A meaty addition to Gladstone Avenue
Seed to Sausage opening adds to ‘food destination’
Seed to Sausage is coming to the city. The award-winning Sharbot Lake charcuterie company which makes chorizo, bacon and sausages that are snapped up by top chefs and home cooks has leased a space on Gladstone Avenue, just west of Bronson, and plans to open the Seed to Sausage General Store by mid-January.
“While lots of shops carry our products in Ottawa, there’s no one place that carries everything we make,” says Michael McKenzie, who started Seed to Sausage three years ago.
“This will also give us a chance to experiment and feature new stuff, like the water buffalo salami with bacon and cranberries that we made for the Wine & Food Festival.”
But until now, unless you travelled to Sharbot Lake, about 125 kilometres west of Ottawa, you couldn’t find the whole range of products in one place. And the new shop, like the Sharbot Lake one, will also carry steaks that have been dry-aged for 70 to 80 days, about 20 types of artisanal cheeses, including some that Seed to Sausage will smoke, and a range of gourmet food products from teas made in Perth to salts from Vancouver Island.
Seed to Sausage products, which include fresh sausages, dried salamis, bacon and cured meats, are sold at about two dozen stores in Ottawa, 15 in Kingston and as far away as North Bay, Collingwood and Toronto. They are also on the menu at such top restaurants as Beckta Dining and Wine, Murray Street, John Taylor at Domus Café and Wellington Gastropub.
“It’s a small space and I like that,” says McKenzie of the Gladstone Avenue corner building that was once a general store, but which has been an apartment building for the last 18 years. “I’d rather carry a limited selection of really great stuff than a huge range of things that are just confusing to the consumer.”
The new shop, at the corner of Gladstone Avenue and Cambridge Street, is co-owned by McKenzie and Ross May, a representative for McAuslan-St-Ambroise brewery.
“In the brewery business, you get a lot of experience putting on special events,” says May. “I’d love to put on something monthly at the new store — like a man’s charcuterie board for Valentine’s Day, or a cheese board for Canada Day with a cheese from every province, or pizza Saturdays where we’d bring in a wood-burning oven.”
McKenzie says he hopes that the area will become a food destination, with Tacolot (formerly Hang Ten) next door, a new spice shop to be called Cardamom and Cloves hoping to open across the street, Pressed sandwich shop half a block west and Red Apron and True Loaf just east of Bronson.
“I think this is going to be like a tipping point for the neighbourhood,” said Jeff Stewart, owner of Pressed. “I think it’s great.”