Peter Hum picks Ottawa’s best restaurant dishes of 2025

Months after having them, I still crave two sweat-inducingly spicy dishes. First, there was the black pork kotthu roti at Thilaks, a Sri Lankan hole-in-the-wall in a Carling Avenue basement — an intensely flavoured mish-mash of highly seasoned pork chunks, chopped flatbread, onions, carrots, cabbage, garlic, ginger and green chili peppers. Also casting a beguiling peppery spell was the slow-cooked, dark brown and earthy oxtail ularithiyathu curry at Ek Bar on Preston Street.

No pasta satisfied me more in 2025 than the wild boar tortelletti with gremolata, well-salted kale and fried shallots that I had at Caméline in Gatineau’s Hull sector last spring. Mind you, my dining companions that night had different favourites among the perfectly al dente pastas. That, of course, is a very good sign.

At the always busy Chesterfield’s Gastro Diner, I was smitten by the jerk chicken eggs benedict, which happens to be the most popular item at that Wellington Street West eatery. The juicy-crispy, well-seasoned thigh meat came with a slab of cornbread, avocado, properly poached eggs, a lightly spicy jerk Hollandaise, and a choice of two sides, such as sourdough toast and jerk plantains.

Portuguese egg custard tarts sold at Lusa Bakery in Kanata were humble little marvels — irresistibly flaky and blessed with brûléed custard that struck the right balance between sufficient, but not cloying sweetness and egginess.

The Nutella-filled bomboloni at Farinella on Rochester Street have a lot of competition, such as the popcorn doughnut at Bamm’s Snack Shack in Lowertown and the face-sized Berliners at the Little German Bakery in Carleton Place. But they prevail, I say.

For tasty sustenance at rock-bottom prices, the $4.25 meat and cheese pies at Ottawa’s Aladdin Bakery locations and the $5.99 Chinese hamburgers at Chef Bai Noodles Soup and Bao are the winners.

I declare a tie because these two restaurants are so different that they’re practically incomparable — La Petite Primerose in Gatineau’s Hull sector, and Ek Bar, the modern Indian eatery on Preston Street.