The Green Door opened in Ottawa East in the late 1980s and has operated as a pay-by-weight vegetarian buffet continuously since, through every dietary trend and counter-trend the intervening decades produced. The kitchen never required defending through novelty. It defended itself through quality — scratch-made curries with the depth of dishes that were assembled that morning, baked goods that come out of an oven rather than a supplier's freezer, grain salads built from real grains cooked by someone who knows when they're done.
At roughly $3.40 per 100 grams, a substantial and genuinely nourishing meal arrives at a price that would be considered excellent even if the food were mediocre. It isn't mediocre. The selection changes daily, which means regulars find something different each time, and the kitchen's commitment to cooking everything from scratch means the rotation is limited by what's seasonal and available rather than by what's already been batch-produced.
A city institution that has earned every year of its operation. Ottawa's most dependable cheap lunch, and one of the few long-running vegetarian restaurants in Canada that has never needed the vegetarian label to do the work of justifying the food.
