Beloved White Horse Restaurant closes to make room for development, but the east-end diner vows to re-open
Peter Hum, Ottawa Citizen
Publishing date: May 26, 2021 • 2 hours ago • 2 minute read
Rachel Ayoub’s final shift at The White Horse Restaurant on Wednesday was filled with tears.
But the cook at the beloved six-decades-old diner in Ottawa’s east end, which is closing to make way for a new apartment building, vows that a new White Horse will re-open one day.
“I’m crying,” Rachel said over the phone. “I have such nice, beautiful customers, I can’t tell you. We’re so close. We’re like family.”
For the last 22 years, Rachel has cooked countless three-egg breakfasts, club sandwiches, fattoush salads and more at the humble restaurant owned by her husband Tallal, who is better known to regulars as Mike.
Rachel, 61, said she’s not ready to retire and that she and Mike, 64, plan to open a new eatery, with the same name and phone number as The White Horse, not far from their Tremblay Road institution.
“I’m going to wait for COVID to calm down … until things get back to normal … so we can have all our customers back,” she said.
TCU Development Corp. recently bought the restaurant and a neighbouring property from its owner, and will tear them down before building a six-storey residential building that will consist of more than 70 one- and two-bedroom units, plus commercial space on its ground floor.
Rachel, who lives a minute’s drive from her restaurant, said she has spoken to the developer about opening in the new building.
The White Horse opened in 1959, said Rachel. Its first owner was the cousin of her husband, and he chose the business’s name because “he was always dreaming of buying a white horse, but he couldn’t afford it,” she said.
An isolated small business in an industrial area near the Ottawa Train Station and Tremblay LRT Station, the eatery is like a throwback to an earlier time given its history, menu and decor.
A writer for this newspaper who surveyed Ottawa’s most storied breakfast spots in 2008 said of the White Horse: “The interior resembles a Big Bang collision of 1970s basement rec rooms — fake wood panelling here, a tile wall over there, ‘marbled’ mirrors behind the counter … Apart from the ‘wood’ Formica and red leatherette booths, there are tables and chairs of white-enamelled tubular steel, the kind you might find at friends’ breakfast nooks.”
Rachel said the pandemic, now in its 14th month, battered The White Horse at first.
“The first month of closure, April, business went down from $50,000 to $6,000 a month. And then in May it went up to $10,000 and then June $15,000. And then it got better, but never like before,” she said.
In an interview earlier this year, Mike Ayoub called the pandemic’s series of lockdowns and re-openings “nerve-wracking.”
Alta Vista ward Coun. Jean Cloutier, whose ward includes The White Horse, said last month that while he supports the development, he is sad to see the eatery go.
“It is a great little local greasy spoon,” Cloutier said. “Mike operates a great business, a great community asset. We need more of those in the community.”
Referring to the commercial space on the ground floor of the new development, Cloutier said: “I think a small local restaurant like that (The White Horse) would be a great addition.”
phum@postmedia.com
https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local...ows-to-re-open
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