Here is what Ottawa restaurant-goers need to sit up for in 2025.
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Native restaurant-goers have heaps to sit up for in 2025, together with new eateries from three prime Ottawa cooks and a break from paying taxes on eatery meals till after Valentine’s Day.
All of the anticipation comes after a yr that included a spate of notable closures, together with three well-established eating places in a main a part of the ByWard Market that abruptly shut down, in addition to two of Ottawa’s old-guard Chinese restaurants famend for his or her dim sum.
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When Antheia, the upcoming restaurant from chef Briana Kim, opens this spring, it should have been eagerly anticipated for greater than a yr.
In January 2024, Kim, who had won the 2023 Canadian Culinary Championship, closed Alice, her cutting-edge plant-based restaurant on Adeline Road as a result of she had outgrown it. She was already planning to open Antheia, which takes its identify from the Greek goddess of vegetation, gardens and blossoms.
“Antheia is within the works,” Kim mentioned in a current interview. The Montreal-based agency APPAREIL Structure is designing the longer term Somerset Road West restaurant.
“We’re actually trying ahead to the brand new area,” mentioned Kim. “The eating room will nonetheless be intimate and we get extra spacious storage rooms.” For Kim, the latter was important, as her restaurant is globally acknowledged for its array of long-fermented substances and the analysis required to create them.
Marc Lepine, chef-owner of Atelier on Rochester Road and the 2012 and 2016 winner of the Canadian Culinary Championship, says he hopes to open La Petite Sauterelle, a restaurant that includes a year-round, indoor backyard, subsequent summer season.
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Development on La Petite Sauterelle is to start in early 2024 at 636 Somerset St. W. Its backyard is to characteristic greater than 1,000 crops “with a concentrate on rising distinctive produce,” says Lepine, whose restaurant Atelier is acclaimed for its innovation, visible aptitude and 40-item tasting menu.
At La Petite Sauterelle, which is to seat about 20, visitors will enter into the main-floor backyard earlier than making their means as much as the eating room, Lepine says.
Joe Thottungal, chef-owner of Coconut Lagoon and Thali, hopes to open a 3rd restaurant subsequent fall, in Almonte, a half-hour’s drive west of Ottawa.
“I did just a few occasions and a cooking class in Almonte and I’ve actually fallen in love with that city,” says Thottungal, who won silver at the 2017 Canadian Culinary Championship. “That city has a appeal, and we thought we might spice it up a bit.”
Thottungal says he has discovered a location in entrance of Almonte Previous City Corridor, however he nonetheless is engaged on his new restaurant’s idea and design.
One other vivid spot on Ottawa’s restaurant scene horizon: On Jan. 31 and Feb. 1, the chef-owner of Raphael Peruvian Delicacies, will vie for the honours that Kim, Lepine and Thottungal introduced dwelling when he competes on the Canadian Culinary Championship. On the Rogers Centre Ottawa, Becerra will compete towards 9 different cooks hailing from Vancouver to St. John’s who additionally gained qualifying occasions this fall.
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In January and till Feb. 15 — historically the slowest time of the yr for eating places — Ottawa eateries is not going to cost taxes on meals, non-alcoholic drinks, beer and wine. (Spirits and spirit-based cocktails might be taxed, nonetheless.) The break is a part of the non permanent “vacation” from the GST and HST introduced in by the federal and Ontario governments, meant to handle the affordability woes of Canadians. The tax break, which additionally covers purchases reminiscent of kids’s toys and vacation bills, was handed on Nov. 28 and went into impact on Dec. 15.
However 2024 was a yr by which the typically sudden closures of a number of long-established eating places in Ottawa, above all within the ByWard Market, overshadowed issues.
Earlier than the top of February, the ByWard Market noticed the sudden closures of the Courtyard Restaurant and Mamma Grazzi’s Kitchen, each George Road eateries situated for many years in Nationwide Capital Fee heritage properties. Of their closing months, the eating places struggled to pay lease. So did Oz Kafe, one other ByWard Market restaurant and NCC tenant, which closed with out warning in mid-October. It owed the NCC nearly $40,000.
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The autumn additionally noticed the closure of the premium ByWard Market butcher shop Saslove’s Meat Market, which had been open for greater than seven many years on ByWard Market Sq..
“It’s been a shedding proposition the previous couple of years,” proprietor John Diener mentioned. “There simply isn’t sufficient site visitors down right here anymore to maintain this enterprise.” Public servants who used to flock to his retailer after work have within the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic modified their purchasing habits and deserted Diener’s retailer.
A few of these casualties within the ByWard Market have been offset. Mamma Grazzi’s has been changed by Darkish Fork, Ottawa’s first dine-in-the-dark restaurant, which opened in September. The Courtyard’s area has been taken over by Ottawa’s Past the Pale Brewing Firm, which opened a taproom there in November.
Additional east, on Clarence Road, the Saigon Bistro, a veteran Vietnamese restaurant in Ottawa, closed in September. However by early December, its alternative, a second location of the Syrian shawarma eatery Mr. Fez, was plying its wares.
In late Could, the acclaimed William Road restaurant Buvette Daphnée closed without warning solely to reopen at the end of July with new serving and kitchen groups in place. The self-described Montreal-style wine bar and eatery opened in August 2023, with superstar chef Dominique Dufour as a accomplice and govt chef. However workers mutinied towards Dufour, strolling out on the restaurant 9 months after it opened, regardless that it had rapidly made it on to the celebrated 2024 listing of Canada’s 100 finest eating places.
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On that listing, Buvette Daphnee ranked 97th. Five other Ottawa eateries cracked the annual list, together with Riviera (twenty eighth), Atelier (43th), Arlo (71st), Provide and Demand (seventy fifth), North and Navy (ninety fifth).
Past the ByWard Market, eating places additionally got here and went.
The venerable Hull restaurant Le Pied de Cochon closed in late June, after serving conventional French fare for nearly 50 years. Its 79-year-old chef-owner Man Mervellet, who had cooked for prime ministers, Supreme Courtroom of Canada judges and innumerable regulars, advised the Citizen: “I love working, what I do, nevertheless it has grow to be too tough.”
Chinese language meals followers misplaced two dim-sum haunts following the mid-November closure of the Yangtze Restaurant in Chinatown and the summer shuttering of Mandarin Ogilvie on Ogilvie Road.
The beloved New Edinburgh restaurant Fraser, run by chef-brothers Ross and Simon Fraser, closed in June after 16 years. The brothers proceed to function the Rowan, a gastropub within the Glebe. Dante, The Italian restaurant Dante now operates within the former Fraser area on Springfield Highway.
In 2024, the proliferation of South Asian eating places in Ottawa, a trend in recent years, continued. Whereas Indian and Pakistani eateries favoured areas in Ottawa’s west finish, final yr noticed the April opening of Masakali Indian Resto Bar and the August opening of Yaari Kitchen and Bar, on Clarence Road and Murray Road respectively.
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The eating scenes in Ottawa’s suburbs diversified in 2024, as new multicultural franchises sought to reap the benefits of cheaper rents and altering demographics.
Within the Chapman Mills Market mall in Barrhaven, Tut’s Egyptian Road Meals model is coming in, becoming a member of such just lately arrived neighbours because the Mediterranean quick meals restaurant Tahini’s and the Indian eateries Biryaniwalla and Bombay Frankies.
Eagleson Highway in Kanata noticed the arrival of not solely the long-awaited T&T Asian Grocery store but additionally a Tahini’s location, becoming a member of a year-old location of Raahi Indian Dhaba, a North Indian takeout eatery.
Off of Merivale Highway in Nepean, which noticed a rush of South Asian eating places and groceries open in the previous couple of years, Agha Turkish Restaurant, which has areas in Mississauga and Waterloo, is to open on Roydon Place. It joins roughly half a dozen different Turkish eating places which have opened throughout the breadth of Ottawa in the previous couple of years.
Within the digital realm, it was Gen Z culinary content material creator Logan Moffitt who most famously represented Ottawa in 2024.
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The influencer broke out this summer season due to protection within the New York Occasions, CNN, BBC and Folks Journal that centred on his cucumber recipe movies. Now, Moffitt has greater than 9 million followers throughout TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Moffitt, who has been nicknamed the “Cucumber Man,” additionally signed this fall with the expertise administration firm Underscore Expertise, leveraging partnerships with such international manufacturers as Netflix, Sephora and Rosetta Stone.
Moffitt’s “now-famous cucumber salad even sparked a cucumber scarcity in Iceland, underscoring the huge cultural impression he’s already made,” mentioned an Underscore Expertise launch.
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