Ottawa Foodies

Excellent house wine, delicious garlic butter shrimp app, and I quite enjoyed my warm spinach salad with artichoke hearts and apricots. The portions were very generous - I could not finish my salad! - and my friend and I shared the creme caramel for dessert. I don't have a taste for creme caramel but she said it was excellent. Will probably go here again some time - though we are trying to visit every restaurant on Preston so it may have to wait until the next rotation!

That's interesting FF. Maia ordered an eggs benny from the Queen Mother Cafe here in Victoria and the same thing: it tasted like it was soaked in lighter fluid. It went back to the kitchen twice before she gave up, ate her homefries and enjoyed a bill that only had my meal on it. They were proud that they "grilled" the english muffin, but boy, I can still taste that oily, nasty flavour.

Excellent service... here's the story: We came here for brunch with our kids. They were friendly and accommodating as we settled at a table on the balcony, happily agreeing to split a tortellini soup into two bowls for the kids. We wanted to try the grilled calamari because it's a rarity on Ottawa menus and my wife is of grilled-calamari-loving Portuguese heritage. It arrived, looked delicious, had very good texture, but tasted something like bbq lighter fluid. We almost never complain about food but couldn't eat this and felt compelled to point it out to the server. She did everything right: apologized profusely, told us we wouldn't be charged, and offered to bring us another order. She returned a few minutes later saying a bunch of the staff had tried it and didn't notice any strange flavour. We opted not to try another shot at the same dish and continued with our meal. Could it be that we're just total BBQ snobs and these calamari were grilled over binder-laden charcoal briquettes instead of lump charcoal? Maybe, but even our burps tasted like chemicals after! Anyways, they handled the whole incident perfectly and in good spirits, and that's unusually professional for an Ottawa restaurant!

The brunch special was this yummy scrambled egg, cheese and pancetta panino. The pancetta was quite spicy and cut into thick slices. It tasted good but I felt kind of bad all afternoon (I blame the calamari rather than this sandwich though).