Here’s what Ottawa restaurant-goers have to look forward to in 2025.
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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.
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“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.
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.
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.
“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.
Beyond the ByWard Market, restaurants also came and went.
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.