Huevos rancheros is a breakfast dish that has been executed badly in enough brunch restaurants that the bar is technically low, but Rene Rodriguez — who has somehow ended up running La Bottega Nicastro, an Italian restaurant in Ottawa — understood that the low bar is the trap. The dish's simplicity is its difficulty: every component is exposed, and there is nowhere to hide an undercooked egg or a thin sauce.
Rodriguez's ranchero sauce builds with dried chiles — guajillo and ancho, toasted in a dry pan until fragrant, then rehydrated in just-boiled water for twenty minutes — rather than fresh chiles and canned tomato, which is the shortcut that produces a sauce that tastes like a shortcut. The eggs are fried in oil that's hot enough to blister the white at the edges while leaving the yolk loose — this requires oil at 375°F and thirty to forty-five seconds of active basting. The tortilla is fried crisp enough to support the egg without bending.
An Italian restaurant in Ottawa run by a man who beat Bobby Flay at Mexican breakfast food is a sentence that deserves more attention than it gets. Bobby's sauce, per the judges, tasted like it had been made in less time than it should have been.
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