Long before Ottawa embraced refined cocktail culture, there was Métropolitain Brasserie. Twenty-one years after opening on Sussex Drive, the city's only formal brasserie continues to demonstrate why the French brasserie remains one of hospitality's most enduring (and influential) formats.
Metropolitain Brasserie
700 Sussex Drive
Mon-Wed 11:30 AM – 10 PM
Thurs-Fri 11:30 AM – 11 PM
Sat 10 AM – 11 PM
Sun 10 AM – 10 PM
Spend enough time searching for Ottawa’s best cocktails and you’ll start to notice that the restaurants with the most ambitious cocktail programs all serve the same food. The menus often feature bread service, oysters, beef tartare, steak frites, and a seafood tower if the room is fancy enough. The drink lists pull from the same sources too: Champagne. Sancerre. Burgundy. Negronis, Old Fashioneds, Martinis done one way or another.
A lot of this stuff, you eventually realize, is borrowed from one specific kind of restaurant: the French brasserie. The restaurants in Ottawa have just softened the edges, lightened the cocktails, added some natural wine, and called it contemporary. But the bones are the same.
Which is how I eventually ended up at Métropolitain Brasserie. I’d walked past it probably a hundred times over the years. This past spring, I sat down at the bar for lunch and tried to figure out what, exactly, was going on here.
The first thing I noticed was the size of the place. The room is large, elegant, and refined. Pressed-tin ceiling, milk-glass globe lights, a long zinc bar, burgundy banquettes running the length of one wall, bentwood chairs on top of mosaic-tiled floors. Around the room are mirrored walls with French words painted on them: Champagne Cocktails, House Wines, Métro Martinis, Boissons, Bières, Bar Cru. The lettering was supposed to be temporary. Whoever was supposed to take it down gave up, and twenty years later, it’s just part of the architecture.
There’s a picture in the washroom from their original 2005 ad campaign, “Closer to Paris Than You Think.”, a model draped across the zinc bar. They still use that slogan on Instagram sometimes.
There’s a word for what this place is, and the word isn’t “French restaurant.” It’s “brasserie”, which is a specific thing. A brasserie is built around the rhythms of a working city: it opens early, serves all day, takes solo diners and six-top tables with the same indifference, and runs a menu long enough to satisfy someone starting with oysters and Champagne next to someone else ordering a steak sandwich and a beer. The dining room is the point. The food is secondary. A brasserie is, before anything else, a civic space: a place where the city does its business over a long lunch.
Métropolitain still works that way. The dining room is enormous by Ottawa standards. The bar seats sixteen and is treated almost as an afterthought during the day, which is funny because the bar is where I end up every time since I never have a reservation. The room is built for people having meetings, not for people taking photographs of their food.
Every lunch, the dining room is full by noon. Mostly people in actual suits, occasionally with what looked like interns or junior staff in tow. The server in black with a waist apron moved through the room carrying duck confit and oysters and the usual brasserie rotation.
The bar is a different animal. Same kitchen, same wine list, but the formality drops. The bartender says hi. Plates still come out fast and empty ones disappear almost immediately, so the operational discipline is identical. They don’t slow down for bar guests, but the tone loosens up. You can sit there for an hour and a half and nobody minds.
Sommelier and bar manager Michael J. Hannas is one of the main reasons to sit at the bar. He’s been there a long time and he knows the list, but more importantly, he knows what people are eating. He pointed me toward a Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon with the steak frites on one visit and a Côtes du Rhône with the duck confit on another.
The parliamentary sitting months basically run the place: staffers, lobbyists, the usual Hill crowd. When Parliament is on recess in the summer, the room fills with tourists and retirees and downtown office workers instead, but the energy stays the same: composed, mature, almost no one under thirty.
Summer weekends have a different rhythm. Rather than the weekday procession of business lunches and parliamentary staff, the 100+ seat terrace fills with people chatting over coffee and wine, watching tourists filter between the ByWard Market and Parliament Hill. It’s a wide stone plaza on the corner of Sussex and Rideau, not a sidewalk strip with two tables jammed against a building. Mature trees, string lights, a real view of the intersection. It’s one of the better patios in the city.
The wine list is the part of Métropolitain that holds up the best, and I think the most important thing to say about it is that it’s not trying to impress you. The list is long enough to be useful and short enough to actually choose from. The French section is exactly what you’d hope for: Muscadet and Chablis for oysters, Sancerre and Pouilly-Fumé for the lighter plates, a good run of Rhône reds, Gigondas, Châteauneuf-du-Pape, the kind of things experienced diners expect to see. The international section has California, New Zealand, Argentina, Italy, Spain (all the usual suspects), all picked to be recognizable enough that nobody at a business lunch has to squint at the list for ten minutes. Most bottles sit between $50 and $80, which is fair for this address. There are no natural wines. There are no experimental pét-nats. The list won Wine Spectator’s Award of Excellence from 2014 to 2018, which is less about prestige than about the fact that the wine program has been this consistent for over a decade.
The cocktail list is more of a mixed bag. Twenty-one cocktails, all $15, which is cheap by current Ottawa standards. There are some real modern classics on there: the Last Word, the Jungle Bird, the Hemingway, and Vesper. The backbar has close to a hundred spirits, including some serious bottles, like a Louis XIII that’s more for show. The signatures lean sweet.
Press Gallery ($15): This cocktail leans heavily into bright citrus and sweetness. Aperol dominates the nose alongside orange bitters and expressed orange oils. Mount Gay rum provides a bit of depth beneath the grapefruit and lemon.
Parisian Honey ($15): Lychee remains the dominant note in this cocktail, supported by grapefruit and cranberry acidity, though the overall profile is ultimately quite sweet. The gin base is secondary beneath the fruit profile.
Long Walk Home ($15): This libation has a tiki-oriented build. Coconut rum and sweet citrus arrive aggressively upfront, with coconut shavings reinforcing the dessert-like concept. Tart lemon and orange provide some contrast, though not enough to fully counterbalance the cocktail’s pronounced sweetness.
None of these are bad drinks. They’re just built for a different audience than the one I’d usually order for, and the sweetness is a few notches past where cocktail bars in Ottawa are right now.
My honest advice: skip the signature list almost entirely. Order a Negroni, or an Old Fashioned, or a Champagne Cocktail. Ask Michael what to drink with whatever you’re eating. He’s better at picking your drink than the menu is.
The food is the food of a grand brasserie, and if you’ve eaten at one in Paris you’ll be familiar with this menu. Oysters on Thursday are still a-buck-a-shuck, which is a rare deal in Ottawa.
Classic Beef tartare ($29): A masterclass in brasserie tradition. While it lacks the flavour complexity found elsewhere in Ottawa, it succeeds by sticking to the traditional composition of shallot, caper, cornichon, and quail yolk. This way, the Metropolitan offers a dish that is unapologetically Parisian. True to its roots, and contrary to the typical North American appetizer format, it is served as a substantial plate with either fries or salad.
The duck confit ($39) is excellent. Crisp skin, properly salted, the meat falling apart.
5oz Steak frites ($30): The steak arrived medium rare, nicely seared, with generous freshly-cracked pepper and maître d’hôtel butter. Their crisp fries paired with garlic mayonnaise are delectable.
I’ve been thinking about why Métropolitain still works, and I think the simplest answer is that it knows what it is. Most restaurants hit a wall after a few years. They rebrand, they redo the menu, and they chase whatever the current thing is. Métropolitain didn’t do any of that. It just kept doing the same thing, and the same thing turned out to be the thing a lot of newer restaurants are still borrowing from.
That’s also why I keep going back. Not for the cocktails… for the cocktails I go elsewhere. But for the room, and for Michael, and for the very specific experience of sitting in a downtown Ottawa restaurant at noon where nobody is wearing athleisure, and the room is elegantly classic, and the food is accessibly-priced, and the beef tartare is exactly what a beef tartare is supposed to be. That kind of place is harder to find than it used to be, and it doesn’t seem to be getting easier.
Twenty-one years in, the slogan still works. Closer to Paris than you think.