We Weren't Done
When Caroline Murphy and Emma Campbell decided to open a second restaurant, its name was almost pre-ordained. DUKES’ moniker comes from putting your “dukes up” and fighting, which the two women have been doing since they decided to open their first place — Corner Peach — in 2019, when they were both just 34 years old. It was also just 14 months before the pandemic shut the city down.
The theme of change has been a constant for Murphy and Campbell, who were faced with opening and closing during the pandemic. The practical pair decided to open a store in their space instead of trying to run a part-time restaurant that opened and closed at governmental whim. Instead they sold pastries, coffees and bottles to go. They also did takeout food, picked up from their back door.
Today, they run Corner Peach as it was originally intended: An evening bistro, but they also offer lunch. They liked the “store” concept so much that when the adjoining space became available, they leased it, too, and opened The Corner Store, which is a lunch counter featuring their legendary sourdough bread and other baked goods. The same space also has a retail operation with many foods they use in their restaurant prep and it has the bottle shop and a fridge for take-home meals.
“Since we were only open for a year before the pandemic hit, it influenced us a lot, because all of a sudden, we had to constantly switch and problem-solve. We weren’t done,” Murphy says. “In the long run, it probably helped us, because we had to let go of these staunch ideas that we had, and just do what worked and what we enjoyed.”
An example of it helping: With the store next door, Murphy can now order in bulk from farmers and whatever they can’t use in the restaurant gets turned into baked goods, salads or soups for the store.
“I’m very proud of how little waste we have,” she says. “We really try to use everything.”
When the space where DUKES is now became available because chef Briana Kim closed her restaurant called Alice, they felt it made sense for them to expand again.
“People ask us to do brunch [at Corner Peach] all the time, but switching over the kitchen from brunch to lunch to dinner is too much,” Murphy says. “Brunch takes up a lot of resources. So now we have a dedicated brunch-and-lunch place, and we use the bakery [in the back of The Corner Store] to make all our bread. It’s just another thing that all works together.”
They admit that they set DUKES up in such a way that they don’t have to be as hands-on as they are at Corner Peach.
“We set it up to let it grow on its own, a little bit more than we did with Corner Peach,” Campbell says.
“Corner Peach is really based around seasonal food, and everything's always changing,” says Murphy, who serves as self-taught executive chef for all three places. “When we get something in, we ask ourselves, ‘How would we want to eat this?’ So it's always changing. We obviously have some core menu items and some core philosophies. Sometimes we'll take an old dish and make it new again. But, with DUKES, it's very much a set menu with all of our old favourites — very nostalgic food. We have some great employees there who are running it. One of our chefs who was running lunch at Corner Peach is now running the kitchen there.”
“We’re mostly delivery people at this point — running things back and forth,” Campbell says. “And there’s a lot more office work now, too.”
Food philosophy
“We just love eating in general, and eating out,” Murphy says. “Long before we were working in restaurants, we were eating in them. Whenever we come up with a dish, we ask ourselves what we want to eat and what we feel is missing in Ottawa.”
“Caroline also has a lot of family recipes,” Campbell says. “Classics that her grandmother made or her mom made.”
Murphy’s father is from a large family in New Brunswick and that’s where her baking and canning roots come from. Her mom’s family were French Canadian, with eight children, so she grew up eating roasts and having big family gatherings on that side.
What shows up on the menu also depends on what the farmers are growing at the time.
“At the end of the day, we want to showcase seasonal products and not overpower what we’re trying to show off,” Campbell says.
“Nothing beats a fresh apple or a warm tomato with salt and olive oil, so I try to let the ingredients speak for themselves,” Murphy says. “My grandparents lived in the Pontiac region, so we had access to all the farm stands on the way there.”
She was especially happy when her former Manx colleague and now farm supplier Terramor Farm (see story on page 49) agreed to grow a particular eggplant she wanted. “That was a cool collaboration.”
Corner Peach has always been open Wednesday through Saturday from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. They’ve recently added Tuesday night in hopes of making it an industry night. Dubbed “Hot & Fresh Tuesday Nights,” it features a small plates menu and a corkage fee of $15 for any of the wines from The Corner Store.
Founders’ foundations
Murphy didn’t go to culinary school — instead, she earned a journalism degree from Concordia University in Montreal, and she started her career working in public relations in Toronto, but she soon realized she didn’t want to work in an office. She had worked in restaurants throughout her university studies, so she moved back to her hometown of Ottawa and started her hands-on culinary education. She has had stages at Vin Papillon in Montreal, and at Noma in Copenhagen and she’s worked at some of Ottawa’s best kitchens, including Black Cat Bistro with Trish Larkin, The Manx and Glebe Meat Market (to learn butchery.) She ran the kitchen at Town for a bit and also worked at Chez Edgar, Soif Bar à Vin and Supply & Demand. She also worked front-of-house at Les Fougères, which she says was very influential on her as a chef.
“I love it,” she says of her work — so much so she spends her vacations learning more about it. She recently spent the one summer week they close their restaurants staging at Four Horsemen, a Michelin-starred restaurant in Brooklyn, N.Y.
Campbell is also from Ottawa and the two met in high school. She studied other things, such as cabinet-making and fashion, and had restaurant jobs on the side. Eventually she asked herself what she really wanted to do and restaurants won out. She was once the manager of Oz Kafé and was managing Supply & Demand when she decided to open Corner Peach with Murphy.
The space
Before they moved in, Corner Peach was an Indian grocery store with a small kitchen area, possibly for store-made samosas. During their renovations, they kept discovering architectural gems, such as the tin ceiling, which they roughed up and now serves as a focal point, and exposed brick that now serves as a backdrop for their long bar, festooned with cheery turquoise bar stools.
“We’d be working and we’d catch a glimpse of something and say ‘Oh no, now we have to do more work to save this,’” Campbell says.
They had to build a subfloor and add bathrooms to the space at Corner Peach, while the space at DUKES had been a restaurant before (The Rex before it was Alice.) Ironically, the kitchen at Corner Peach was better outfitted than the one that used to house a restaurant in some respects, maybe because Alice concentrated on fermentation and didn’t have a large stove.
“It’s a simple design at DUKES — we didn’t want to do too much and we wanted a pretty quick renovation,” Campbell says. “There was a hood, which is usually the main expense when you’re trying to build a kitchen, so that was a win for us.”
They redid the banquettes and bought some vintage wickerback chairs and bar stools that match despite being newly made, and they added some appliances in the kitchen.
What’s in The Corner Store
The store features some actual vintage wallpaper they found and applied together.
“This was a real test of our friendship,” Murphy says. “We had to paint the glue on and everything. It was really old [wallpaper].”
They also had to add a bathroom to the store because they often use the space for a private table for 10 at night when they have big groups.
“It adds a little bit of extra movement to the restaurant. People can choose family-style options if they like.”
For the products, they carry many items made by their friends or the items they use in their restaurant dishes.
“Or there are things we have trouble finding, and once we do, we start carrying them,” Murphy says.
The Corner Store’s bottle selection leans toward more natural or funky wines, with a big contingent of Canadian wines that aren’t available at the LCBO.
From its long counter, it sells sourdough, focaccia, donuts, little salads, sandwiches and small cakes.
Today, the three operations employ 35 people. Campbell and Murphy still take on a large share of the workload to make sure their employees have decent work-life balance.
And they swear they both still love what they do.
Corner Peach
802 Somerset St., W., Ottawa
cornerpeach.com | @cornerpeach
DUKES
40 Adeline St., Apt. 1, Ottawa
dukesottawa.com | @dukesottawa
