The Rowan

The Rowan calls itself a gastro pub, and the plates that arrive at the table keep pulling against the label. A Smoked Cheddar Churro lands with feta, peanut salsa macha, and fried pepperoni. A Tuna Crudo sits in crispy nori with umeboshi, pickled ginger, and sesame. A Beef Croquette Rarebit shows up with pickled mustard, onion, and roasted tomato relish. The Bank Street dining room is small, the service is friendly and astute, and the kitchen is doing a sharper version of the form than the word pub tends to promise on its own.

The lunch menu follows the same impulse. Seared Tuna lands with radicchio, feta, hazelnut romesco, and potato. Mussels & Fries comes through a jerk sauce with coconut, ginger, and chili. A Porchetta Sandwich runs with roasted garlic mayo, caramelized onion, and mozzarella, served with fries and a salad. Brunch is its own service rather than a daytime trim of the dinner menu: a German Pancake with fresh fruit, whipped cream, and maple sugar; Shakshouka built on focaccia, pine nuts, and yogurt; Silog over garlic rice with pork belly, sunnyside eggs, lime, and sesame; a Frittata sitting on roasted potato and a brown sauce; Asparagus Tartine & Scrambled Eggs layered with spinach, ricotta, parmesan, and a shallot garlic oil. The official menu is presented as a sample rather than a contract, and the rotation is the point.

What the menu reads as is a kitchen that grew up inside a modern British gastropub frame and never accepted the boundary. The composed plates carry seafood, lamb, scallops, and pork through accents that turn up across the wider list — pickled ginger, nduja butter, peanut salsa macha, kataifi pastry, hazelnut romesco, chimichurri, labneh, pomegranate. Scallops and Pork Belly is the cleanest example of that habit: a dinner anchor that keeps the comfort-food centre while layering it with celery root, mushroom cream, leeks, and walnuts. The Veggie at dinner is broccoli, roasted beet hummus, cashew cream, kataifi sesame pastry, and a chili and charred scallion relish, which is about as much engineering as the steak gets. Pub comfort is still there in the Bacon Cheeseburger with Rowan sauce, in the Flat Iron Steak with horseradish cream and onion rings, in the Wedge Caesar with bacon, olive, pickled hot pepper, and toasted breadcrumbs. The interesting tell is that nothing has been left to default to the easier version of itself.

Ross and Simon Fraser opened the room in 2015. According to local reporting, the name comes from their Scottish grandmother Mary and a bagpipe tune called The Rowan Tree — a small family-history thread that runs underneath the modern British framing without taking it over. The Glebe directory keeps that framing current, and earlier local coverage of the brothers carried both the name story and the room's food style at the time of the opening, including a holiday profile that traced parts of the menu back to family memory rather than to a restaurant playbook. Later Ottawa reporting on how the brothers run the kitchen fills in the rest of the picture.

The Bank Street address is small enough to cap groups at six and to run set reservation seating windows, and the kitchen does not currently offer takeaway — the dining room is built for the table that sits down rather than the order that travels out. Weekday lunch, weekend brunch, and nightly dinner have each been given their own anchors instead of borrowing from each other, and the rotating sample-menu posture keeps each service from settling into the same plates twice in a row. All of that adds up to a Glebe dining room that reads as a planned-meal restaurant first and a pub label second, holding more cooking detail on the plate than the form itself asks for.