This beloved family-owned restaurant has thrived on the banks of the Gatineau River for 13 years with a talented team, from-scratch cooking and seasonal ingredients.

By any measure, The Village House in Wakefield is a success story. The family business — run by a husband and wife team — has been serving “upscale comfort food” for the past 13 years. Now, having groomed Liam Carey, a summer student turned sous-chef and current chef de cuisine, Mike Houle has been able to step back from full-time cooking duties to take on new projects such as a frozen food line, popups and catering. His wife, Sarah Swan, runs the front of house and serves when needed.

“I’m looking to work smarter, not harder,” Houle says. “We’ve been really fortunate with all our staff ever since we opened. And, then to have somebody like Liam come along — I couldn’t wait to get him groomed up. I would tell him, ‘One day, you will definitely take over. That was always kind of the goal, even though I didn’t tell him that eight years ago.”

Carey interjects with a laugh. “Actually, you did.”

Carey started working in the kitchen at The Village House in 2013 as a summer student. He was already enrolled in Montreal’s St. Pius X Culinary Institute and Houle sent him off to school with lots of training he didn’t have to relearn.

He then did stints at the Wakefield Mill and the now-closed Restaurant Harlow and Restaurant Cho in Montreal before Houle called to ask him to return to his hometown of Wakefield and take a senior sous-chef position at The Village House.

Owners’ early days
For his part, Houle moved to Ottawa from Sault Ste. Marie in 2003 and took a job at O’Connor’s, a big pub in Kanata where his brother’s neighbour was the general manager.

“It gave me time to get to know Ottawa and kind of choose where to work [next],” Houle says. “I had never lived in a bigger city. After a year at O’Connor’s, he went to work at Bistro 115 for a couple of years before the owners sold it to chef Steve Mitton, and I was part of the deal.”

He left Mitton’s Murray Street Bistro for a year to help a friend open a restaurant in Hull, but returned a year later and stayed until he left to open The Village House in 2012.

Swan, meanwhile, worked front of house in ByWard Market restaurants for most of her career except for a three-year stint out West. She worked at The Peak at Kicking Horse Mountain Resort — the highest restaurant in the country — and at Rob Feenie’s now-closed Lumière in Vancouver. She returned to Ottawa and worked at Social when chef René Rodriguez left to open Navarra. He hired her to follow him and run his new restaurant.

“I did that for two-and-a-half years,” says the affable Swan. After that, she returned to her hometown of Wakefield to work at the Wakefield Mill. “I was already living up here, so I took that job, and it was fun, but it was a big monster, with a lot of staff and a lot of challenges.”

At that point, Houle and Swan were a couple living in Wakefield and their friend Luigi Meliambro told them that the owner of Soupçon, a Thai restaurant on Chemin Riverside, the main drag in Wakefield, wanted to sell and that they should open their own place there.

“It didn’t take long to convince us,” Swan says of the heady time. “We flipped it [from Thai to upscale comfort food] in about six weeks. We liked the space and we didn’t have a lot of extra money so it was quick. We were just renting for the first couple of years and then we bought the building, too.”

Meliambro was in the restaurant business for a long time and served as an excellent mentor for the couple. And all in all, they can’t complain about their first 12 years.

“It’s gone well,” Swan says. “We’re still married, we have the young generation taking over, so we have all the key things that we really hoped would happen.”

A personal touch
Houle says the restaurant’s name — The Village House — encapsulates their vision for it. The village part implies their commitment to the community, and the house part suggests that they’ll treat you like a guest in their home.

“We’ve always been entertainers,” he says. “Even before we had the restaurant, we always had people over for dinner, so we just really wanted the name and the feel of the restaurant to feel like you’re coming to our house — to make it really personal.”

When you walk into the restaurant, you first see the large open-concept kitchen behind a counter with stools. It’s a warm, welcoming space with an exposed brick wall. Besides the bar, there are a few other tables, but most of the restaurant’s 25 seats are in the next room, full of windows revealing the pretty river across the street. A cosy patio fronts onto the street on the other side of the kitchen, and, in season, is full of trailing annuals in window boxes.

“I love the open concept,” Houle says. “Everybody asks us questions while we’re cooking, and they get to see everything, so I think it’s a unique experience for our clients. It’s like me cooking at home and everyone is all around the island. That’s the feel we’re going for.”

Houle’s menu is inspired by his French Canadian roots on his father’s side.

“I grew up with tourtières and slow cooking,” he says. “Growing up, there was a lot of farm-to-table without even realizing it. I wanted to bring that concept — really well-done upscale home cooking, with a little Italian because I grew up with heavy Italian [influences.] We do a lot of smoking and brining and curing. We started off really simple, but over the years, we’ve added new techniques to dishes.”

Asked about a dish that’s served the test of time, Houle quickly names the braised beef short rib, which is on the stove behind him during the interview.

“It’s usually served with some sort of pasta or gnocchi,” he says. “I tried to take it off the menu once and there was a riot. There are people who’ve been here 100 times, and they’ve had the short rib every single time.”

Houle says that everything is made in-house.

“If it’s on the menu, it’s made here,” he says, noting that if there’s a taco on the menu, they will have made the tortillas; if there’s ice cream, it’s made there.

For clientele, there’s steady support from the local community — something that’s necessary for a restaurant to run year-round in a small town.

“I’d say [our traffic] is 25 per cent local, maybe 50 per cent from the city and the other 25 per cent are tourists staying in Wakefield — [it’s] a great tourist destination,” Swan says.

Swan and Houle have tried adding lunch over the years, but in the summer of 2024, they settled on lunch on Saturdays and Sundays. Otherwise, they’re open for dinner Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday, giving the couple time to spend together with son, Cooper, 11.

The next gen
Carey has had his thumbprint on the menu for a couple of years, but Houle is always there to run things by.

“They’re very similar in their approach to food,” Swan says.

“We have all these amazing farms that are 10 or 15 minutes from here, and what they have really influences the menu,” Carey says. “We just sort of take all their ingredients — Juniper Farm, [Ferme] Pleine Lune and Le Coprin [mushroom growers] — and that’s how the menu comes together.”

North Slope is another farm they deal with, and Ferme aux Saveurs des Monts is their chicken supplier.

“They have impressive birds,” Houle says. “The wings look like legs,” Carey says.

“And they’re delicious,” Swan adds. “We do a chicken and ribs night every Wednesday, so we bring in their chicken, and oh my God, the wings are great.”

When asked to deal with allergies, the kitchen rises to the occasion.

“When they do the menu, they make sure whatever is on it can be modified to be gluten-free or vegan, because we’re going to get those requests,” Swan says.

“We always have a vegetarian main, and we make sure it’s vegan and it will almost always be gluten-free, too,” Carey says.

The future
In addition to running the restaurant, the couple is adding some things to their business.

“Mike’s doing more projects outside the restaurant,” Swan says, adding that they’ve co-ordinated and orchestrated catering, in- house dinner parties, small weddings and collaborations with event spaces. “One of those things — because the demand is there — is frozen foods. It started with tourtière, and now we have shepherd’s pie, and we added a short rib ragu, which is flying out fast now.”

“We also have our jarred products, like hot sauces and smoked tomato jam,” Houle adds. “One of my first dishes was a potato-wrapped shrimp and instead of cocktail sauce, I came up with this smoked tomato jam that just went perfectly. And now I sell it with the tourtière.”

They also plan on more special collaboration dinners with brewers and wineries. “We did a beer dinner for 40 people on the patio, and we had the brewer and Liam talk,” Swan says. “And we’ve been doing wine dinners for years.”

The Village House
759 Chem. Riverside, Wakefield
thevillagehouse759.com | 819.459.1445 | @thevillagehouse759