About roneade.com
roneade.com was an independent food blog published from Ottawa. This archive presents its articles. What follows is drawn from the blog's own about page as it stood in 2015, together with the public record of its author's death, and nothing has been added to either.
Archive note. This page presents work first published on roneade.com between 2014 and 2016. Ron Eade died in August 2015; nothing on this site is new writing in his voice, and the reporting below is presented as a dated record rather than as current coverage. Restaurants, prices and staffing described here reflect the moment the piece was filed.
The journalist
Ron Eade was a 1975 graduate of the journalism programme at Ryerson University in Toronto, with a Bachelor of Applied Arts. By the time he launched this blog he had spent roughly thirty-nine years in the news business. His about page listed the route in order: a small weekly, The Enterprise in Iroquois Falls, Ontario; then the Peterborough Examiner, where he was city editor; then the Waterloo Region Record, as a labour writer and municipal affairs columnist; and then, in 1988, a move to the nation's capital as a municipal affairs reporter.
He wrote that he had won a number of awards during the Western Ontario years — top gala honours for column writing twice, for labour reporting once, for investigative news twice and for business writing twice — and that he had steadfastly declined to enter journalism contests after arriving in Ottawa in 1988. His stated reason was blunt and worth quoting as he put it: he had concluded that most journalism trophies "do not serve the public, per se, but mainly the employers (and, more insidious, the special interest groups who sponsor and capitalize on the awards)." The line that followed was characteristic: "I try to be up-front."
From city hall to the food pages
In Ottawa he worked as an investigative reporter at city hall and then on Parliament Hill before taking over as Food editor at the Ottawa Citizen — his about page gives the year as 1998, while later accounts of his career give 1997. He held the position for fourteen years before accepting a voluntary buyout in August 2012.
His blog at the Citizen, Omnivore's Ottawa, launched on the newspaper's website in 2008. He described it as "original, and proudly iconoclastic," and said it was surprisingly successful from the outset because he brought journalistic — and sometimes investigative — skills to a beat that had traditionally been focused mainly on seasonal vegetables and fruit.
The approach he described is visible on every page of this archive. He went into kitchens to meet the chefs cooking the food, and out to farms to watch growers, ranchers and poultry producers work. He made a point of getting to know the local culinary academic community so he could follow the next generation of cooks coming up through the colleges. That interest in training runs through the whole collection, from a graduating high-school class running a restaurant kitchen for a night to Ottawa chefs teaching at a college restaurant lab.
The independent blog
roneade.com was the venture he struck out on after leaving the paper. He called the project a Celebration of Incredible Edibles and said it was a passion he was excited to share with food lovers and with what he called Ottawa's world-class culinary community. The tagline he chose for the masthead — Celebrating incredible edibles — is the one this archive still carries.
In practice the blog was closer to a trade beat than to a food column. It covered openings and closings, competition results, charity fundraising in the hospitality industry, street food, charcuterie and small-producer sourcing, and it published recipes contributed by named chefs at demonstrations and special dinners. The interviews are the part that has aged best: restaurateurs talking on the record about rent, wages, food cost, seat counts and the profit that was left afterwards, in a year when several of them were about to close.
The closing chapter
Ron Eade died in Ottawa on 13 August 2015, aged 61. The blog published dozens of articles between 2014 and 2016; this reading archive presents a selection for which complete text is available.
His journalistic papers are held as a fonds in the archives of the University of Waterloo, alongside other Canadian labour and municipal reporting collections. The newspaper he spent his last twenty-five working years at, the Ottawa Citizen, still publishes.
About this archive
This is a reading archive. No attempt has been made to write anything in the author's voice or to extend his work. Where the source text was written in the first person, the material here is presented as a dated report of what he wrote and what his sources said, with quotations kept intact.
Eade's photojournalism depicted named people at named events. The illustrations used across this archive are generic and depict no real person.
The full index of articles is on the archive page.