Julie Gauthier featured the Ottawa food businesses Drip House, SuzyQ, Fritomania and Heartbreakers Pizza in her latest episode.
The minutiae of restaurant menus can get me pretty excited and sometimes even keep me up at night.
But I’m a food critic, and you’re not. Maybe the podcast called Pepperoni Pizza Dreams will have its desired soporific effect on you.
Its host, Ottawa native Julie Gauthier reads aloud menus in her best slow, ASMR, sleepy-time voice. Her hope is to lull insomniacs to slumber. Her most recent episode, posted in time for World Sleep Day on March 14, recaps the offerings at four Ottawa food businesses: Drip House, SuzyQ Doughnuts, Fritomania and Heartbreakers Pizza.
Gauthier was considering these food businesses from quite a distance as she has lived in Victoria, B.C., since 2016. While she hasn’t yet been to Drip House or Heartbreakers, she has eaten SuzyQ’s sweet wares, while Fritomania, an Orléans poutinerie, was a childhood favourite.
“When I tell people about the podcast, I get one of two reactions,” Gauthier says. “If it’s someone who listened to sleep podcasts, they’re like, ‘That makes so much sense. That’s the perfect thing to read.’ If somebody’s never listened to a sleep podcast, where the more insignificant the content is the better, they look at me like I have three heads.”
“That was one of the weirdest things that someone’s sent to me,” Kristy Bailey, general manager of SuzyQ Doughnuts, said in response to my email letting her know about Gauthier’s Ottawa episode.
Still, Bailey was glad that SuzyQ was covered in the podcast. “It’s quite a service to offer people. I hope she’s not making people hungry instead of making them fall asleep,” Bailey said.
More often sleep podcasts feature hosts reading old books or leading guided meditations. Gauthier said her premise “is silly — and it works!”
Evening Update
According to a 2024 report by Triton Digital, the top podcast genres in Canada in terms of market share were true crime (18 per cent), comedy (16 per cent) and news (16 per cent). Health and fitness podcasts had a six-per-cent share.
A few years ago, Gauthier was having trouble sleeping and she started listening to sleep podcasts. Over the years, she had people tell her that her voice was very soothing and suitable for ASMR or voiceover work. She eventually decided she wanted to make her own sleep podcast, with menus as content.
“I’ve always loved menus and food,” Gauthier says. “I go out to eat a lot with friends. It’s how we connect and how we socialize. I study menus before I go out to eat.”
One night, she was in bed reading a menu on her phone. That was when the idea came to her to make a menu-based sleep podcast, “especially for people who are interested in food,” even if the point was to help listeners pass out.
She launched the podcast last October and has been podcasting full-time, having left her federal government job. Gauthier says she has yet not looked into how to monetize her podcast. Her goal for 2025 is simply to consistently publish episodes each week.
So far, almost 10,000 episodes of her podcast have been downloaded. “I’ve gotten listens from almost every corner of the globe,” she says, adding her top four tallies of listeners are in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States. Last month, the Guardian picked Pepperoni Pizza Dreams as a podcast of the week.
Each episode, which is now roughly half an hour, takes about three days to make, including a day of researching and scripting, a day of recording and a day of editing, Gauthier says.
In addition to her Ottawa-based episode, she has done episodes focused on food scenes in Edmonton, San Francisco, Houston, and Portland, Ore. She splans to cover cruise ship restaurant menus, shopping mall food court menus, Disney World restaurant menus and even menus from strip clubs.
Gauthier says some readers express gratitude for background information she gives on each restaurant before launching into her recitation of its menu. But readers also reach out to say they enjoy her podcast even though or perhaps because they fall asleep nearly instantly.
“Some people don’t even make it to the menus. That’s great. That’s what meant to happen,” Gauthier says.
For podcast fans interested in Ottawa’s restaurant scene and also in staying awake, Adam Vettorel, chef and co-owner of North & Navy on Nepean Street, launched a podcast called At The Pass, beginning in late March 2020.
His podcast consists of engrossing conversations between him and fellow Ottawa-area chefs. While Vettorel was most active during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, when he released almost 20 episodes, he released his last episode in January 2024. Still, he says he plans to resume podcasting soon, when his work schedule allows.
