Union Local 613

Union Local 613 takes orders three different ways across a week. The dining room runs a Southern-inspired dinner Monday through Saturday, anchored on fried chicken and shrimp and grits. Wednesday turns into half-price whiskey for the night, Old Fashioneds excepted. Wednesday through Saturday, the kitchen stays open past ten on a separate late-night menu — sandwiches, Frito Pie, hush puppies, dollar fries — running to two in the morning Friday and Saturday. Three different visits from one address on Somerset Street West in Ottawa's Chinatown, and the menu is built so each window has its own answer.

Union Fried Chicken is the clearest dinner order: brined, fried to a crisp shell, plated with collard green slaw, pickles, a side of grits or cornbread, and pepper vinegar, with an optional Nashville-style heat move for the table that wants the spicier version. Shrimp and Grits is the second main, built on shrimp, pork belly, nduja sausage, and hominy grits — a richer Southern-comfort plate for diners who would rather start dense than start fried. Frito Pie comes either with beef or vegan chili, barbecue Fritos, cilantro aioli, and pickled jalapeño, and is the easiest opener for a table that wants something to share before the mains arrive. Blackened Basa carries the fish slot with dirty rice, charred poblano chutney, jalapeño crema, and pickled onion. Around the edges sit fried green tomatoes, hush puppies, duck wings, Southern egg rolls, tempura devilled eggs, cast-iron cornbread, and a crème brûlée brownie for dessert.

The menu reads as a kitchen that treats Southern as a working frame, not a costume. The reaches are specific — Nashville-style heat on the chicken, nduja in the grits, dirty rice under the fish, pepper vinegar at the table — and the small-plate side runs broad enough to feed a group without forcing every diner toward the same main. The drink list is treated with the same seriousness: seasonal cocktails alongside standards, draft beer, wine, a whiskey-and-bourbon section that the restaurant builds a recurring event around, and a no- or low-alcohol section that does real work rather than sitting as a courtesy. The 4-to-5 weekday window keeps the front of the night useful — half-price wine by the glass, six-dollar draft, fourteen-dollar classic cocktails — and it lands as a value move rather than a generic after-work stop because the food at that hour is the same food the kitchen runs at eight.

The other reason Union shows up in Ottawa conversation is the Staffroom — a basement bar reached through a bookshelf on the main floor, framed as the hidden layer of the same address. It is the move when a group wants the night to feel more tucked-away than the front dining room: cocktails and whiskey after dinner without leaving the building, the same drinks program one floor below the dinner crowd. The upstairs leans on communal seating that pushes a group out of its booth and into a louder, shared rhythm; the bookshelf entrance reads as theatre, but the bar behind it does the same work the upstairs program does, with a quieter setting and fewer tables.

Union Local 613 has been on Somerset Street West since 2012, and the things that have kept it useful are still on the menu now: a Southern-inspired kitchen that knows what it is doing, a drinks list built to share the weight, a calendar of weekday and late-night windows that lets a regular use the restaurant for more than one occasion, and a hidden basement that changes the shape of an evening without changing the operation. Chinatown's western edge sits a few blocks from the Bank Street crowd, which suits a restaurant that can answer a dinner reservation, a Wednesday whiskey hour, and a late-night sandwich run from the same kitchen.