Colonnade Pizza on Carling Ave isn't trying to impress you with a wood-fired aesthetic or a rotating small-plates menu. It's doing something more durable: keeping a 1967 recipe alive, largely unchanged, because the recipe is right. Founded by Lebanese-Canadian immigrant Kalil Dahdouh, Colonnade is one of the clearest expressions of Ottawa-style pizza in the city — a regional style shaped by the Lebanese diaspora that settled here, producing pies meant to be eaten with a fork and knife, layered with toppings tucked under a crispy, thick mantle of brine-salted brick cheese sourced from Oak Grove Cheese Factory in Southwestern Ontario. Not mozzarella. Brick. That distinction matters more than it sounds: the result is a richer, saltier, chewier cheese pull with a texture that holds up to the sweeter, thicker sauce underneath. Three people in the world know the exact formula for that sauce and that dough. That's not marketing copy — that's just the reality of a family operation that has outlasted most of Ottawa's restaurant history.
The pizza is the primary reason to be here, and context matters when you eat it. The Carling Ave location at Fairlawn Centre is scrupulously clean — the kind of clean that signals a kitchen operating with discipline, not just for show. If you branch off the pizza, the chicken brochette and Italian salad have genuine advocates among regulars, and the club sandwich has a quiet following. But you're not coming to Colonnade for the club sandwich. You're coming because the cheese browns differently here, because the crust has a specific density you can't replicate elsewhere in the city, and because Ottawa Citizen critic Peter Hum called this an iconic Ottawa brand in 2024 — and he wasn't being generous.
The practical move: order a pizza as your anchor and let the kitchen's well-kept secrets do the work. If you're coming with someone skeptical of the fork-and-knife format, lean into it — this is a regional style with a legitimate history, not an affectation. Takeout holds reasonably well but loses the cheese-at-peak-temperature advantage, so eat in when you can. Price level puts this squarely in the accessible range, which means there's no reason to wait for a special occasion.
