Elgin Street Diner

The Elgin Street Diner keeps no closing time. Every hour of every day, the turquoise booths a block south of Ottawa's downtown core stay open to whoever walks in — the student halfway through an essay, the line cook coming off a shift, the table that wandered over after last call, the family in for Sunday pancakes. Centretown has plenty of restaurants that do one of those services well. This one does all of them, because it never turns the lights off and never asks the hour.

The food is diner food cooked with a straight face, and poutine is the clearest signature. The base is honest — fresh-cut fries, house gravy, St. Albert cheese curds — and the kitchen runs it in every direction: smoked meat piled on top, the ESD version under fried onions and bacon, a four-cheese build, a Buffalo chicken one finished with Frank's Red Hot. Breakfast holds equal weight and never leaves the menu. The Breakfast Special lands eggs, breakfast meat, house-made home fries, baked beans, and toast on a single plate at any hour; the Hangover Breakfast swaps the home fries for poutine, which tells you exactly who is ordering it and when. Around those two lanes sit four-decker Dagwood clubs, Montreal smoked meat on rye, the jalapeno-and-Sriracha El Diablo burger, and a milkshake list that treats dessert as part of the order rather than an afterthought — the Black Forest Cake shake folds in wild cherries and Oreo crumbs.