Ember

Ember runs on two fires. A wood-fired pizza oven and an Argentinian-style charcoal grill anchor the kitchen, and most of what reaches the table has passed over one or through the other. The restaurant sits on Clarence Street in the ByWard Market, downtown Ottawa's oldest quarter for eating and drinking, and it treats live-fire cooking as its organizing idea rather than any single cuisine. Mediterranean share plates, wood-fired pizza, seafood, and steak run down one menu, held together less by geography than by the grill and the oven.

The clearest first order is the charcoal-kissed salmon crudo, dressed with miso mayo, ponzu, sesame, pickled chili, rayu chili oil, crispy garlic, and green onion — a dish that shows the precise, polished side of the kitchen. From the oven, the beef cheek pizza is the one to plan a meal around: prosciutto meat sauce, braised beef cheek, herb mushrooms, rosemary, and reggiano, a topping profile richer than the usual downtown pie. The grill carries the centre of the menu. Whole branzino arrives with chickpeas, dandelion greens, whipped labneh, za'atar, and a chile vinaigrette; the twelve-ounce Canada Prime ribeye comes with a red wine demi-glace and herb fries; smoky harissa chicken leans on charred sweet peppers, garlic yogurt, honey, and burnt lime. Even the sides read like plates in their own right: herb fries under the ribeye, a kale Caesar built to hold up next to the pizzas.

Beyond the signatures, the menu is wide enough to plan a full table around. The oven turns out other pizzas — a hot honey chorizo among them — and the pasta side runs to a mushroom mafaldine and an n'duja rigatoni. Vegetables get real attention rather than a token line: wood-fired roasted olives, a smoky eggplant dip, spicy feta, grilled asparagus, charred hispi cabbage, and brown butter halloumi give a vegetarian table a genuine order rather than a single default. Lunch is a lighter read on the same idea, built around dishes like a harissa chicken club with crispy prosciutto, pickled red onion, garlic-lime aioli, and herb fries. At either hour, the point is that a group rarely has to settle on a single style of eating.

The breadth is deliberate rather than unfocused. Ember is not a steakhouse, though it grills a serious ribeye; not a pizzeria, though the oven turns out some of the more interesting pies downtown; not strictly Mediterranean, though za'atar, harissa, and labneh recur from the dips to the mains. What holds it together is a clear point of view about fire and a willingness to let a table find its own meal — crudo and cocktails for two, or olives, dips, a pizza, and a shared branzino for six.

Ember opened in 2024 in what had been the Cornerstone Bar and Grill, and the live-fire setup was built in rather than inherited — the charcoal grill and the wood-fired oven are the reason the kitchen took its current shape. Local reporting at the time introduced it as a chef-led operation with a dedicated hand on the drinks, and that balance shows: the cocktails and the wine are weighted as carefully as the plates, not tacked onto a dinner menu.

The bar widens the use case further. A dedicated drink program and sommelier-guided wine pairings make Ember as workable for a drinks-led evening as for a full dinner, and on Friday and Saturday the kitchen runs until two in the morning — late enough that a ByWard Market night can end here on a pizza and a last cocktail rather than start somewhere else. It is a young restaurant that has already decided what it is: a live-fire kitchen that works as a dinner, a date, or the last stop of the night, depending on which fire you order from.