Flora Hall Brewing

Flora Hall Brewing pours and cooks inside a 1927 automotive garage, two levels of restored brick and steel a few blocks off Bank Street in Ottawa's Centretown. Founder Dave Longbottom bought the empty Welch and Johnston building in 2016 and opened Flora Hall in 2017, keeping the garage-door bones and the mezzanine rather than papering over them. What he built is a brewery-restaurant, not a taproom that happens to serve food: beer made in-house, a scratch kitchen behind it, and a layout that reads as one operation. The industrial shell is not set dressing — it is the reason the floor handles drop-in pints, full dinners, and large tables with equal ease.

The kitchen cooks with more intent than brewery food usually carries. The Chicken Wings come breaded and finished with Parmesan snow, lemon zest, and pepper, with BBQ and Maple sriracha as alternate flavours. The Burger is a six-ounce patty under provolone, Dijon, pickled onions, and spinach pesto, fries or salad alongside. From there the menu reaches for the dinner table: Short Rib, slow-cooked and boneless, with garlic puree, grilled asparagus, roasted potatoes, and jus; Burrata over a quinoa pancake with salsa cruda and bacon macha; Shrimp in panang curry with baby bok choy and house-made gnocchi. A blue oyster mushroom from Riviere Farms arrives braised with celeriac, roasted almonds, and a mushroom broth. None of it is pub shorthand.

The beer is made on site, in an eighteen-hectolitre, two-vessel brewhouse with a single bright tank and five fermenters. The tap list moves across styles rather than settling into one lane: an English Ordinary Bitter and a Bohemian-Style Pilsner for malt-and-balance drinkers, a West Coast IPA, a North East IPA, and the small-batch Dolcita Nano IPA for the hop side, alongside an Oatmeal Stout, a Dry Hopped Sour Ale, and the lighter Flora Light. Sparkling Hop Water and a Non-Alcoholic Bitter give non-drinkers something made in the same building, which keeps a mixed table from splitting its order between the bar and a corner-store fridge. The brewhouse is small enough to keep the list turning over, which is why a regular rarely finds the exact same lineup twice.

That breadth makes the table easy to plan. A group can open with Fries and the Chicken Wings while it sorts out the beer, lean vegetarian on Muhammara, Baked Brie, and the Burrata, then split into Short Rib and Burger when the meal turns into dinner. The Trianon closes it out for a table that wants dessert. Nothing on the menu forces a fixed format, which is what lets the same kitchen serve a quick snack-and-pint and a full sit-down dinner without choosing between them.

The garage suits the way Flora Hall works. Service runs on drop-in seating with no reservations, so weeknights fill from the door and groups do best arriving at opening; larger gatherings book the mezzanine or a weekday lunch, and the brewery adds tours and a to-go beer shop on the side. Longbottom's reuse of the Welch and Johnston building tied the brewery to Centretown's habit of putting old industrial stock back to work, and local reporting from its early days credits Rod Hughes as the founding brewer. The art on the walls and the two levels have had years to settle into the block.

Nine years on, Flora Hall sits in the rhythm of the neighbourhood: a pint after work, a long Friday table, a visit that started as a beer and ended on Short Rib. The restored garage gives it a setting most breweries cannot manufacture, and the kitchen gives a table a reason to stay past the first round. The beer and the building came in together on Flora Street, and the place still runs as though the two were never meant to be separate.