L’Oree du Bois

Great New Year’s Day dinner with family. We had dropped by in the fall and spoke with the chef who was bbq ing at back of restaurant. He was so friendly and passionate about his food we had to go back. Highly recommended for best in class québécois and Canadian cuisine.

Although this restaurant has been our favourite place to celebrate special occasions for over 20 years, we feel the price has become much too high for what it is. We will probably find another «favourite.»
The service is very good. The food is very good. However, after the last few times, we felt that the price was higher than the value.

L’Orée du Bois is one of my favourite higher end restaurant in the National Capital Region. They make quality dishes using ingredients from le terroir (local meats and vegetables) and all cooked in a French Canadian style.
The restaurant is in a lovely wooden house in a wooded, enchanting setting. The interior is cozy and welcoming. The service is attentive and responsive. While it seems very fancy, we have eaten here with our children and felt very welcome. They are very accommodating to specific requests.
The food: everything is fresh and tastes amazing. You can tell it is made with care. They are also not shy of cooking truly medium rare meats and even recommend it. I have had the duck confit, the deer medallions, the filet mignon, the rabbit and lamb over the years and I can’t decide what I like the most. Most dishes come with a side of buttery mashed potatoes and seasonal vegetables.
The soups are always creamy and flavourful. The appetizers are very good too: salmon tartare, mushroom puffs, etc.
I think I always end up ordering crème brûlée for dessert because it is SO good.
They offer a lot of the above in a Table d’hôte at a very reasonable price and are flexible (you can request some items from the regular menu as a Table d’hôte option). I would say it is overall a great deal compared to many of the fancy restaurants in the region. For example, my husband and I had an amazing Valentine’s dinner for $ 135, taxes and tips included, and we had plenty of food and wine.

Véritable institution. L’endroit est chaleureux. Si le menu né brille pas par son originalité, on est agréablement surpris par les saveurs. Bön service sympathique, ambiance familiale.

Ho-​hum. Consistently disappointed by Ottawa’s ‘high end’ restaurants, I have decided to cast a wider net and return to La Belle Province, in hopes to find a hidden gem. L’Oree du Bois was not it — yet another tourist trap. Cheesy décor aside, I tried to look pass it and put all my hopes in the potential talent in the kitchen — having read such rave reviews from fellow Unilocalers.
I feel like I’ve eaten in these wannabe ‘high end’, ‘rustic’ and ‘seasonal/​regional’ cuisine a thousand times. No surprises here, no creativity either — which is a shame for this price range. Wine list — nothing to write home about. How can you serve ‘local’ foie gras without a Quebec ice wine on your list?
Anyways, service was attentive and they put obvious effort in making you feel ‘as if they cared’, in that over-​the-​top, manufactured kindness kind of way — do not get me wrong — I always appreciate the effort. So far, true gastronomy does not exist in or near Ottawa. The quest continues.

We had a spectacular dinner. The wild mushroom appetizer and the duck leg were both superb. The fish soup was surprisingly spicy. Wish there were restaurants like this in Vancouver.

L’institution culinaire de l’Outaouais par excellence. On y sert une cuisine française classique préparée avec des ingrédients du terroir. La cuisine est très goûteuse et très bien exécutée. Le service est aussi très professionnel et efficace. Certains pourraient peut-​être trouver la cuisine pas assez inventive, mais le menu classique de cette exécution est selon moi l’atout majeur de l’endroit.

I have been to this restaurant 2 or 3 times over the past 2 or 3 years, and I definitely look forward to going back! They also offer gift certificates, a service that I have been able to take advantage of.
I found out about this restaurant from a work-​colleague who had been there and suggested it, when we were planning a winter lunch function for our office holiday event. It’s a little pricier than our usual fare (in fact one of our best winter luncheon events at work was at a way less expensive place — but sometimes you just need to go upscale, when you can afford to do so), but it was well worth the experience and the expense; we got very positive feedback from the rest of the unit. Finding a restaurant for a work function is a daunting task at the best of times! Although you «can’t please everyone», we scored higher on the satisfaction scale with this choice of venue.
This restaurant is a pleasant, short drive from the city of Ottawa and it looks like a «cabin in the woods». It is accessible for people with walkers and wheelchairs (except for 1 room which has 2 or 3 steps up into it). There are at least 3 rooms that serve as the eating area; our group took up 2 of them — one holds about 70 people, and the other holds about 30. It’s very cozy inside, and would be a pleasant visit year-​round. For a group our size, I would say the only negative experience for us was that we couldn’t all fit into 1 room.
*Language alert!* Expect to hear French here! It is a tourist attraction, of sorts, but it is located just over the Quebec side of the border with Ontario. The staff and the service is very efficient, as well as patient with us Anglophones.
The food tends to be a bit on the unusual side, as in they don’t cater to the every day selection of menu items. I seem to recall there was duck on the menu, and perhaps venison, elk and lamb, as opposed to burgers and fries. The chef does a wonderful concoction with mushrooms in a potage of saorts, as an appetizer. Both times I was there, the food was very good.
This might be a good location for a wedding, or at least a proposal :-) as it is very romantic. If you do this, congratulations! And please let us know how it turns out!

In the Ottawa «area», but actually on the QC side in Chelsea, about a 15 minute drive from downtown Ottawa.
A great little getaway type restaurant, as the name implies, it’s in the middle of the woods — right beside the Gatineau Park, very scenic setting. The restaurant builds on this and continues the woodsy décor to good effect.
It’s French (France) /​Canadian food, I go at least once a year and it hasn’t disappointed me once — a rare feat for any restaurant you go to often enough. The prices are really low for what basically is fine dining, you’ll pay a lot more for this in Ottawa’s higher end restaurants. If you go for their table d’hote, which is basically a 4 course meal where you get to pick from a selection of dishes for each course, it’s about $ 40. That’s just a tad over what you’ll pay for the main course alone at a place like Domus.
As you would expect, their wine list has a good selection of French wines and the markup is pretty decent.

The food at L’Oree du Bois is fantasic.
Classic high end French with local ingredients.
The most experienced foodies will love the food and the shocker is the low price!
I was with a group when I went and for the cost of a standard entrée (at a fine restaraunt) I got the full table d’hote. Soup to start, a delicious duck terrine as an app, Filet Mignon for a main and desert to finish off. All that for $ 43 !!
It’s 20 minutes from downtown Ottawa and it’s worth the drive…

* Charming escape from Ottawa *
The name is fitting, as this charming restaurant is at the edge of the forest (Gatineau Park) in a renovated farm house about a 20 minute drive from downtown Ottawa.
I visited a few years ago, but just thought about it again as a friend asked for recommendations for a trip to Ottawa.
They offer classic «Cuisine du Terroir» — focusing on fresh local ingredients. They do lots of in-​house smoking of fish, meat, and poultry using local maple. They also have their own herb garden which features prominently in their dishes.
We had the table d’hôte, which was very reasonably priced at a little under $ 40 for a four course meal, with housemade chocolates and a hot beverage to wrap things up.
Although it has been a while since my visit I still remember a few of the dishes fondly.
The puff pastry filled with a mushroom filling that included fresh herbs and roasted garlic was amazing. They used just the right amount of cream and butter to round out the flavour of the filling and contrast it with the flaky pastry. Perfection!
The duck confit was also amazing. It was served in a creamy peppercorn sauce that balanced the dish nicely. The skin of the duck was perfectly crispy, with the tender meat inside, as well as some additional shredded confit. Lovely.
The memory of the rest of the meal is a bit faded, but I recall enjoying the soup. Some of us got a cheese plate for dessert which had a nice selection of local Quebec cheeses, many of which were made with lait cru (raw milk) — aaaah… Quebec! And I remember some fresh berries with an herbed sabayon which was very pleasant as well.
Overall for a meal to stick out in my mind over the years like that, it makes me want to go back.
Hopefully it is still as good! It would be sad if the memory is better than current day reality!