Trofí Restaurant

Trofí hangs its signature skewers from an upright rack and leaves the protein to the table. The Souvlaki Brochettes come charbroiled over Mediterranean salad, rice, tzatziki and grilled pita, with the choice running from chicken and beef to lamb, shrimp, kafta, or halloumi and vegetables for anyone skipping meat. The hanging rack is the theatrical part; the protein-by-choice is the practical one, and it is the same choice the rest of the menu keeps putting to the table. One plate, in other words, explains the kitchen — and a group can split the brochettes six ways without landing on the same skewer twice.

The brochettes are the headline, not the whole story. The opening rounds read like a proper mezze spread: Hummus Royale, where marinated lamb tenderloin sits over hummus with roasted nuts and herbs; Grilled Halloumi with fig, fennel, arugula and pomegranate vinaigrette; Greek Fries double-fried and finished with feta and garlic aioli; and a run of Crispy Calamari, Spanakopita, Keftedes and the Charbroiled Loukaniko Board for a group still reading the kitchen. Even the salads pull their weight — a Santorini Greek salad finished with a block of feta, a steak-and-goat-cheese plate with strawberries, pomegranate and candied pecans. From there the menu reaches further than most Greek kitchens attempt. A sixteen-ounce bone-in ribeye and an eight-ounce filet mignon — locally sourced prime beef — arrive with Greek fries, feta butter and garlic aioli; grilled lamb chops come with garlic mashed potatoes and salsa verde; and the seafood runs to a broil of tiger prawns and Canadian lobster tail, a seafood linguine, and pan-seared black cod. The Metochos Grill gathers most of it onto a single platter — sliced ribeye, lamb chops, chicken and shrimp skewers, sausage and lobster tail — for the table that cannot settle on one thing.

What the menu says about the kitchen is that it treats Greek as a base, not a boundary. The throughline holds across nearly every plate — za'atar pita, sumac onions, tzatziki, feta — but the cooking sits comfortably next to a chophouse and a seafood counter and does not apologize for either. A bone-in ribeye gets feta butter; the tuna tartare comes with za'atar wontons; the burger is built on kafta and grilled halloumi under sumac onions. The price sits at a proper dinner-out level, a step up from the quick-souvlaki category it grew out of. It is a wide menu by design, broad enough that everyone at a mixed table finds the plate they came for.

Trofí did not start as a sit-down restaurant. By the team's own account, it is the newest venture from the people behind Greek On Wheels, an Ottawa operation more than twenty-five years in by the time the restaurant opened on Somerset Street West, in Ottawa's Chinatown, in 2022. That lineage shows in how the menu is built to feed a crowd — the shared platters, the choose-your-own skewers, the dips meant to be passed — and in the ease with which a familiar Greek catalogue gets dressed up for a polished dinner without losing its plainspoken core. No celebrity name fronts the kitchen; what it brings instead is a quarter-century of feeding Ottawa, now seated in Somerset Village.

None of that breadth is locked to a full dinner. Trofí runs a happy hour on its own rhythm — early evening Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday, then late night on Friday and Saturday — with discounted dips, mezze, cocktails, wine and beer, which makes it as workable for a first round as for a planned celebration. And the kitchen keeps the Greek thread going to the last course: Baklava + Vanilla, gelato folded with baklava chunks, pistachio, honey and berries, set beside a vanilla-bean crème brûlée and the chocolate Ifistio lava cake. Order the brochettes, build out from the mezze, and the rest of the table more or less assembles itself.