You don’t hear too much from Ottawa-based Tex-Mex restaurant Lone Star Grill. But it’s been out there for almost 60 years, quietly setting records and creating new fans of classics such as Cervesa Corona, its famous Fajitas, and its house-made Chips and Salsa…
The Lone Star’s legendary, signature Fajitas…
‘The Lone Star’ was still a relatively hot, new proposition when I came to Ottawa, many years ago. It was also tied to the guys I worked for, in as much as my radio station shared corporate roots with the Ottawa Roughriders, the Canadian Football League team in Canada’s capital.
The resto was founded by partners, Roughrider stars Val Belcher and Larry Brune. Who were both native Texans. The story (at least partly apocryphal) is that they loved Ottawa and spent a lot time here. But both also missed the food they were brought up on. So they pooled their resources and opened the first Lone Star Café at the corner of Baseline Road and Fisher Avenue.
Location proved iconic
It was, in fact, in the heart of the suburbs, but right across the road from a big chunk of the Ottawa Greenbelt. Which, in turn, had originated a hundred years before as the Ottawa Experimental Farm – the basis of what has developed into the federal government’s central Ag and Food authority: Agricuture Canada.
Every spring, hundreds of across right across the road from the original Lone Star‘s huge picture windows, are planted with crop developers’ ‘experimental’ varieties. And folks who dine at the Lone Star can imagine they’re ‘deep in the heart of Texas’.
But the resto has much more to boast about than its unique locale and contribution to the culinary diver-sity of its home town.
Fast Facts
In 2024, the last year for which full and accurate figures are available…
- 1.8M people dined at the Lone Star.
Menu standout sellers included:
- 40,000 Shots of Tequila – making it Canada’s single largest restaurant consumer of Tequila.
- Uncounted thousands of killer Margaritas.
- 186,000 Coronas.
- 1.2.M fajitas – the resto’s signature dish – sold for dine-in and takeout. And…
- Truckloads of the resto’s house-made Salsa and Tortilla chips.
Now, you look at those numbers and you might imagine a huge barn of a place, open 24/7 – 360 days a year. But the numbers are actually for all 22 Lone Star locations, together. Eight of those are in Ottawa. But other locations are spread across the province of Ontario, from Windsor to Kingston (at the eastern end of Lake Ontario.
My take
The moral of this story is, never underestimate the power of food – to shape communities, migrate cultural phenomenae thousands of miles across continents, and create good will between cultural groups as diverse as Texans and Ottawans..
~ Maggie J.