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 shard. A brittle crown on a bowl of something soft. A tuile stuck in a mousse like a flag planted on conquered territory. It’s as if no dish is allowed to leave the pass unless it carries a structural element on top—a kind of culinary scaffolding whose purpose is not flavour but reassurance. The reassurance that the dish has “texture.”

Texture has become the most overcorrected note in modern dining. For years, chefs were told their plates were too soft, too silky, too safe. Diners wanted contrast. Critics wanted tension. And now, like any overcorrection, we’ve sprinted too far in the opposite direction. Every menu resembles a construction site of dehydrators and fryers, where ingredients are pulverized, crisped, aerated, or baked until they snap.

But the problem isn’t crispiness itself—it’s the default of it. Crunch has become a reflex, not a decision. The crisp component rarely speaks the same language as the dish beneath it. A Parmesan tuile on a delicate fish. A rice cracker on something meant to be eaten warm. Random frizzled aromatics scattered like confetti because the plate looked “too smooth.”

The real tragedy is that Ottawa doesn’t need this crutch. This city cooks quietly, confidently. We’re good at warmth, depth, subtlety. But somewhere along the way, the crispy element became a kind of culinary insurance policy: “If all else fails, give them something that cracks.”

What if we trusted softness again?
What if a dish didn’t need a brittle crown to feel finished?
What if the confidence came from flavour, not acoustics?

Crunch should be a choice, not an apology. A punctuation mark, not the whole sentence. And maybe the bravest thing a chef in Ottawa can serve right now is something unapologetically smooth, creamy, or yielding—no tuile, no puff, no crackle—just a dish that isn’t afraid to be quiet.