Kelly Egan sees it as death by bistro — how restaurants can eat a ’hood and leave you hungry for places to shop

Good luck trying to find a stamp or a box of nails or someone to hem the trousers.

KELLY E GAN

Restaurants have a sneaky way of taking over “hot” neighbourhoods, a trend that can be viewed as a modern-day menace, this death by bistro.

The topic came up with Mike Dewan, 65, the operator and partowner of Britton’s, a newsstand and smoke shop on a section of Richmond Road now in the depths of trendy-land called Westboro — not so much a place but a contagion.

He opened the second Brittons location almost exactly 10 years ago as the area was beginning to wake from the dead. At the end of June, he’s closing. Business is only break-even, he says wearily, giving him cold feet about another multi-year lease.

“If nothing changes, in five or 10 years, it’ll be nothing but restaurants along here, just like Elgin Street,” he said one sunny morning.

It rather says something, does it not, that this retail strip can support something called The Cupcake Lounge, which I’m sure is a perfectly wonderful place, but not a little shop that stocks 3,000 titles of the printed word?

The market, evidently, has pronounced.

Dewan is a cool guy. Softspoken, low-key, he wears one of those 1970s ’staches from the classic Fu Manchu collection and has a background in the carnival business, a little odd for a man now selling the Harvard Business Review and $79 smoking pipes.

And didn’t we yak away about the $6 Diet Coke over there and the spiffy guards who look after the Pope? See, there is a world beyond quinoa, the most famous food you’ve never heard of.

So, what’s so bad about restaurants or, sorry, bistros, diners, trattorias, osterias, pubs, lounges, grills, spoons, or buffets, cuisines, delis, sushi bars, roadhouses, or clubs, palaces or dining rooms?

Well, nothing, except when they totally take over a street.

I was looking along Clarence in the ByWard Market the other day. Unbelievable. If you’re not hungry or thirsty, let’s be honest, there’s nothing to do or buy. So, in off-meal hours, it’s something of a retail desert, a lot of people on patios on cellphones, staring at people passing on the sidewalk, on cellphones.

This has been a oft-expressed concern about Elgin Street, now Preston, now Wellington, now sections of Richmond. Seriously, is that all we do — eat and drink, 18 hours a day? Good luck trying to find a stamp or a box of nails or someone to hem the trousers.

This is part, no doubt, of the larger epicurean hysteria that has gripped North America, with 24-hour cooking channels and chefs better known than statesmen. What’s happened to us?

As kids, we grew up in an era when a once-a-month hamburger outing was an exquisite treat. Today, unless you eat out four times a week you’re an out-oftouch loser, a cultural weakling kept alive by hotdogs or baloney.

Sorry to break the news to all these food-and-wine psychos, but, truthfully, it’s all pretty boring. It’s only eating, people. Everybody does it. Must we endure your superior tales of al dente this and caramelized that, the braised or bain-maried whatthe-hell, with wasabi sauce, the joys of Ethiopian? But we digress.

Back to restaurants. The City of Ottawa has a handy section of its website where it publishes the results of health inspections at food establishments. They aren’t all restaurants — grocery stores and even daycares are included — but it does ballpark the numbers.

Total establishments available for inspection: 5,567. On Clarence, there are 27, on York 43, on Elgin 72, on Wellington 88, on Richmond 102 and on Bank 429.

Honestly, you really start to wonder if all our stoves have been confiscated.

The idea, surely, is to aim for balance in the retail mix, so that traffic is spread out during the day, the reasons to come are many and not everyone is snapping their fingers for sauvignon blanc or a kale smoothie.

As for YOUR dining experience? Not that into it. But I’ll take the stack of New Yorkers, please.