RESTAURANT TAKEOVER
Into every life a little quinoa should fall, argues Bruce Deachman, who relishes having lots of places to dine
The times, fortunately, changed, and we expanded our food horizons, widening our palates, so to speak.
BRUCE DEACHMAN
Back in the day when Anne Hardy’s Where to Eat in Canada was the only authority of its kind, Ottawa — the nation’s capital and fourth-largest city — perennially merited just one mention, as residents and visitors were advised to either eat at Mamma Teresa’s or simply stay home with a thawed TV dinner.
Today’s edition of Where to Eat lists more than a dozen Ottawa restaurants (Mamma Teresa’s no longer makes the cut, by the way), a blossoming that can be attributed to an increased interest in food on the part of Ottawans, followed by an explosion of restaurateurs looking to fill that need.
According to online travel site Tripadvisor.com, there are more than 2,100 restaurants in Ottawa, a far cry from the days when Mamma’s, Nate’s, Kardish, The Mill, Green Valley and Green Dragon restaurants ruled. Is one restaurant for every 500 inhabitants too many? Perhaps, but I’d prefer to have too many choices and let market forces do their thing, rather than die not knowing what sweet potato poutine with artisanal curds and duck-confit gravy tastes like. If you don’t want them, you don’t have to order them.
After all, depending on which Internet sources you trust, each of us spends somewhere from four to six years of our life eating, affording plenty of time for variety. Years ago, it would have been easy enough to break that number down: Three-and-ahalf years, say, eating breakfast cereal, shepherd’s pie, fried-egg sandwiches and roast chicken and lamb shoulder chops with pressure-cooked carrots at home; 11 months at Harvey’s and McDonald’s; three weeks dining out at an Elgin Street restaurant that offered well-done steaks and well-done pasta. Four months eating pizza; a month of Chinese takeout; two more months consuming potato chips, spearmint leaves candy, licorice all-sorts and popcorn, and a final month — most of it accrued around Christmases — storing away energy from turkey, chocolate, eggnog and mandarin oranges.
The times, fortunately, changed, and we expanded our food horizons, widening our palates, so to speak. The apples, oranges and grapes in our parents’ fruit baskets ceded space to pomegranates, guava, dragonfruit and figs. The suburban all-youcan-stand Chinese buffet started to offer fare from Thailand and Vietnam, while Greek, Indian and Lebanese restaurants opened all across Ottawa. We embraced shawarmas and donairs, souvlaki, naan, bagels and couscous.
To lament that you can’t buy a paper bag filled with drywall screws within an easy stroll of your Westboro home, and to blame it on restaurants, is a mug’s game. It’s not the fault of the Chef Pierre caramelizing onions that small businesses such as Dover’s Hardware and Sporting Goods can no longer be found along Richmond Road. No, that blame falls to you and me, when we years ago decided that lower prices, greater selection and the customer-loyalty rewards cards offered at Hammers R Us and similar big-box stores warranted a turn in our allegiance.
The closure of Britton’s magazine shop is indeed a sad business, but quinoa is not to blame. I get the New Yorker mailed to me, and read other magazines online.
When Britton’s closes, perhaps an Ethiopian restaurant will move in, or any other business: a laundromat, say, or antiques store or Starbucks or a printer or a hat shop, or yet another outdoor clothing store or bike shop. And if it provides enough of us something we want, even if it’s just another outdoor café where we can sit and read the New York Review of Apps on our iPads, and if its owner and staff decide that that’s enough for them, then there’s no reason it shouldn’t be enough for us.
And remember: in that same lifetime in which we spend upwards of six years eating, we also spend seven years trying to get to sleep. A preponderance of restaurants in Ottawa shouldn’t be one of the things keeping us up at night.