roneade.com
Celebrating incredible edibles
Great food and the people who make it, in the nation's capital. The independent food blog roneade.com was published from 2014 to 2016 by Ron Eade (1954–2015), Food Editor of the Ottawa Citizen from 1997 until his retirement in 2013.
Publication note. The reporting dates from 2014 to 2016. Ron Eade died in August 2015; nothing on this site is new writing in his voice. Restaurants, prices and staffing reflect the date shown above.
What the articles cover
For roughly two years this address carried some of the most closely observed reporting anyone was doing on the Ottawa restaurant trade. It was not review writing. Eade had spent decades as an investigative reporter before he ever wrote about food, and he brought those habits with him: he asked restaurateurs what their rent was, what a plate cost to put out, how many seats a dining room needed before the arithmetic worked, and why so many well-regarded kitchens were closing in a single spring.
The result is a primary-source record of a specific and quite turbulent moment. Between the spring of 2014 and the spring of 2015 the articles document two of the city's best-known dining rooms shutting their doors, a charity fund being founded to catch the cooks and servers those closures displaced, a high-school culinary class taking over a downtown restaurant for a night, and a regional cooking competition marking its tenth year. Several of the businesses named in these pages no longer exist. That is precisely what makes the record worth keeping.
The reporting, by subject
The business of running a restaurant
The most substantial articles are long question-and-answer interviews conducted with owners who were willing to talk about money. A chef-owner's account of rebuilding a menu from scratch lays out margins, seat counts and price points in unusual detail, and a candid exit interview with the owner of a long-running ByWard Market dining room was filed the day after he announced the closure. The collapse of a celebrated vegan restaurant over unpaid sales tax was reported the weekend it happened.
Competition and the culinary schools
Eade covered the regional heats of a national cooking competition for years, and the coverage includes the tenth Ottawa contest in full, plus the late roster change that preceded it. Culinary training was a recurring beat: a graduating high-school class cooking a four-course dinner for paying guests, and four Ottawa chefs presenting a valley-themed menu at a college teaching restaurant in Niagara.
Producers, provisions and craft
Charcuterie, dry-aged beef and small-farm sourcing turn up constantly. See the opening of an artisan charcuterie storefront, the annual whole-hog festival at the producer's country plant, and a street-food rally decided on a steamed bun.
Recipes as they were given
Eade's recipes were almost always contributed by a named cook at a demonstration or a dinner, and were published with that attribution intact. Two of the fuller examples are a roast pork belly and a fried cinnamon pastry from a college teaching kitchen, a long-simmered Mexican mole taught by an Orléans cooking instructor, and a set of dishes carried home from a travel show's cooking stage.
Reading dated reporting
Everything here is fixed in time. A restaurant described as newly opened may have closed a decade ago; a chef described as executive chef somewhere has almost certainly moved on; the prices are 2014 and 2015 prices. Articles are dated so that changing facts can be read in their period context.
These dated articles do not form a working blog. Its value lies in what the articles say about Ottawa's food culture in the years they were written.
Start here
The complete index of articles is on the article index, arranged newest first. Background on the journalist is on the about page. Readers looking for the wider institutional record of Canadian food and hospitality trades may find the Canadian Culinary Federation a useful starting point.