Corner Peach

Most small restaurants spent the first pandemic year trying to hold the ground they already had. Corner Peach used it to take more. Emma Campbell and chef Caroline Murphy had opened their bistro on the Chinatown stretch of Somerset Street West in 2019 — a tight kitchen built on seasonal cooking and not much pretence — and rather than wait out the slow stretch, they pushed through the wall to the storefront next door. What came out the other side was The Corner Store, a bakery and bottle shop attached to the dining room, and a bistro that now earns a visit at more points in the week than its size would suggest.

The cooking leads with restraint. A snack of sourdough and butter comes as two slices or four, and it is no throwaway — the bread is the spine the rest of the menu hangs on. Around it sit small, exact plates: marinated manchego with olives and orange, a warm gougère filled with parmesan fondue, whipped ricotta under chili crunch and pickled beets. The smaller plates do the same precise work — beef tartare with fries and aioli, built to share; butter fish crudo beneath an orange-raspberry mignonette; an artichoke-shrimp sourdough toast. Dinner then climbs through Cod Pil-Pil with local green garlic and lemon, a braised lamb shank with snap peas, pistachio and confit onion, and spaghetti turned through spring herb pesto and pangrattato.

By day the register loosens without losing the detail. Lunch runs to a smashburger with special sauce and dill pickles, a sweet-and-spicy fried chicken sandwich glazed in hot honey, a tinned fish platter with sourdough, pickles and mustard, plus salads and a soup with toast. What ties the two dayparts together is movement: the menu shifts with what is good that week, so tartare and sourdough hold as anchors while the vegetables and sweets rotate underneath them — a kale, endive and radicchio salad with cheesy granola and prune vinaigrette one stretch, grilled asparagus over whipped potato the next, a mango and coconut soft-serve sundae with chili crisp and lime when the kitchen wants a bright finish. A burger can sit beside a crudo because the same hands season both.

Murphy cooks out of time spent in some of Ottawa's more serious kitchens, and it reads on the plate: French technique underneath, contemporary Canadian on top, simple formats that lean on sourcing and seasoning rather than flourish. Campbell runs the front and the wine, Murphy the kitchen. Local reporting cast the pair as two Ottawa businesswomen who met the pandemic by expanding rather than retreating, and the two later told a regional food magazine they simply "weren't done."

The Corner Store is what makes the whole thing cohere. Bread, house donuts and pastries come off the same bench and often sell out by mid-morning; coffee, prepared foods and a lunch counter fill the daytime; the bottle list runs to natural wine and local beer; and the storefront absorbs the semi-private dinners that the snug main dining room cannot seat. Catering and pickup work off the same kitchen. The effect is a bistro that behaves less like a single dinner service than like a standing fixture of the block — useful for a weekday lunch, a bottle on the way home, or a larger table that needs its own four walls.

None of it strays far from the original idea: a little kitchen cooking seasonally on Somerset Street West. The difference is reach. What opened as a single bistro now runs a bakery, a bottle shop, a lunch counter and a catering bench beside it — and the Saturday bread run still tends to be over before noon.