Second Joey restaurant set for downtown corner

A trendy Calgary-based restaurant is hoping to carry its success at Lansdowne Park to the corner of Colonel By Drive and Rideau Street.

The busy corner, which has played host to a few different restaurants in recent years, will soon be the home to a second Joey location.

The new restaurant, which isn’t to be confused with the “Joey’s Only” fish-and-chip shops that largely left Ottawa en masse around 2010, is headquartered in Calgary and has 25 locations across the country. The chain is celebrating its 25th anniversary this year.

The company’s new downtown location will incorporate a revamped patio.

“We were excited about this historic site and being part of downtown Ottawa,” said Meghan Pitt, designer for Joey Rideau. “It was important that this location embodied the Joey brand, but was also cohesive with the historic exterior elements of the building.

“We worked with the city to ensure our patio paid homage to the city’s history while also being unique to us.”

The location has seen a number of restaurants come and go in recent years. The Elephant & Castle was there for years, then The Exchange opened before rebranding itself as The EX. The EX closed in 2013 and the space has been sitting empty ever since.

Barry Nabatian, a market researcher with Shore Tanner & Associates, said construction has been an issue at the corner. It’s been ongoing in the area since 2008 when the old Ottawa Congress Centre was demolished, blocking sidewalks and making it difficult to move around the intersection.

The larger size of the mall’s corner space was also an issue, Nabatian said.

He said the recent addition of a Chipotles restaurant to the corner, which opened in recent months, has chewed through some of the available space, making the once cavernous unit a bit more intimate. He said with the upcoming opening of the light-rail station and the return to business as usual on the corner, it’s likely that Joey will have better luck at the location than its predecessors.