When dining out was still novel
A weekly look back at some offbeat or interesting stories that have appeared in the Citizen over its 175-year history.
A century ago, according to the Citizen, there were 56 restaurants and cafés (including, remarkably, 23 Chinese restaurants) in Ottawa, a city that then boasted about 108,000 residents.
Notwithstanding those that were part and parcel of hotels or boarding houses, and a handful considered “annexes to saloons,” restaurants were a relatively recent addition to Ottawa's landscape, an evolution that spanned little more than 30 years, or roughly the current age of the World Wide Web.
In other words, restaurants were still new enough to be a source of curiosity to many, yet well enough established to boast a history worth recounting, which, on Jan. 8, 1921, the Citizen did, in a feature titled “EVOLUTION OF THE EATING HOUSE.”
The first house in Ottawa to specialize in meals alone was one established on Queen Street in 1880 by a Mrs. Sutton.
However, the “pioneer of the orthodox eating house,” the Citizen wrote, was “really old” George Bulger, who had been a “rough and ready chef in his pristine days” and who always wore the linen shako (hat) and apron which represent the traditional uniform of his class.”
In 1890, Bulger opened a beanery on Metcalfe Street, between Queen and Albert streets. “The place was very much like George himself — a little on the careless side.” But he could cook beans, steak or bacon and eggs, “chiefly after ten o'clock at night,” and it was not uncommon for members of Parliament to get a plate of beans to go following a late-night session.
By 1895, Charles A. Bellier, one of the “pathfinders for better class restaurants,” had opened an establishment at the corner of Metcalfe and Albert streets, a place that “marked a distinct effort to transplant at least some of the florid features of Parisian cafe life to the virgin soil of the Canadian Capital.”
The Citizen, however, was somewhat cryptic in its praise for Bellier's restaurant. “We have nothing in Ottawa today quite like the Bellier cafe of 1895-1903,” it wrote, “and perhaps it is just as well that the Parisian exotic, with its upstairs private rooms, did not take permanent root.”
The Sherbrooke, meanwhile, established in 1895 on O'Connor Street, at Slater, counted prominent cabinet ministers among its clientele. The Boston Lunch on Sparks Street followed, “the first of many eating places of its class now to be found scattered all over the city” and “unquestionably the forerunner of the `we-never-close' restaurants now so common.”
The all-night diner format flourished, coinciding with the establishment and growth of 24-hour Chinese restaurants, most downtown along Metcalfe, O'Connor, Queen and Albert streets.
The Citizen singled out a pair of entrepreneurs who were raised in Hong Kong and changed their names (or, as the paper wrote, “dropped their celestial cognomen for the euphoniously Anglicized name of Hamilton”) before opening The Canada Chinese Lunch on Metcalfe Street. It was not the first Chinese restaurant in Ottawa, that honour going to New York Chinese Lunch, which opened at 68 O'Connor St. a year earlier, in September 1904, but The Canada Chinese Lunch was the first in town to feature booths.
“Inevitably,” the Citizen wrote, “there arose a demand for something better than the more or less makeshift eating house. It did not meet the needs of families. It had not been patronized by ladies to any considerable extent. The field was promising.”
The turn to more upscale dining in Ottawa, the paper noted, began around 1910, when two of the largest (unidentified) department stores “set apart ample spaces on the upper floor for a modern and well-appointed dining room.”
Chinese restaurateurs, the paper reported, followed suit, also opening higher-class establishments. “At least three of such dining places are now in operation. They are patronized by well-to-do people. Ladies are in the majority. Husbands and wives without children come next.”
Tea rooms, the first of which, The Kettledrum, was established on Sparks Street by a Miss Lindsay “about thirteen years ago,” catered to “leisurely souls who are quite willing to pay for an atmosphere more or less exclusive.”
And that, it appears, summed up the history of dining out in Ottawa, circa 1921. “Ottawa is a somewhat distinctive city as the center of government, with a high proportion of the clerical class, and it does not call for a particularly active imagination to draw a picture of 1940 which would have in it, as contrasted with that of 1920, more of real change than has been presented in this unpretentious and all too incomplete sketch,” the paper said.