Four Ottawa restaurants made it onto the highly regarded 2025 Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants list released on May 5, down from
six in 2024
.
Top-rated among the local selection is
Atelier
, chef-owner Marc Lepine’s sophisticated tasting-menu destination on Rochester Street. It ranks 41st now, up from 43rd last year.
Also returning to the list is the Centretown fine-food-and-wine haunt
Arlo
on Somerset Street, which rose to 49th from 71st last year.
Meanwhile, big-city eatery
Riviera
on Sparks Street fell to 88th from 28th last year. However, the judges said Riviera had Canada’s best restaurant bar.
Perch
, chef-owner Justin Champagne-Lagarde’s intimate tasting menu restaurant on Preston Street, is back on the list, ranking 95th, after being absent last year. Perch was 85th on the 2023 Canada’s 100 Best list.
That year, eight Ottawa restaurants made the list
.
Dropping off the list this year were North & Navy on Nepean Street, which ranked in the mid-90s in 2023 and 2024,
Supply and Demand
on Wellington Street West, which was 75th last year and 63rd the year before, and
Buvette Daphnée
on William Street, which ranked 97th in 2024.
Between them, Toronto (29 restaurants) and Montreal (24) were home to more than half of the list’s restaurants. Vancouver had 14 restaurants while Calgary had five, Winnipeg had three, and Halifax and Quebec City each had two.
Topping this year’s list was Restaurant Pearl Morissette in Jordan Station, Ont. Last year’s top restaurant, Montreal’s Mon Lapin, came in second this year. Alo, Edulis and 20 Victoria, all in Toronto, were respectively third, fourth and fifth this year.
“The exceptional ones do linger,” Jacob Richler, editor-in-chief and publisher of Canada’s 100 Best.
The list was generated from ballots submitted by 177 Canadian culinary experts, including chefs, sommeliers, restaurant owners, bartenders and food enthusiasts. As in past years, this writer was among them. The 2025 judging panel was the largest one assembled for the list, which debuted in 2015.
Asked about Riviera dropping 60 places, Richler said: “Everybody would rather be 28 than 88 for sure. I used to hear about it all the time when it opened, and people get accustomed to it.
“People love shiny new things… It’s kind of inevitable that restaurants fade in support,” said Richler.
He added that among the list’s bottom 20 restaurants, and even among the next 30 or so restaurants that did not make the list, there were great places to eat.
In past years, a challenge for the list has been to assemble a panel of judges that properly and proportionately reflects the dining scenes and populations of Canadian cities and regions. But Richler said that this year, the list’s algorithm had been tweaked to compensate, if needed, for a region or city being underrepresented in terms of its judges.
“If there’s a regional inadequacy in the panel, we can adjust the votes upwards to represent the proportion of the population at large,” said Richler.
The rules call for a judge to submit 10 restaurants on his or her ballot, and of them, no more than seven must be from the judge’s region.
For my part, I voted for fewer Ottawa restaurants than I usually do, simply because I ate so well in Vancouver and Montreal in 2024.
The list’s release comes in advance of a summer when more Canadians may well choose to travel within Canada rather than visit the U.S., which they might shun for political or economic reasons.
“Hopefully, there will be extra utility in this list for them,” said Richler.
