You’ll never guess which Ottawa restaurant made OpenTable’s Top 100 list

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The good news: DreamLand Cafe, a casual, fun pasta eatery on Preston Street cracked this year’s OpenTable list of the top 100 Canadian restaurants.

The bad news: the list misspells Ottawa as “Ottowa.”

“Some lists are decided by critics, but not OpenTable’s Top 100 — this one is driven by diners,” says the webpage. “See this year’s top-ranked spots based on insights and reviews from verified OpenTable users just like you.”

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OpenTable is a reservation service and app that many restaurants use to manage bookings, and which diners use to nab reservations.

In comparison, six Ottawa restaurants made this year’s Canada’s 100 Best restaurants list, which was unveiled in May and which includes input from restaurant and food writers including myself. That list included Riviera, Atelier, Arlo, Supply and Demand, North & Navy, and Buvette Daphnée, which closed for several weeks this summer due to staffing upheaval and problems with its celebrity chef but later re-opened.

All of these restaurants, to varying degrees, are fine-dining restaurants. Atelier, for example, is the restaurant of chef Marc Lepine, a two-time winner of the Canadian Culinary Championship, and it serves a deluxe 40-course tasting menu.

But DreamLand, which opened in 2018, is much more casual. My Ottawa Citizen review lauded DreamLand as an unassuming eatery that kept its pasta dishes “fresh, simple and flavourful.”

The OpenTable webpage elaborates that its list was “generated from over 1 million verified OpenTable diner reviews and dining metrics from Oct. 1, 2023 to Sept. 30, 2024.

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“Restaurants with a minimum threshold of diner reviews were considered and evaluated by a compilation of unique data points, including diner ratings, the percentage of five-star reviews, the number of alerts set, the percentage of reservations made in advance, percentage of capacity and direct searches. Metrics were weighted to comprise an overall score, used to rank the list,” says the page.

Ultimately, the 100 restaurants on the OpenTable list were not ranked 1 to 100, but are shown in alphabetical order.

Not all restaurants use OpenTable as their reservation platform. Of the six restaurants feted on the Canada’s 100 Best list, Riviera, Arlo, Atelier and North & Navy use OpenTable. But Supply and Demand and Buvette Daphnée use Resy instead, and as a result, they would not have been eligible for the OpenTable list.

In 2022, Riviera was the sole Ottawa eatery on OpenTable’s Top 100 list.

OpenTable releases various, more specialized lists several times a year. For example, in September it released a list of Canada’s best restaurants for solo dining. That list included the Ottawa eateries Cocotte Bistro, Play Food & Wine, Anabella’s Kitchen & Lounge, Gitanes and Grounded Kitchen.

OpenTable’s May 2024 list of best Canadian restaurants for outdoor dining included Arlo, Bar Lupulus and Social.

DreamLand is fine for what it is, and I’d happily grab a weeknight dinner there. I did include it on my list of red-sauce joints for Joe Biden to check out when he was in Ottawa in 2023. But would it make my list of Canada’s top 100 restaurants? I don’t think so.

What do you think?

phum@postmedia.com

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