La Bottega Nicastro

Walk into La Bottega Nicastro for a sandwich and you walk out with groceries. The George Street shop in Ottawa's ByWard Market is a working Italian alimentari first — shelves of imported pasta and oil, a deli case of cured meats and cheeses, a cheese counter at the centre of it — with a custom panini line and a coffee bar built onto the same floor. Its own sign reads Market, Café, Restaurant, and the order matters: the shopping comes first, and lunch happens while you do it. Behind the grocery, a fifteen-seat open kitchen turns the errand into something closer to a meal.

The everyday draw is the all-day sandwich counter, where a panino is built to order — bread, cured meats, cheese, marinated vegetables, and sauce chosen one component at a time. The Fully Loaded Italian Classic is the maximalist version, several cured meats stacked with provolone, marinated vegetables, and house condiments; the Napoli is the restrained read, prosciutto and fresh mozzarella with tomato and greens, leaning on ingredient quality instead of sheer volume. Past the two headliners the board runs deep — a Milano, a Sicilian, a Capri, a Mortadella, an Italian ByWard named for the market outside. Regulars know to add the marinated spicy eggplant, the house component that lends almost any order its acidity and heat. An illy espresso bar shares the same counter, with cannoli and biscotti in the case for anyone who came mostly for the coffee.

The restaurant hiding at the back is the part newcomers miss. A chef, Rene Rodriguez, took over the small trattoria in the spring of 2024, and the open kitchen now runs lunch Tuesday through Saturday and a dinner service on Friday nights. The cooking there reaches well past the deli case: antipasti, classic pastas, pizzas like the Capricciosa and the Diavola, crudités with a white bean pesto, wine by the glass and a cold beer. Local food writing credits Rodriguez with the rotating daily specials and the tiramisu the café has made its signature finish.

What sets the place apart is how completely the grocery and the kitchen belong to each other. The same shelves that stock salumi and formaggi boards, pizza kits, lasagna, meatballs, and pre-packed La Bottega boxes also supply the café, so a fast lunch and a grocery run collapse into one errand. Portions come generous and priced for an everyday lunch — no small thing in a downtown where a quick, good meal can run thin or costly. Much of what the kitchen makes is built to leave with you, which is why the takeout bag is as common here as the tray.

The family name goes back further than the shop itself. The Nicastros opened their first Ottawa food store on Gladstone Avenue in 1972, and the ByWard location on George Street followed in 1995. It still works the way an old-country grocer does — a Parmigiano wheel cracked open at the counter, shelves of oil, tinned fish, and dried pasta sourced to taste of home. Pat Nicastro, by local accounts, opened that store and still anchors it, part of a Calabrian family whose name has been on Ottawa storefronts for two generations.

The result is a place that runs on several clocks at once: a morning espresso and a wedge of Parmigiano, a noon panino eaten standing at the counter, a Friday dinner in the back, a box of cannoli carried home for later. Chef Rene's tiramisu is the order that bridges the two halves, the deli stop and the sit-down meal, on the nights the trattoria is open. The sign out front promises a place where Ottawa shops like Italy; the sandwich counter is still where most people start.