The ByWard Market Masquerade

Step into the ByWard Market and you could be anywhere in the marketing brochure version of Ottawa.
A crush of patios spilling into cobblestones. Buskers strumming the same three songs. Neat rows of peaches and corn arranged for a lens rather than a saucepan. It’s the postcard image: bright, busy, alive.

It’s also a lie.

Once, there were reasons for a local to eat here. A couple of restaurants whose names you could drop without having to defend them. Now they’re gone. What’s left is a churn of bars, tourist menus, and pub food wearing “gastro” as a paper mask. The word artisan gets printed on menus where the only local thing in the kitchen is the keg.

The Market runs on a split shift. By day, it’s staged abundance: fruit stalls, souvenir maple syrup, and cafes where the latte art is more consistent than the espresso. By night, it’s a revolving door of bachelorettes, lineups for the same three bars, and 2 a.m. shawarma. You can eat here, sure. But why would you?

Meanwhile, the real food scene has moved on. Hintonburg, Chinatown, Little Italy, Centretown — neighbourhoods where the wine lists aren’t built by distributors, where chefs aren’t afraid to take risks. Places with an identity beyond “somewhere near Parliament.”

But the masquerade continues. To visitors, the Market is Ottawa dining. To locals, it’s an open secret we don’t bother correcting. Let them have the cobblestones. Let them think this is the city’s best. The rest of us know the good stuff is happening somewhere else entirely.