I’m sitting in a small, semi-crowded restaurant. It’s a Tuesday night at 8:30 p.m., and I’m thankful I had a reservation, because the place is packed.
I’m surrounded by well-dressed young professionals; there is not a family nor older couple in sight.
Everyone is sipping cocktails and small plates of fragrant food cross the restaurant from kitchen to table and back, carried by beautiful young waitstaff wearing clothing that could barely be mistaken for a uniform.
What I’m seeing is a symptom of the new Ottawa food culture. Restaurants such as this one are scattered across town, in the Glebe, the ByWard Market, on Elgin, and in Westboro.
Making the shift
They popped up seemingly overnight. As one trendy restaurant after another sets up shop, it begs the question: what is happening and what is causing these changes?
The answer lies both in the expectations of the public and in the ambitious chefs behind the scenes.
On the consumer’s end, lots of factors have made for a demanding and discerning public—travel, food television, and food blogging.
But in the kitchens, Ottawa’s chefs have formed their own club. Most of them young, all graduating from the same select culinary colleges. They’re choosing Ottawa as the place to own their restaurants and head their kitchens.
Gone is the separation of artist from businessman. In the new food economy, restaurants both owned and operated by chefs are the order of the day.
Urban hubs are seeing the results of this shift: small restaurants are popping up, taking over stretches of the downtown core. Nowhere is this more true than Ottawa, where there are stretches of street where there is little to do but eat and drink.
Keeping up to standards
The City of Ottawa keeps well-maintained and extensive records of their food inspections, all available online.
You can key in a specific restaurant name to see the restaurant’s report, but entering only the name of a street will yield something else: a list of all the establishments on that street with food inspections.
For example, on Elgin Street alone, 72 establishments were inspected. There were another 87 on Richmond Road in Westboro, and 24 others on Clarence Street in the ByWard Market. It’s clear there are an overwhelming number of food establishments making up the streets of Ottawa’s entertainment and nightlife districts.
Ron Eade was the Ottawa Citizen food editor for 14 years. In the time he manned the paper’s food pages, Ottawa made its drastic shift from what he calls “meat-and-potatoes” to sophisticated, artful food for the young professional.
An unlikely culprit
New wave Ottawa cuisine is, above all, authentic. From straight-from-Mexico tacos to the tapas of Spain, the food is worldly and flavourful. Small plates have replaced large ones, and the culture is one of sharing and celebration.
The unlikely culprit? Television.
“What changed everything for better and worse was food television . . . You have food television where food became entertainment,” Eade said. “With shows like Iron Chef America you could learn things almost by accident, just watching them do different things with the key ingredients.”
But it’s also more than bored 20-somethings watching the Food Network and thinking they can cook.
“At the same time, social media took off, such that every dental hygienist or IT professional with a laptop at home who had dinner last night started taking pictures of his or her food and posting it,” Eade said. “And then they started putting a few pithy words to the post and called themselves food bloggers.”
So the culinary revolution had begun, at least in Ottawa.
Food entertainment
Food television combined with food blogging made people actually care about what they were eating. Food was no longer just for sustenance, and people went out to do more than just socialize. Good food was now the main attraction.
“People are becoming more sophisticated. They know what’s good and what’s bad, and they are willing to pay for it. Ottawa is not alone in this. It’s happening across the country,” Eade said.
These are the people eating at the new wealth of small boutique restaurants, but who owns them? That reveals another layer of food culture, springing out of culinary colleges across the country.
The new restaurants are chef owned-and-operated, a trend facilitating the innovative cuisine the public has come to favour.
But anyone who has spent a night out on the town in Ottawa knows this is a small city.
Jon Svazas owns the recently opened Fauna Food + Bar on Bank Street. His menus consist of a variety of food options from octopus, to green curry, to cabbage rolls, each with its own flavour to make the dishes unique to this restaurant.
He thinks Ottawa has the capacity to become a major food and culture hub, if it can accept it.
“Ottawa likes to think of itself as a small town, and it’s the fourth biggest city in the country,” Svazas said. “I think it could accept being a major city, and the capital of our country.”
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the restaurant industry, where Svazas said new restaurants and innovative chefs are pushing food and nightlife forward.
“I’ve been here for 17 or 18 years . . . it has gotten a lot better, a lot more choice. There are at least 20 restaurants of note, and I’m probably low on that number,” he said.
“I think that the restaurant industry is doing a lot to sort of move Ottawa ahead in terms of nightlife . . . and generally making the city more fun.”
Friendly competition
But in a city full of young ambitious chefs, it’s surprising there isn’t more bad blood. Competition is intense, and opening and owning a restaurant is a tough business.
But according to Eade, the key to Ottawa’s culinary success is the relationships between chefs.
“The camaraderie among young chefs in this city is unprecedented and I think unequalled anywhere else in the country,” Eade said. “They meet together, they socialize.”
Michael Holland owns the west-end bakery Holland’s Cake and Shake. He said his choice to open in Ottawa was because of the atmosphere of community. Although the restaurants are in competition, Holland said the chefs really aren’t.
“Ottawa is one of the very few cities where there is no competition. Everyone gets along, and each restaurant is unique. You don’t see that in too many other cities,” he said.
A culinary smorgasbord
The trend towards Ottawa as a culinary smorgasbord is a new one. Before, many foodies had to travel to Montreal or Toronto to get a good bite to eat. Holland himself was trained in Toronto and did the majority of his work in Montreal before coming to Ottawa to open his own restaurant.
West de Castro is the head chef and owner of Clover, a Bank Street restaurant that opened last summer. Having lived in Ottawa since 1991, she has seen the change from a culinary shy town to the burgeoning food mecca it is now.
“For the longest time people would say, if you want to eat somewhere you have to go to Toronto or Montreal,” de Castro said.
“But it has changed so much and I think Ottawa has a really strong food scene right now, some great chefs.”
Being able to own their own restaurants has changed the landscape of food, because nowhere is a chef more free to experiment than in his or her own kitchen.
“As a chef there’s always long hours involved, and I figured if I’m going to work this hard I’d like to do it for myself, and at least that way I get full control of the menu,” Svazas said.
It all comes down to the food. And it turns out those chefs who own their restaurants are just not afraid to try something different—and foodies love it. As a result, Ottawa’s diversity of food and nightlife is on the upswing.
