one family's table rather than a regional survey. The dining room is small and hung with local art, and on weekend mornings it fills early enough that a reservation is the safer plan.

It is a menu built to be shared, which is also where the value lands. Portions are generous, and the plates are designed to overlap — a fatteh, a sunflower loaf, a couple of dips, and a pot of karak make a full table for a moderate bill. Much of it is vegetarian without trying to be: the chickpeas, the yogurt, the eggplant, the halloumi, and the breads carry most of the menu, so a table that doesn't eat meat rarely has to negotiate. The kitchen also packs it to go and caters, which is how the sesame breads end up on tables well beyond Bank Street.

The effect is a restaurant that asks to be eaten the way the food is built: several plates at once, bread in the middle, tahini and yogurt and chickpeas circling it, a karak going cold while the table reaches for one more piece of the sunflower loaf. Ottawa has no shortage of places to find hummus; it has very few that put a Palestinian breakfast and a working bakery at the heart of the operation and let everything else follow. On a stretch of Bank Street better known for big-box parking lots, SemSem keeps the oven going and the doors open until the bread carries it to four.