After being clobbered by COVID-19 in 2020, Ottawa restaurants are optimistic 2021 can only be better
"There’s some really cool stuff coming down the pike for 2021."
Peter Hum, Ottawa Citizen
Publishing date: Dec 29, 2020 • December 29, 2020 • 6 minute read
As grim as a pandemic-ridden 2020 was for Ottawa’s restaurants, Walid El-Tawel has a sunnier view of the year ahead.
The strategic advisor and project manager at the restaurant supply company Chef’s Paradise has an inside track on how Ottawa’s restaurateurs are eyeing 2021. And instead of forecasting doom and gloom, El-Tawel, a former fine-dining chef himself, even talks about positive developments for Ottawa food lovers.
“There’s some really cool stuff coming down the pike for 2021,” he says, hinting that he expects new, exciting restaurants to debut in the city in a matter of months. “There are some big names, established restaurateurs, opening in the second quarter of next year,” he says, before refusing to divulge further details.
“I’m feeling really optimistic, to be honest,” says El-Tawel. And he is not alone.
It’s indisputable that, since last March, Ottawa’s restaurants were continually upended and rocked by COVID-19. They were forced three times to shut their dining rooms for extended periods and had to drastically adapt to the new realities of physical distancing, mask-wearing and virus anxiety.
However, government subsidies for wages, rent and personal protective equipment, loyal customers and agile pivoting mitigated the financial hit to Ottawa’s restaurants, and a surprisingly small number of them shut down during 2020 because of the pandemic. Among the casualties of COVID-19 were Ottawa’s two Stoneface Dolly’s restaurants, the Fish Market Group businesses in the ByWard Market, and Mason-Dixon Kitchen+Bar in Little Italy.
Now, El-Tawel and others take their cue from two words — “summer” and “vaccinations” — and look forward to less hardship and perhaps even some profits in 2021.
“There’s light at the end of the tunnel,” says Sarah Chown, managing partner at the Metropolitain Brasserie on Sussex Avenue and the Ottawa chair of the Ontario Restaurant Hotel & Motel Association.
She and her peers acknowledge that the coming January, February and March will be tough — as they are every year. The next few months will be all the more challenging because COVID-19 eradicated the December holiday parties that usually lined restaurant coffers so they could get through the ensuing lean winter.
But Chown thinks further ahead. She envisions “a nice early spring, and St. Patrick’s Day with patio days … it would be great to get a 2021 like that and make up some ground.”
Ottawa chef and restaurant scene podcaster Adam Vettorel says the recovery of Ottawa’s restaurants will depend entirely on the public mood once vaccines have been widely administered.
“If there is a general reluctance to go out post-pandemic, I think that would be disastrous for most places. We are all going to have to dig out of a hole after this, and we will need the public’s support to do so,” he says.
But he says he has seen “a great deal of enthusiasm to return to restaurants in the limited version of socially distanced dining,” and he’s optimistic that “once it is safe, there will be a wave of people desperate for a night out.”
But Nelson Borges, the National Arts Centre’s general manager of food and beverage, says that as much as he wants to be optimistic, he needs to be realistic.
“I don’t think COVID goes away and all the restaurants fill,” Borges says. He contends that just as people have grown accustomed to going online for entertainment rather than attending shows or concerts, they have replaced restaurant-going in their lives.
“It’s going to be hard to get people back. They’ve learned to do things differently. They’ve learned to cook at home more,” Borges says. “People might not be going out as much in the future. It’s going to take time for this industry to build back. It’s not going to be easy.”
Indeed, the NAC is planning on keeping 1 Elgin, its restaurant, closed until at least early February, when Winterlude and Valentine’s Day might help spark diners to visit, Borges says.
That said, Borges has plans to upgrade the patio outside 1 Elgin into a state-of-the-art structure with glass walls and a retractable rooftop, which would extend the restaurant’s patio season on both sides, allowing for extra months of outdoor dining beside the Rideau Canal. That upgrade will require the approval of the NAC’s board of directors early next year, Borges says.
That pivot to bolster outdoor dining would be yet another example of a leading Ottawa restaurant re-inventing itself to be more virus-resistant.
Perhaps most dramatically, the fine-dining restaurant Fairouz in Centretown moved to the ByWard Market in the fall and became Fairouz Cafe, a more casual eatery with an enlarged food-to-go component. In another transformation, Common Eatery on Elgin Street closed in mid-March, and then reopened in mid-August as Gitanes Burger, the more casual spin-off of Gitanes, its fine-dining neighbour across the street.
Other fine-dining restaurants aimed more widely with their food by making family-style meals available for pickup and delivery. They also pushed the sales of alcohol with food deliveries, which the Ontario government permitted in 2020 and which will be allowed permanently going forward.
As one of his responses to the pandemic, Ottawa restaurateur Stephen Beckta launched his “Curated by Beckta” meal kits paired with wine deliveries.
“The takeout support has been incredible and it has kept our staff working even during the shutdowns,” says Vettorel, chef and co-owner of North & Navy in Centretown and the more casual Cantina Gia in the Glebe. His restaurants pivoted to create wine shops, a Christmas market and other programs to bring in money, he says.
“A high-end, fine-dining restaurant always operates on a razor-thin line,” Vettorel says. “We buy expensive ingredients and the food is incredibly labour-intensive so there is not much left over at the best of times.”
After the initial lockdown in June, some restaurants, such as Chili Chili in Chinatown, chose not to re-open their dining rooms and switched to making food to go exclusively.
Because delivery services such as Uber Eats can charge commissions of as much as 30 per cent, an Ottawa-based service, Love Local Delivery, opened soon after the pandemic hit. That service enlisted more than 60 restaurants into its network and charges a flat $5 fee for delivery.
Becoming a delivery-focused eatery was the saving grace for the tiny downtown restaurant Dosa & Curries, which opened in December 2020.
Its owner, Vijay Krishna Rangarajan, says the eatery did not suffer that badly during the pandemic, despite downtown emptying as workers relocated to their home offices. While his eatery’s dine-in revenues did sink, delivery sales have nearly compensated, he says. Now, 90 per cent of his sales are for food to go, and net sales are down only about 10 per cent compared to his pre-pandemic business, Rangarajan says.
The restaurant would be doing better if the commissions taken by delivery services were smaller, Rangarajan says. However, Indian expats who crave his South Indian crepes and dishes have become regular customers. “I have a kind of niche, so people, they come for it.
“I have no complaints. I’m happy. I see some restaurants, they are facing a bad time, but ours is not like that.”
However, Rangarajan says he has a second, newer restaurant in Montreal, and it is faring worse than his Ottawa business.
Similarly, El-Tawel is grateful Ottawa’s restaurants have not been as hard hit as their peers in Toronto and Southwestern Ontario, where infection numbers have also been much worse.
El-Tawel hopes Ottawa’s steadily employed government workers will keep stimulating the local economy and ordering from restaurants.
“Ottawa has a sense of local pride. The public needs to do its part and not go to big chains,” he says.
Vettorel agrees. “What worries me is the prospect that many good spots that contribute to Ottawa’s food scene and overall culture will fail and the big chains will eat up their market share. If this happens, it would be terrible for the city.”
Chown calls the Ottawa bubble a “strange place,” more like a small town than a big city.
“There’s been so much support from the community, people dedicated to saving their favourite restaurants,” she says.
Among them are restaurateurs eating at each other’s businesses, Chown says.
“We are all out dining at other people’s places. We’re living the life too and we want to make sure everybody makes it through,” she says.
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https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/restaurants-2021
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