New Ottawa restaurants in 2025 from three top chefs will offset a year rife with closures

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Local restaurant-goers have lots to look forward to in 2025, including new eateries from three top Ottawa chefs and a break from paying taxes on eatery meals until after Valentine’s Day.

All the anticipation comes after a year that included a spate of notable closures, including three well-established restaurants in a prime part of the ByWard Market that suddenly shut down, as well as two of Ottawa’s old-guard Chinese restaurants renowned for their dim sum.

When Antheia, the upcoming restaurant from chef Briana Kim, opens this spring, it will have been eagerly anticipated for more than a year.

In January 2024, Kim, who had won the 2023 Canadian Culinary Championship, closed Alice, her cutting-edge plant-based restaurant on Adeline Street because she had outgrown it. She was already planning to open Antheia, which takes its name from the Greek goddess of vegetation, gardens and blossoms.

“Antheia is in the works,” Kim said in a recent interview. The Montreal-based firm APPAREIL Architecture is designing the future Somerset Street West restaurant.

“We are really looking forward to the new space,” said Kim. “The dining room will still be intimate and we get more spacious storage rooms.” For Kim, the latter was critical, as her restaurant is globally recognized for its array of long-fermented ingredients and the research required to create them.

Marc Lepine, chef-owner of Atelier on Rochester Street and the 2012 and 2016 winner of the Canadian Culinary Championship, says he hopes to open La Petite Sauterelle, a restaurant featuring a year-round, indoor garden, next summer.

Construction on La Petite Sauterelle is to begin in early 2024 at 636 Somerset St. W. Its garden is to feature more than 1,000 plants “with a focus on growing unique produce,” says Lepine, whose restaurant Atelier is acclaimed for its innovation, visual flair and 40-item tasting menu.

At La Petite Sauterelle, which is to seat about 20, guests will enter into the main-floor garden before making their way up to the dining room, Lepine says.

Joe Thottungal, chef-owner of Coconut Lagoon and Thali, hopes to open a third restaurant next fall, in Almonte, a half-hour’s drive west of Ottawa.

“I did a few events and a cooking class in Almonte and I have really fallen in love with that town,” says Thottungal, who won silver at the 2017 Canadian Culinary Championship. “That town has a charm, and we thought we would spice it up a bit.”

Thottungal says he has found a location in front of Almonte Old Town Hall, but he still is working on his new restaurant’s concept and design.

Another bright spot on Ottawa’s restaurant scene horizon: On Jan. 31 and Feb. 1,?the chef-owner of Raphael Peruvian Cuisine, will vie for the honours that Kim, Lepine and Thottungal brought home when he competes at the Canadian Culinary Championship. At the Rogers Centre Ottawa, Becerra will compete against nine other chefs hailing from Vancouver to St. John’s who also won qualifying events this fall.

In January and until Feb. 15 — traditionally the slowest time of the year for restaurants — Ottawa eateries will not charge taxes on food, non-alcoholic beverages, beer and wine. (Spirits and spirit-based cocktails will be taxed, however.) The break is part of the temporary “holiday” from the GST and HST brought in by the federal and Ontario governments, meant to address the affordability woes of Canadians. The tax break, which also covers purchases such as children’s toys and holiday expenses, was passed on Nov. 28 and went into effect on Dec. 15.

But 2024 was a year in which the sometimes sudden closures of several long-established restaurants in Ottawa, above all in the ByWard Market, overshadowed things.

Before the end of February, the ByWard Market saw the sudden closures of the Courtyard Restaurant and Mamma Grazzi’s Kitchen, both George Street eateries located for decades in National Capital Commission heritage properties. In their final months, the restaurants struggled to pay rent. So did Oz Kafe, another ByWard Market restaurant and NCC tenant, which closed without warning in mid-October. It owed the NCC almost $40,000.

The fall also saw the closure of the premium ByWard Market butcher shop Saslove’s Meat Market, which had been open for more than seven decades on ByWard Market Square.

“It’s been a losing proposition the last few years,” owner John Diener said. “There just isn’t enough traffic down here anymore to sustain this business.” Public servants who used to flock to his store after work have in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic changed their shopping habits and abandoned Diener’s store.

Some of these casualties in the ByWard Market have been offset. Mamma Grazzi’s has been replaced by Dark Fork, Ottawa’s first dine-in-the-dark restaurant, which opened in September. The Courtyard’s space has been taken over by Ottawa’s Beyond the Pale Brewing Company, which opened a taproom there in November.

Further east, on Clarence Street, the Saigon Bistro, a veteran Vietnamese restaurant in Ottawa, closed in September. But by early December, its replacement, a second location of the Syrian shawarma eatery Mr. Fez, was plying its wares.

In late May, the acclaimed William Street restaurant Buvette Daphnée closed without warning only to reopen at the end of July with new serving and kitchen teams in place. The self-described Montreal-style wine bar and eatery opened in August 2023, with celebrity chef Dominique Dufour as a partner and executive chef. But staff mutinied against Dufour, walking out on the restaurant nine months after it opened, even though it had quickly made it on to the prestigious 2024 list of Canada’s 100 best restaurants.

On that list, Buvette Daphnee ranked 97th. Five other Ottawa eateries cracked the annual list, including Riviera (28th), Atelier (43th), Arlo (71st), Supply and Demand (75th), North and Navy (95th).

Beyond the ByWard Market, restaurants also came and went.

The venerable Hull restaurant Le Pied de Cochon closed in late June, after serving traditional French fare for almost 50 years. Its 79-year-old chef-owner Guy Mervellet, who had cooked for prime ministers, Supreme Court of Canada judges and innumerable regulars, told the Citizen: “I?love working, what I do, but it has become too difficult.”

Chinese food fans lost 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 continue to operate the Rowan, a gastropub in the Glebe. The Italian restaurant Dante now operates in the former Fraser space on Springfield Road.

In 2024, the proliferation of South Asian restaurants in Ottawa, a trend in recent years, continued. While Indian and Pakistani eateries favoured locations in Ottawa’s west end, last year saw the April opening of Masakali Indian Resto Bar and the August opening of Yaari Kitchen and Bar, on Clarence Street and Murray Street respectively.

The dining scenes in Ottawa’s suburbs diversified in 2024, as new multicultural franchises sought to take advantage of cheaper rents and changing demographics.

In the Chapman Mills Marketplace mall in Barrhaven, Tut’s Egyptian Street Food brand is coming in, joining such recently arrived neighbours as the Mediterranean fast food restaurant Tahini’s and the Indian eateries Biryaniwalla and Bombay Frankies.

Eagleson Road in Kanata saw the arrival of not only the long-awaited T&T Asian Supermarket but also a Tahini’s location, joining a year-old location of Raahi Indian Dhaba, a North Indian takeout eatery.

Off of Merivale Road in Nepean, which saw a rush of South Asian restaurants and groceries open in the last few years, Agha Turkish Restaurant, which has locations in Mississauga and Waterloo, is to open on Roydon Place. It joins roughly half a dozen other Turkish restaurants that have opened across the breadth of Ottawa in the last few years.

In the digital realm, it was Gen Z culinary content creator Logan Moffitt who most famously represented Ottawa in 2024.

The influencer broke out this summer thanks to coverage in the New York Times, CNN, BBC and People Magazine that centred on his cucumber recipe videos. Now, Moffitt has more than nine million followers across TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. Moffitt, who has been nicknamed the “Cucumber Guy,” also signed this fall with the talent management company Underscore Talent, leveraging partnerships with such global brands as Netflix, Sephora and Rosetta Stone.

Moffitt’s “now-famous cucumber salad even sparked a cucumber shortage in Iceland, underscoring the massive cultural impact he’s already made,” said an Underscore Talent release.

phum@postmedia.com

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