This is one of the rare times we’ve ventured downtown for Eat the Strip. We’re more accustomed to industrial parks and suburban strip malls, where restaurants hide in plain sight between auto shops, warehouses and parking lots. Downtown Ottawa is a different beast. Instead of pulling into a plaza, Sergio, my frequent collaborator on the blog, and I find ourselves navigating the labyrinthine corridors of a government office tower, following the flow of employees through the building in search of lunch.

Eventually, we find Elite Kitchen, tucked into the basement food court at 407 Laurier Ave. W.. It’s not exactly the sort of place you stumble across by accident, but that’s part of the appeal. This is a genuine hidden gem, run by Ebrahim, an owner and chef who’s making fresh, Persian-inspired food in a setting where you might least expect to find it.

We catch Ebrahim after the lunch rush, sitting at his post and taking in the world. We ask what he recommends. His salmon, one of his bestsellers, has already sold out, so we settle on a chicken curry, a Persian eggplant dip and a beef kebab sandwich.

We find a spot near a pharmacy and wait. The food arrives quickly, steaming hot and freshly prepared. In a food court catering to people with limited lunch breaks, speed matters. But as we start eating, it becomes clear that Elite Kitchen has more going on than convenience.

The eggplant dip immediately grabs our attention. It’s warm, savoury and wonderfully lemony, with tomato bringing its own bright acidity and garlic that never overwhelms. Sergio says it reminds him of Sunday gravy, that comforting tomato sauce that might spend an afternoon bubbling away on the stove. It’s a surprising comparison, but the tomato provides a familiar richness, while the citrus gives the dip a character of its own.

You could eat that with a spoon for sure, he says.

It’s hard to disagree. We keep returning for another scoop, until the dip starts to eclipse everything else on the table. The rice is an excellent companion, too. Freshly cooked and fragrant with saffron, it works particularly well alongside the eggplant’s acidity. Rice can be an afterthought, something to soak up sauce and fill a plate, but here its freshness makes a real difference. We agree that good rice can change the entire experience of a meal.

The chicken curry is enjoyable, offering a mild, comforting option for anyone who wants flavour without too much heat. Sergio reckons it’s the kind of curry that won’t upset your tummy. It’s a solid dish, and the saffron rice gives it a boost, but it ends up playing second fiddle to the eggplant and the sandwich.

The beef kebab sandwich is the other surprise. Our first bites remind us of a Big Mac, prompting us to wonder aloud why anyone would head to a fast-food chain when there’s a freshly prepared sandwich waiting here. The two aren’t identical, but they share that familiar, satisfying combination of savoury beef and sandwich-shop comfort. This one, however, comes from a kitchen preparing food for you rather than assembling it on a production line.

Between the sandwich and the eggplant, the curry barely gets a chance to make its case. It’s a good problem to have, especially when everything arrives hot and quickly. For a lunch tucked away in a government building, this is an unexpectedly satisfying spread.

After eating, I sit down with Ebrahim to learn how he ended up cooking Persian-inspired fusion food in the basement of an office tower.

His route into the kitchen wasn’t conventional. Ebrahim trained as an engineer before stepping away from that career in 2018. Food, however, had always been a passion. As he explains, he loved food and loved cooking. He began exploring the industry more seriously, taking master classes and developing his skills.

He eventually worked at a restaurant in the ByWard Market before moving to Spritz as a sous-chef under René Rodriguez. After leaving restaurant work, he started cooking as a private chef, built a catering business and eventually decided to open his own boutique kitchen.

Elite Kitchen has now been operating for three and a half years. Ebrahim adapted his menu for the grab-and-go crowd, building a business around the needs of the people working in the surrounding offices. It’s practical, but the economics are challenging.

The margins on his food are slim, he explains, which makes catering essential to keeping the business going. The food court gives him a way to serve customers every day, but catering is where the business becomes more financially viable.

There’s also the question of what customers expect to pay. This is a government office building, and Ebrahim has had to adapt his menu to suit the tastes and budgets of the people upstairs. Some customers still expect pre-pandemic prices, imagining that freshly prepared food should cost $5 or $6.

It’s a familiar problem for small food businesses. Customers want quality, freshness and generous portions, but they’re often reluctant to pay what those things actually cost. For someone cooking from scratch, the arithmetic can be brutal.

And yet Ebrahim continues to prioritize quality. He received a 2026 Canadian Choice Award for best catering, recognition of the work he’s doing beyond the food court. The demand for his cooking is encouraging, too. He estimates that around 95 per cent of people who try his food return to sample something else. On the day we visit, he has prepared around 20 salmon portions, and they’ve all sold.

The challenge isn’t necessarily convincing people to like his food. It’s finding a way to introduce them to more of it.

Ebrahim came to Canada from Tehran when he was 19. His Persian roots remain central to his cooking, even as he adapts his dishes for the customers who make up most of his clientele. His approach to fusion is deliberate: he wants to bring Persian influences to food that feels familiar and approachable to the people he serves.

It makes sense given the setting. Most of his customers are regulars from the government offices above, people looking for a quick lunch between meetings. Ebrahim has to make food that appeals to them while finding ways to share his culinary heritage. There’s a Persian touch to everything he prepares, and the saffron rice accompanying our meal is a good example of how those influences can shine through without overwhelming the dish.

Still, Ebrahim has ambitions that extend beyond making food that fits neatly into an office worker’s day. He wants people to recognize Persian cuisine in the same way Ottawa diners recognize Lebanese food through shawarma or Greek food through the gyro. Those dishes have become familiar introductions to much larger culinary traditions.

Persian food deserves that same recognition. There’s a depth and range to the cuisine that many Canadians have yet to discover, and Ebrahim wants to introduce more of it to his customers rather than always adapting his menu to what they already know. As he puts it, he wants to continue bringing quality food to his community.

For now, he’s working within the realities of his location. He runs his catering business alongside Elite Kitchen, uses fusion to bring customers through the door and continues to put quality at the centre of what he does.

That commitment is evident in the meal we’ve just eaten. The eggplant is bright and comforting, the rice is fresh, the sandwich is satisfying, and everything arrives quickly without feeling careless. The wrap is under $10, while the main-course dishes are under $20. For freshly prepared food in downtown Ottawa, those are reasonable prices.

What stays with me most, though, is the gap between what Ebrahim can cook and what the economics of his location allow him to offer. He has the training, experience and ambition to share a broader picture of Persian cuisine. The question is whether enough people will take the time to discover it.

Elite Kitchen isn’t the sort of place you stumble upon while wandering through Ottawa in search of your next meal. You have to find your way through an office tower and descend into a basement food court. But there’s a chef down there who has spent years building a business around his love of cooking, trying to share a piece of his heritage with a community that might not otherwise encounter it.

I hope more people make the trip. Not just because the food is fresh, affordable and genuinely enjoyable, but because Ebrahim deserves the opportunity to show Ottawa what Persian cooking can be when he has room to do it on his own terms. We’d happily return for the salmon, and we certainly wouldn’t say no to another bowl of that eggplant dip. But I’d also love to see the day when people walk into Elite Kitchen specifically looking for Persian food, ready to discover something they didn’t know they were missing.

For now, the government workers upstairs have a hidden gem beneath their feet. The rest of Ottawa should take note.