This weekend marked Ottawa’s first ever Underground Chef’s Market, bringing new meaning to the phrase “dress code is casual.”
Perhaps I should have realised that casual didn’t mean a pair of old jeans, worn-out sneakers, and a tired flannel shirt with a camera strapped to my body and a billion wires hanging out of my pocket.
Casual, as I discovered, actually meant dressing somewhere between going out for dinner at a nice restaurant and clubbing. Women wore high heels and teetered their way through the Ottawa Convention Centre while men wore crisp dress shirts. There were a few confused students dressed similarly to me, awkwardly darting between the professionals.
The market itself was a first for Ottawa, created as a festival for up-and-coming chefs from around the city to demonstrate their food to an eager audience. Some didn’t have a full restaurant in operation yet, while others ran more established eateries and food trucks.
“So far, the response is very positive,” says Louis Charest, the head chef at Rosie’s Southern Kitchen and Raw Bar. “We’ve had people coming back to our booth, pointing at us, and saying ‘You’ve gotta try this,’ so that’s always a good sign.”
Charest’s restaurant doesn’t open until Dec. 6 and he is using the festival to see how everyone reacts to their food styles.
His paella was easily the best dish of the night. Both spicy and meaty, it rivalled many of the paella I’ve had in Spain, and was absolutely loaded with seafood. If the rest of their food is anything like this, I would shell out the clams—pun entirely intended—to visit their new restaurant in the Glebe.
Alongside the restaurants, many food trucks were invited to attend the festival and were met with massive praise from the army of casually dressed. By a massive margin, Gongfu Bao appeared to be the most popular, selling their Asian-style steamed pork buns to a colossal lineup.
This confused me for a number of reasons. I suspect that something of a ribfest marketing strategy was employed here. At most ribfests, where many vendors sell similar products and a huge number of attendees can’t really tell the difference, vendors tend to sell their products slowly, building a big line, and onlookers jump to the conclusion that a long line means that the product must be good.
For that reason, the line at Gongfu Bao that literally cut the festival floor in two and snaked like a telephone wire seemed baffling. Of course, I never purchased the product, considering I didn’t have a half hour to kill in line and the thought of shelling out $5 for a bao bun that I can get for around a dollar around the corner from my apartment, was a little revolting.
This didn’t seem like a student-friendly zone, considering that most of the food was in small portions and at similar prices. Fortunately, the food for sale was largely unique and unlike most of what you can find around Ottawa.
This includes artisanal donuts, for sale by Dough Town, a donut store still without a brick-and-morter location.
“People just can’t get anything around here except Tim Hortons,” says Amber Lepage, the owner. “The market is really saturated with cupcake stores, and we’re hoping to inject some life into the patisserie scene.”
Their donuts, to their credit, were indeed much better than Tim Hortons, though priced at $3 each.
What seemed to be a massive oversight by the organizers was their bar setup.
Rivalling Gongfu Bao for the longest lineup in the building was the line for the two small bar stations and their exhausted-looking bartenders constantly pouring wine and beer. They also didn’t have a draught menu, but the bartenders were pouring beer from bottles to glasses, slowing the service down further.
It also seemed strange, being so focused on ultra-local and new restaurants, that the organizers only seemed to offer an extremely banal, mass-marketed beer selection. With so many hyper local, small-scale breweries, some of them less than a year old, the oversight was surprising and clunky.
Despite how it could be difficult to get any sort of liquor, which is never a good thing on a Saturday night, the event was extremely well-attended. Organizers say the event was completely sold out, and when I left relatively early, the lines were growing extremely long.
Organizers will be following the event up with a noodle-market in February. If you are an independently wealthy student, want to hoodwink a date into thinking you’re much wealthier than you are, or enjoy waiting in long lines for a bottle of Canadian, I would recommend checking the event out.
