Hunter's Public House

Calamari at a neighbourhood pub usually means filler — something fried and safe to keep the table busy until the mains arrive. Hunter's Public House answers with the Maple Chili-Crisp Kraken: buttermilk-marinated strips finished with maple-chili crisp, lime, green onion, and citrus aioli, a sweet-and-heat register that surfaces again and again across the menu. That dish is the tell at this food-focused pub on the south end of Bank Street in Ottawa. It keeps every familiar pub category — wings, nachos, burgers, fish and chips — and then cooks each one a notch past what the category asks for, so a table can range from a quick share plate to a full dinner without ever leaving the building.

Before any of that, the share plates set the tone: beer-brined pub wings dusted and fried, East Coast garlic fingers on pinsa dough under Halifax donair sauce, a loaded plate of Chef's Nachos. The core lane, though, is comfort food given a little craft. St-Albert Curds on Smashed piles local cheese curds and Hunter's Pilsner gravy over smashed baby potatoes; the French onion soup braises its onions in the house red ale before the Swiss and crostini go on. The Pot Roast Yorkie sets slow-braised AAA chuck under a Yorkshire pudding with a mushroom medley and more of that pilsner gravy, and the meatloaf comes bacon-wrapped over the same smashed potatoes. The handhelds hold their own — a hundred-percent chuck burger with aged white cheddar and crispy onions, a buttermilk fried-chicken sammy under apple-cabbage slaw and maple ranch, a black-bean-and-quinoa veggie patty with fried goat cheese for the table that wants one. Fish and chips arrives as beer-battered Nova Scotia haddock with hand-cut fries.