Ottawa: Home

Ottawa is where I'm from. It's not a city you go to. It's a city you go back to.

There's a version of Ottawa that exists for tourists. The Parliament buildings, the ByWard Market, the Rideau Canal in winter when it becomes the longest skating rink in the world (7.8 kilometers, if anyone's counting). That version is real, and it's nice, and it has nothing to do with why I go back. I go back because my family's there. Because the street I grew up on still looks the same. Because the shawarma at a place that only locals know about is still exactly as good as it was when I was 17.

Let me pause on the shawarma thing because this is important. Ottawa has the best shawarma in North America. This is not debatable. The Lebanese immigration wave in the '80s and '90s turned the city into a shawarma capital. There are more shawarma shops per capita in Ottawa than any other city on the continent. The garlic sauce alone is worth the plane ticket. If you visit Ottawa and don't eat at Shawarma Palace on Rideau Street (the one near the University of Ottawa, not the suburban locations) or 3 Brothers on Bank Street, you've wasted your trip. I'm serious. Order the chicken shawarma plate with extra garlic and extra turnips. I took G to Shawarma Palace on her first visit to Ottawa and she looked at me like I'd been hiding this from her deliberately. I had been, sort of. Some things you save. Thank me later.

I tried to book the Andaz Ottawa ByWard Market for this trip. It's the best hotel option in the Market district. Modern rooms with floor-to-ceiling windows, a rooftop bar called Copper Spirits & Sights with panoramic views of Parliament Hill and the Gatineau Hills across the river, and a location that puts you on top of the best area of downtown Ottawa for eating and walking around. The booking got cancelled (some reservation issue) and I think I ended up staying with family. That's the thing about going home. The hotel becomes an afterthought.

But if you need a hotel in Ottawa: the Andaz for the rooftop bar and the location, or the Fairmont Château Laurier if you want to sleep in a castle across from Parliament and don't mind paying $400+ for rooms that are coasting on reputation.

April in Ottawa is mud season. I won't sugarcoat this. The snow is gone but the city hasn't figured out that it's spring yet. The tulips that make Ottawa famous in May haven't appeared yet. Nobody visits in April on purpose.

The best times to come: February for Winterlude, when the canal freezes and the city builds ice sculptures on Confederation Boulevard and you can buy a BeaverTail (fried dough with cinnamon sugar and lemon, a Canadian institution) while skating past the Parliament buildings at sunset. Or May for the Canadian Tulip Festival, when over a million tulips bloom along the canal and around Dow's Lake. The tulip story itself is actually one of the better pieces of Canadian history: the Netherlands sent 100,000 tulip bulbs to Ottawa after World War II as a thank-you because Canadian soldiers helped liberate the Dutch, and the royal family had taken refuge in Ottawa during the war. They've been sending bulbs every year since. The whole city turns into a garden for three weeks. It's beautiful.

If you do come in April, here's what you do: eat shawarma, walk the canal path from the National Arts Centre to Dow's Lake (about 45 minutes, flat, scenic even without the tulips), stop at the Whalesbone on Elgin Street for oysters and a glass of Muscadet, and then go eat more shawarma.

I was going through a transition at this point. Still in Toronto, still figuring out what was next. Going home to Ottawa was grounding in the way that only going home can be. You eat dinner at your mom's kitchen table and the world gets smaller for a few days. The noise gets quieter. The things you thought were urgent turn out to be less urgent than you assumed.

For anyone who needs that kind of trip, Ottawa is really good at it. It's a quiet capital in a quiet country, and sometimes that's exactly the point.