Walk west on Somerset Street this fall and you'll pass Casa Verde Latin Kitchen at 765 Somerset, serving out of a dining room that belonged to Lola's Kitchen a few months ago. Keep walking and you'll find Lola's Kitchen again, this time at 826 Somerset, cooking in a space that was Babar before that, and St. Elsewhere before Babar. Two blocks the other direction, a chef named Teegavarapu Sarath Mohan is two seasons into running Kozhi out of 820 Somerset, a fried chicken concept he built after a decade of kitchens in a Kanata strip mall, an east-end business park, and Ek Bar on Preston Street.
None of these operators poured a new kitchen this year. They walked into somebody else's hood vents, somebody else's grease trap, somebody else's walk-in cooler, and started cooking. That's the actual story of Somerset Street in 2026: not how many restaurants opened, but how few of them had to build from scratch to do it.
The Chain of Storefronts
Restaurant kitchens are expensive to build and expensive to remove. A commercial hood system, a grease interceptor, three-compartment sinks, walk-in refrigeration: these things get left behind more often than they get torn out. On a strip like Somerset, that means the fastest way into business isn't an empty shell, it's somebody else's built-out kitchen.
Here's how that's played out on the ground this year:
| Address | What was there | What's there now |
|---|---|---|
| 765 Somerset St. W. | Lola's Kitchen | Casa Verde Latin Kitchen (opened mid-June) |
| 826 Somerset St. W. | Babar, formerly St. Elsewhere | Lola's Kitchen (moved in June) |
| 820 Somerset St. W. | — | Kozhi (opened July 15) |
| 653 Somerset St. W. | — | Instant du Palais |
| 690 Somerset St. W. | Sushi 88, closing after 23 years | staff moving to Izakaya Shingen on Bank Street |
| 625 Somerset St. W. | Jadeland | business and property listed for sale |
Look at the middle two rows again. Lola's Kitchen didn't close, it traded up, taking the bigger footprint that Babar left behind after its final service in mid-May. Casa Verde didn't open in a vacant storefront, it took over Lola's old spot the same month. That's not two unrelated openings. That's one storefront's exit becoming another business's expansion, becoming a third business's entry point, inside of about six weeks.
Why the Biggest Space on the Street Took the Longest
Compare that pace to what happened at 700 Somerset, the corner building that housed the Yangtze Restaurant and Dining Lounge for more than 40 years. The Yangtze served Cantonese cuisine since the early 1980s, ran a lower-level banquet hall that could seat 70 people for weddings and birthdays, and occupied roughly 4,800 square feet on each of its two floors. When it closed in November 2024, Chinatown BIA executive director Yukang Li has said it left a real hole in the neighbourhood, especially coming a couple years after another marquee restaurant, Oriental Chu Shing, had already closed at 691 Somerset.
The building sat empty for well over a year. It wasn't until early 2026 that Chris Xie confirmed he'd take over the space with a new Chinese restaurant, a deal that took this long partly because a space that size doesn't turn over the way a single storefront does. Fitting a new concept into 9,600 square feet across two floors with a banquet hall built for 70 is a different proposition than moving a taco counter into a vacated dining room. The small storefronts on Somerset changed hands in weeks. The building built for weddings took over a year to find its next tenant.
The Cuisine Mix Is Widening, Not Just Turning Over
What's moving into these spaces isn't a like-for-like replacement of the businesses that left. Li has pointed out that the mix on the street is broadening, with Latin American and African kitchens now sitting next to the Chinese, Vietnamese and Thai restaurants that have anchored Somerset for decades. Casa Verde brought Latin American cooking into a storefront that had cycled through Filipino and plant-based concepts. Instant du Palais, a West African eatery that's an offshoot of a Toronto restaurant of the same name, opened at 653 Somerset.
Mohan's decision to bring Kozhi to Chinatown says something similar from the operator's side. Before scouting the location, he didn't think of Chinatown as a particularly popular destination for Ottawa's restaurant-going crowd. He's spent the past decade cooking in a Kanata strip mall, an east-end business park, and on Little Italy's Preston Street at Ek Bar, until leaving that kitchen last February. Chinatown wasn't the obvious next move. Now it's where he's building an upscale, globally inspired fried chicken concept, and he's said flatly that he loves the location.
Two Long-Timers Are Leaving as the Newcomers Arrive
The turnover isn't only additive. Sushi 88 at 690 Somerset announced on Instagram that it's closing after 23 years, with its staff moving over to Izakaya Shingen on Bank Street. And a few doors down, the business and property for Jadeland, a nearly three-decades-old Chinese restaurant at 625 Somerset, are currently listed for sale.
Those two exits matter because they're not struggling storefronts changing hands after a short run. They're two of the street's longer-tenured names stepping away in the same year that new operators are moving in fast enough to fill each other's kitchens within weeks. Somerset is gaining new energy and losing institutional memory in the same stretch of blocks, at the same time.
What's Still Coming
Not every property on the street has found its next chapter yet. The lot at 818 Somerset, formerly home to Mekong Grocery, is in the early stages of redevelopment more than two decades after a fatal fire destroyed the building in April 2005. Li has confirmed the plan includes residential apartments with commercial space at street level, though he hasn't said yet which businesses will move in or when construction will wrap. It's a slower-moving project than anything else on this list, and a reminder that not every gap on Somerset gets filled by a restaurant walking into an existing kitchen. Some gaps take twenty years and a full redevelopment plan.
This Weekend Is the Best Time to Walk It
If you want to see all of this at street level, the timing lines up. The Ottawa Chinatown Mid-Autumn Night Market runs September 25 through 27 on Somerset Street West between Bronson Avenue and Bell Street, which puts its final hours on the same block where Casa Verde, Lola's Kitchen, Kozhi and Instant du Palais have all opened this year. It's a different event from the larger night market Chinatown runs in late May, smaller in scope and built around the Mid-Autumn Festival rather than a summer street fair, but it closes out the same stretch of sidewalk that's seen more storefront turnover in the past few months than most Ottawa commercial strips see in a couple of years.
Somerset Street isn't quieter or louder this year than it's been before. It's the same length of sidewalk doing what it's always done, just faster: businesses trading spaces instead of building new ones, cuisines stacking on top of each other instead of replacing one another cleanly, and a couple of long-running names stepping aside right as a wave of new ones walks in.
If you're weighing what a stretch like Somerset Street means for property in West Centretown, from the pace a commercial space actually turns over at to what that says about long-term demand on a strip like this, that's the kind of read Serge and the team at The Papineau Group build a conversation around. Book a Discovery Call when you're ready to talk it through.
