Q & A with chef/owner John Taylor, on closing Domus Cafe after 18 years
Originally filed at roneade.com
A pioneer of local, seasonal cuisine says he feels a bit bitter and a bit jaded. The ByWard Market business, he says, just is not there for him any more.
Archive note. This page preserves 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 scene
Eade arrived barely twenty-four hours after Taylor had announced the closure on social media. Plain paper was already taped across the floor-to-ceiling sidewalk windows of the fifty-five-seat dining room. Most of the chairs were upside down on the tables. The refrigeration was switched off. A recycling bin sat outside the front door waiting for refuse. The wine had not yet been taken out of the display case.
Taylor, then 47 and self-taught, expected to spend the rest of the week cleaning up and leaving the room empty and ready for another operator — but not for himself. He had, he said, had quite enough of it.
The interview
The exchange was published as a lightly edited transcript. Asked what had happened to his plan, discussed in Niagara only two months earlier, to expand into the space next door, Taylor gave a one-word answer: "Broke." Asked what was broke, he said: "Me."
He was equally short on the state of the business. Told that the interviewer had been under the impression Domus was a busy high-end restaurant, Taylor replied: "No it's not. This last winter was brutal, man. I literally worked three months by myself in this kitchen because there was no business. Nobody comes to the Market anymore."
On the neighbourhood: "The economy was bad, and the Market isn't a market anymore. The Market is an entertainment district with bars, kids. Yeah, sure, all our regular customers were still coming in and it was wonderful to see them. But when the landlord gave me the opportunity to walk away after 18 years, that's what I did." He was, he said, leaving the restaurant completely intact for somebody else.
Costs, and the decision
Taylor described a business in which everything had risen — sugar, milk, dairy, gas — and in which the profit had gone. Expanding to seventy-five or a hundred seats would have changed the arithmetic, he said, but he did not have the money to close for two months to renovate. He had dipped into personal savings for a couple of months and had decided to stop the bleeding.
He acknowledged owing money and declined to say whether any of it was harmonized sales tax, the issue that had closed another well-known Ottawa restaurant two days earlier. He said he had been paying small producers cash on delivery for the previous two or three months, that staff had been given notice on a scale of one week per year of service, with his longest-serving employee receiving eight weeks.
On critics, and on quitting
Asked what had changed, he named social media. "Everybody's a critic now," he said. "If you put yourself in a restaurateur's shoes for a couple days, it's a tough, tough market, a tough business and I just don't want to do that anymore. I've lost my passion, I've lost a bit of the drive; I haven't lost my passion for food and cooking, but I have for the business. And that's not fair to anybody — not the customers, not staff, and it's not fair to my family to continue on with this struggle."
He was direct about the emotional register too: "I'm bitter and jaded, for sure, a little bit. But I feel good about finally making the decision."
The kitchen he ran
Pressed on his own contribution, Taylor deflected. Asked whether he had been among the first Ottawa chefs to focus on local, seasonal and where possible organic ingredients, he named a predecessor instead — a long-serving executive chef at the National Arts Centre, by then deceased — and then credited the cooks who had passed through his kitchen. He listed several by name and said he had let them be creative while he set the mandate. "I was just fortunate enough to have those talented people come through the kitchen. It's a team effort."
He was less sanguine about the pipeline. Cooks were coming out of school expecting $45,000 or $50,000 a year, he said, when in his view it took a minimum of ten years before anyone would take a serious look at you. He added, of himself: "I'm 47 years old and I'm still learning every day, that's just the way it is. The business changes constantly — the trends, the fads, you've seen them all. They come, they go; I came and now I'm going."
What came next
Taylor kept his second, smaller restaurant in Old Ottawa South, opened in 2010, and said he would work there full-time for at least a couple of years while deciding what to do differently. He was clear that the closure was a choice rather than a collapse: "This was not necessarily a closing, it was my choice. I could have continued on, like I said, but why continue hemorrhaging money?"
He had trained briefly at Algonquin College after arriving in Ottawa in 1987, having already worked in kitchens for a couple of years, but left after six months, finding that he learned faster in the industry.
A month later, a Westboro chef-owner walked through the same economics from the point of view of a restaurant that intended to survive them.