Everyone Wants Transparency Until They See the Numbers

Transparency has become a moral position in restaurants. Guests ask for it. Staff ask for it. Comment sections demand it. Post the margins. Show the wages. Explain the pricing. Break it all down. The assumption is simple: if people saw the numbers, everything would make sense. It’s a nice

Heat Without Anger

There was a time when kitchens believed heat had only one setting: rage. A culture built on the idea that food tasted better if someone suffered for it. Cooks learned to move fast, keep their heads down, flinch at the wrong tone. Fire was discipline. Fire was hierarchy. Fire was

The Unphotographable Dish

There’s a certain kind of dish every cook keeps tucked somewhere in the back pocket of their mind. It’s the one that tastes like a revelation and looks like a shrug. No height. No angle. No engineered shadows. Just a quiet, almost apologetic plate of food that refuses

The Menu That Eats Its City

Some cities imprint themselves onto their restaurants more than others. Ottawa does this quietly, almost politely. It doesn’t announce its influence; it exerts it. A slow pressure. A mood that seeps in through the walls and into the menu, until the food begins to reflect the place more honestly

The Customer Who Needs To Announce They’re a “Foodie”

There’s a certain guest who arrives not to eat, but to establish expertise. They declare it immediately — we’re total foodies — as if the room needed the warning. Their knowledge is mostly decorative. They use words like umami and acidity the way tourists use landmarks: to prove they were

Things Said During Service (That Sound Like Poetry Out of Context)

Can you give me thirty seconds. That’s not what I meant. Behind. Hot. I need hands. Where did this go. No, not that one. We’re waiting on fire. It died. It’s fine. It’s fine. Walk it. All day. Again. Again again. That’s dragging. Who touched

We Can Tell Who’s Worked in Restaurants

It’s not something they announce. They don’t wear it loudly. But within minutes—sometimes seconds—we know. It’s the way they sit down. The way they look at the room before they look at the menu. The way they say hello like it matters. People who’ve

The Industry Loves Passion Until It Costs Money

Everyone says they want passionate people. They say it like it’s a compliment. Like it’s currency. Passion is great when it looks like staying late. When it looks like covering a shift. When it looks like answering messages on your day off. When it looks like “no worries.

There Is No Such Thing as “Just a Server”

The phrase slips out easily. Just a server. As if the role were incidental. As if anyone could step into it without consequence. Restaurants encourage this thinking. Job titles flatten. Uniforms anonymize. Guests learn names only when prompted. And yet, almost everything that defines a dining experience passes through one

A Fork Is a Decision

A fork pretends to be neutral. It isn’t. The moment you pick it up, you agree to a way of eating. You accept distance. You accept separation. Food becomes something you manage, not something you meet. We don’t talk about this much because utensils feel inevitable. They aren’

Taste Is a Group Chat

We like to believe taste is personal. That it forms slowly, privately, somewhere between the plate and the palate. That what we like arrives unannounced and uncoached. It doesn’t. Taste is negotiated. Softened. Pre-approved. It passes through a series of hands before it ever reaches your mouth. By the

The Only Kinds of Feedback That Actually Matter

There's a particular expression diners make when they’re giving feedback they believe is useful. The eyebrows soften, the lips tense just a little, and the tone lands somewhere between apology and authority — as if they’ve just been given temporary custody of your ego. They lean forward

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