Pelican Seafood Market & Grill

Pelican works a fish counter and a grill out of the same Bank Street address, and the overlap is the point. The chilled case that sells Atlantic haddock or a fillet of Arctic char to take home stands a few steps from a kitchen that will batter that same haddock and send it back out with chips. It is a family-owned seafood market and grill in Ottawa's South Keys end — unfussy enough for a Tuesday lunch, stocked widely enough that a table of mismatched appetites can still settle on a single order. Most seafood restaurants ask you to trust their sourcing. Here you can watch it on ice on the way to your seat.

Three orders carry the menu. The freshly shucked oysters change with the day's delivery and arrive with mignonette, citrus horseradish, lemon, and hot sauce — the cleanest first read on what the kitchen is doing. The wild Atlantic haddock fish and chips is the plain-spoken anchor, served as a one- or two-piece lunch and as a full dinner main. And the showpiece is the whole lobster poutine: a whole steamed lobster splayed over fries with cheese curds and lobster gravy, a seasonal order that has turned up on the Food Network and works best as the centre of the table rather than a side.

Around those three, the menu keeps widening. The East Coast classics are all here — a chopped lobster roll, PEI mussels with fries, a cup or bowl of fisherman's chowder, snow crab and steamed lobster when the season allows. Then the cooking travels: a tuna poke bowl, Korean fried shrimp, a red Thai shrimp curry, crispy haddock tacos, crab linguini, coconut shrimp, and Ontario pickerel for anyone who wants their fish pulled from closer to home. The chilled towers scale the same ambition, climbing from the modest Bobby Dazzler through the Chi-Chi Rodriguez to the Orville Magoon when a group wants a spectacle on ice.

That range says something about how the kitchen sees its job. A seafood house could stop at oysters and a fryer; Pelican, family-owned and busy with it, reads more like a counter trying to answer every seafood craving a neighbourhood can throw at it — a quick poke bowl, a curry, a hundred oysters for a crowd. It has worked this stretch of Bank Street since 1978, long enough to know the difference between a raw-bar afternoon and a lobster-poutine night. A sustainable-seafood note runs along the menu, less marketing than housekeeping for a counter that has bought fish here for decades.

Timing rewards the planner. Every afternoon from two to five, a shellfish happy hour puts premium PEI oysters out by the half dozen, the dozen, the fifty, or the hundred, with shrimp cocktail and a short list of cheaper drinks alongside — the easiest way into the raw bar before the dinner menu turns rich. The market and the daily takeout carry the same logic past the dining room: a tray of oysters, a seafood platter, or a parcel of fresh fish can leave for a dinner that never touched a table here, and the kitchen caters beyond it. For the seafood-tower and whole-lobster crowd, reservations hold the line.

What keeps Pelican from being just another grill is that the seafood never has to end at the plate. Plenty of restaurants send you home full; this one can send you home full and carrying tomorrow's dinner, the fillet chosen from the same case the kitchen cooks from. Bank Street South is not where Ottawa goes looking for waterfront romance, and Pelican does not pretend otherwise. It is a working fish market that happens to set tables, or a seafood grill that happens to sell you the raw material — and which one it is depends mostly on which door you walked in for.