Bistro Boreal

This is a very nice place with very good food. I come to this museum often and enjoy the food at Boreal. A little snobby Chef and personnel but still a nice experience. Very consistent too. Museum members enjoy a 10%discount.

The restaurant at the Museum of Civilization used to be the Café du Musée. It was in one of the administrative buildings and had a beautiful view of the river. Trouble was, nobody found their way there. It was like the private dining room for museum administrators. Now they have moved into the main building — beside the coffee shop with a patio on Laurier and re-​branded as Café du Musée.
First off, I would never have thought of this place without Ottawa’s real food expert, Anne de Brisay. Check out her
blog.
We went for a ‘dress-​up’ lunch on a beautiful summer day. I called ahead but it was not necessary. The place was not exactly swamped.
Service was excellent. A very attentive young man who knew the menu well (in English and French) and made some excellent wine recommendations.
The interior is evocative of the stone/​steel/​undulating riverbanks as walls theme that the rest of the museum enjoys. It worked. Nice, modern clean lines. It didn’t feel like you were eating at the family snack bar, even though the Imax theatre was 50 yards away.
The menu could be called scaled-​down fine dining (?) Farm to table, local ingredients, extremely well prepared by a chef of some skill (formerly of Café Henry Burger, I understand).
Bread was excellent — a couple of different kinds — one was a dried cranberry thingy (a bit sweet for me), the other was a whole wheat with just a hint of molasses.
I tried the cauliflower and oka cheese soup. Delightful and creamy. Great balance of flavours. Oka (for foreign readers) is Canada’s version stinky but good-​tasting local cheese.
Instead of a large main course, I had the east coast crab cake. it was a good sized cake of smoked salmon and shrimp on a purée of celeriac. Very nice and just right for lunch.
My husband had the arugula, goat cheese, and cranberry salad. Three ingredients, very tasty. His main was the bison with chanterelles and fingerling potatoes. I tried a bit and it seemed nice but I am not a bison fan.
Good espresso and crème brulée trio to finish. Best of the trio was the chocolate, though being chocolate probably violates some crème brulée code.
Would definitely go back when feeling spendy.