Azhar Kitchen & Bar

A table at Azhar orders in two movements. The dips land first and set the pace — warm chickpea hummus with masabacha, lemon pickle, and green shatta; muhammara ground from roasted pepper and walnut; babaganoush smoked and finished with date molasses — and the meal only takes its shape once one large plate arrives in the middle of them. That plate is the decision the table has to make together. Whole sea bream under chermoula, dill seed, and lemon. Iskender kebap, hanger steak with brown butter, serrano, yogurt, pita, and herbs. Wood-fired chicken with pine nut amlou, toum, labneh, and aleppo. Azhar is an Eastern Mediterranean and Middle Eastern restaurant on Ossington Avenue, and everything about how it is built assumes the food will be passed across the table rather than guarded on one side of it.

Fire and spice run through the menu, and the kitchen is specific about both. Warm halloumi comes under fermented honey, garlic, chilies, and sage. Roasted lamb belly sits on kashk bademjan with dried mint and pomegranate molasses. Mussels are steamed with saffron and arak, sofrito, a fennel salad, chilies, and tomato pita. Wild scallops arrive on ramp hummus with pea, butter, and za'atar. Lamb kebab binds spiced lamb and beef with barley, feta, pistachio, and green ajika. Dolmades hide spiced beef and rice inside grape leaves and land with garlic tahini. The sides are not afterthoughts: saffron rice studded with golden raisin, date, pistachio, and pine nut, and za'atar fries under lemon aioli. Dessert is a pistachio torta with pistachio butter, ground pistachio, and vanilla ice cream.

What the menu says about the kitchen is that it has thought about who is actually sitting down. Vegetarian diners are not handed one plate and a shrug. The dip lineup, the falafel plate, saffron rice, za'atar fries, halloumi, and the torta give them a full path through the same meal everyone else is eating. The structure — dips, small, large, sides — lets a table pace itself, ordering in waves instead of committing at once. It is also the answer when a group cannot agree: dips for the middle, one bream or one kebap as the anchor, enough small plates to keep the table from stalling. Cocktails and spritzes, including versions built without alcohol, sit alongside the food rather than under it. Reservations are the sensible move on a prime Ossington evening.

Azhar belongs to Janet Zuccarini, part of her Gusto 54 group, and the cooking is led by chef Stuart Cameron. Cameron's kitchen is the reason the fire reads as method rather than decoration. The wood-fired chicken, the whole fish, and the grill-driven kebap all come from a single point of view about heat and spice, applied consistently enough that a diner can trace it from the first dip to the last plate. Azhar treats the Ossington strip as its natural home, a corridor where a dining room can be polished without ever turning formal, and where dinner is expected to run long.

Happy hour is where the restaurant loosens its collar. Weekdays from four to six, weekends from three to five, snacks and spritzes and selected wine move at a lower commitment than a full dinner order — the same kitchen, the same fire, a shorter contract. Weekend lunch runs from noon to three, stuffed pita and platters alongside the dinner list. It is a useful thing to know about a restaurant otherwise built for the long evening. You can come to Azhar for two dips, a plate of za'atar fries, and a drink at five o'clock on a Tuesday, and the kitchen will still cook them like it means it.