The Clarendon Tavern

Order the Soppressata & Hot Honey and the plate comes out with candied jalapenos, goat cheese, and a drizzle of hot honey over spicy soppressata — a sweet-heat read that belongs to a current kitchen more than to the oldest tavern address in Ottawa's ByWard Market. The Clarendon Tavern works that seam. It sits in a heritage George Street building with a nineteenth-century hotel behind it and runs a menu rebuilt for the way people eat now. Four things make the place, and they are strongest read together: the courtyard patio, the daily happy hour, weekend brunch, and a pizza list that has become a real part of the tavern's rhythm.

The pizzas are where the current menu shows its hand. Truffle Mushroom layers cremini, shiitake, and oyster mushrooms on a white-wine cream base under fresh fior di latte and a truffle drizzle; Chicken Alla Vodka runs marinated chicken and roasted red peppers over a vodka rosé; Meatball Gorgonzola sets house meatballs and creamy gorgonzola on pomodoro. Underneath that list is the tavern baseline that anchors the menu — the Clarendon Burger on brioche with house sauce and cheddar, a buttermilk fried chicken sandwich tossed in maple buffalo, wings, poutine, and beer-battered cod. And there is a composed mains lane that reaches past pub fare: Pan-Seared Trout with tarragon brown butter and a sweet-pea and mint puree, hanger Steak Frites with kale chimichurri, a ten-ounce pork tomahawk under mustard jus. A Vegan Gold Curry and a tuna poke bowl round out the edges.

Read together, the menu is comfort food with a current polish rather than a bare pub checklist. The truffle and hot-honey pizzas and the composed trout show a kitchen reaching, while the burger, wings, and fish and chips keep the tavern promise intact. The daily happy hour is where that balance is easiest to see: it moves pizzas and small plates into the late afternoon at a lower stake, so the pizza program reads as a strategy and not an afterthought. Weekend brunch does the same work from the other end of the day, with a Traditional Benedict, the Clarendon Skillet, and avocado toast giving the daytime visit its own reason to exist rather than opening the lunch menu early.

The tavern is built for mixed tables more than for a single specialist order. Start a group with Crispy Cauliflower under chipotle aioli and lemon yogurt, or the Clarendon Nachos with pineapple-mango salsa, before the pizzas and mains land, and the kitchen keeps pace whether the table wants a full dinner, a patio round, or a daytime Market stop. Reservations run online, which matters most for the patio and busier Market evenings, and the late-afternoon happy hour gives the whole thing a lower-commitment lane when a full dinner isn't the plan.

The building carries the backstory. The Clarendon takes its name and its bones from a nineteenth-century Clarendon Hotel that has stood on George Street since 1864, and the tavern that fills it now opened in 2018 under owners Caroline Gosselin and Peter Boole, part of the Eighteen Hospitality lineage in the Market. Local reporting at the time framed the opening as a long-delayed arrival that landed as a destination once the doors finally opened. That heritage is not decoration; it is why the courtyard patio and the George Street setting do as much work as anything coming off the line.

What holds it together is range without drift. A table can split between a hot-honey pizza and a plate of trout, book the patio for a slow happy hour, or come in on a Saturday for brunch, and none of those visits asks the tavern to be something it isn't. The George Street patio is the piece to plan around — a courtyard seat in the heart of the ByWard Market is a different meal than the same plate eaten indoors, and few tavern addresses this old can put a table outside at all.