Are Chefs Still Allowed to Be Weird?

There was a time when being a chef meant being a little unhinged. Not in the toxic, screaming caricature sense, but in the creative sense — the willingness to chase ideas no reasonable person would dignify with mise en place. A dish could be strange. A dish could be divisive. A

Ottawa’s Next Great Restaurant Is Going to Come From a Basement, Not a Developer

There’s a certain kind of restaurant Ottawa keeps trying to build. You know the one: polished concrete, soft LED wash, a name that sounds like a boutique condo. The menu is safe but photogenic. The investors want “approachable.” The chef is told not to scare anyone. It opens with

The Crispy Problem

There’s a certain sound you hear in Ottawa restaurants these days. Not conversation. Not the clink of glassware. It’s the crunch—that fragile, triumphant noise chefs have started treating like a mandatory ingredient. Every dish has to come with something shatterable. A puff, a chip, a crisp, a

Weather as Ingredient

Weather isn’t just something outside the dining room. It walks in with people. It settles on their coats, their appetite, the way they read a menu. In Ottawa, the seasons don’t change the city so much as they reshape its hunger. On the coldest nights, dishes taste different.

Dining After 10pm in Ottawa: A Tragedy in Three Acts

Act I: Hope You tell yourself it’s possible. That a capital city of a million people should, logically, have something—anything—worth eating after 10pm. You scroll through hours on Google Maps like a gambler looking for a sign, convinced that this time the algorithm won’t lie. You

Ottawa’s Secret Ingredient: Fear

There’s a flavour you can taste in this city if you pay close enough attention. It’s not on any menu. It’s not a spice, or a technique, or a trend imported from Copenhagen six months too late. It’s quieter than that. It sits underneath the food,

The Flavour of Ottawa in 2035

Nobody noticed the exact moment Ottawa’s palate changed. You never do. Cities don’t wake up with new cravings; their tastes drift the way rivers do— a degree at a time, invisible until you step back and realize the shoreline has moved. 2035 isn’t far away. A decade

Service Industry Astrology

Your horoscope is wrong. This is the real one. Forget whatever the sky is doing. The restaurant industry has its own zodiac—one forged in walk-in freezers, on the pass, and in the eternal glow of the POS screen. If you work in hospitality, your personality was set the moment

Inventory

Flour, ten kilos. Butter, six blocks. Three lemons that no one remembers ordering. A container of parsley that’s half wilted but not yet gone. One pastry brush with a handle darkened by years of glaze. The smell of yeast in the corners of the walk-in, faint but alive. Two

Slow Mile

Ottawa on a Sunday feels like a city between breaths. The noise has stepped outside. The sky hangs low and undecided, the streets washed clean of urgency. Windows glow but no one hurries toward them. Even the pigeons look like they’re waiting for something to reopen. You can walk

The Knife Rack as a Family Portrait

Every kitchen has one wall that tells the real story—not the pass, not the menu board, not the framed reviews near the bathroom. It’s the knife rack. A straight line of metal and magnets, holding more biography than any staff meeting ever will. Each knife on it is

How to Date Someone Who Works in Restaurants (And Survive)

Dating a restaurant worker is not for the faint of heart. It’s not like dating normal people with weekends and circadian rhythms. It’s more like entering a long-distance relationship with someone who lives six blocks away but only exists between 2 and 5 a.m., holding a beer

When the Staff Meal Became Content

There was a time when staff meal wasn’t meant to be seen. It was eaten out of deli containers, balanced on overturned buckets, in the thirty minutes between panic and service. It wasn’t family. It wasn’t content. It was fuel — cold pasta, too much salt, and just

Everybody Wants to Plate Like Copenhagen

Somewhere along the way, the world decided food should look sad. A single scallop, half a leaf, one trembling drop of chlorophyll — each placed with the precision of a surgeon or a stylist. The plate is gray, the light is cold, and everything looks like it just got bad news.

“Guest Notes”

Every service leaves behind a few lines of dialogue that don’t make it to the check. Collected, they read like a natural history of dining — the evolving language of curiosity, complaint, and misplaced confidence. The Revisionist: “We’ll build our own tasting menu.” The Scientist: “Can I see the

Chefs Without Restaurants

There was a time when a restaurant defined a chef — four walls, a door that locked, a name in cursive over the entrance. You built a menu, a team, a reputation. You stayed put. Now, the walls are gone. The new generation moves like weather — a dinner in one city,

The House Ferment

Once, fermentation was a necessity. Now it’s a signature. Every restaurant keeps a row of jars on a shelf — a small altar to time, bacteria, and self-regard. It began as rebellion. Chefs wanted to reject the speed of the industry, the sterile precision of sous vide, the artificial rhythms

Tannins and Time

There’s a certain kind of person who talks about aging as if it’s a craft. They swirl their years like wine in a glass — letting oxygen rewrite the story. They say they’ve “mellowed,” that the edges have softened. What they really mean is that the bitterness has

Zero Waste, Infinite Guilt

Somewhere between the compost bin and the tasting menu, virtue became another course. Chefs weigh scraps like sins, recite sustainability pledges between plating and press interviews. Diners nod, absolved. The food may be delicious, but the air is heavy with confession. Zero waste used to mean efficiency; now it means

The Fear of Silence

No one lets a dish speak for itself anymore. Every plate arrives with a sentence attached — an origin story, a flourish, a reason for existing. The quieter the food, the louder the explanation. It’s not really about education. It’s about control. The chef, the server, the brand — all

Your Server Tonight Is the Owner

The new language of fine dining is intimacy. No waiters, no uniforms, no hierarchy — just the chef, emerging from the kitchen with the dish they made “for you.” The gesture is framed as purity. Transparency. A kind of culinary honesty, unfiltered by service staff. But the truth is cheaper than

Night Shift Aesthetics

The city feels different when you walk through it after service. The air has cooled; the noise has thinned. You can still smell the night — fryer oil, exhaust, bread, cigarettes — but it’s all gentler now, softened by distance and fatigue. There’s a strange beauty to this hour, a

The Menu That Never Changes

There’s a certain comfort in a dish that never leaves. The one the servers describe like a reflex, the one diners return for as though it were a friend still working the same shift. But comfort, in restaurants, can be a kind of inertia. Ottawa has its share of

Why No One Knows Ottawa’s Sommeliers by Name

Ottawa knows its chefs. Knows the faces on the pass, the signatures on the plates, the names that get stitched into every awards shortlist. Chefs here are characters. Recognized, quoted, mythologized. But sommeliers? Ghosts. There are a handful in this city with encyclopedic palates, people who could dismantle a wine

Food Critics Without Critics

Ottawa doesn’t have critics anymore. It has cheerleaders. It has comped dinners written up as glowing Instagram reels. It has copy-and-paste “Top 10” lists with the same five restaurants shuffled like a deck of cards. But a critic? Someone who actually eats, judges, and risks saying something unpopular? Gone.