Two Decades On, the Brassica Banoffee Pie Reaches Its End

The Brassica banoffee pie — a $12 dessert that has survived a fire, a pandemic and one change of address — is losing its last home, with the Ottawa Citizen reporting that Brassica on Richmond Road is closing. For most people that reads as another restaurant notice in a city that gets plenty of them. For a certain kind of Westboro regular, it reads as a dessert obituary.

Chef Arup Jana has been putting that pie in front of Ottawa diners since the early days of Allium, the Holland Avenue restaurant he ran from 2004 until 2019. When he opened Brassica in January 2020, according to Ottawa Magazine, the question he kept fielding wasn't about the menu or the room. People wanted to know whether the banoffee pie was coming with him.

It did. It stayed on the list for six more years, in a dining room of roughly 50 seats, priced at $12 while mains climbed to $38. No date for a final service has surfaced in coverage beyond the Citizen's report, and no reason has been made public. If you have a slice owed to you, that's the practical detail that matters most.

What Made the Brassica Banoffee Pie a Landmark

Banoffee is a British invention and a fairly plain one on paper: bananas, thick toffee, cream, a biscuit base. It doesn't photograph well and it doesn't sound clever. Its whole appeal is that it tastes like something from a childhood you may not have actually had. Reviewing Brassica in February 2025, Ottawa Citizen critic Peter Hum called it a magic dessert and noted it had been a holdover from Allium's earliest days.

That's the unusual part. Signature dishes usually die with the restaurant that made them. This one moved neighbourhoods, changed buildings, and kept its name and its price point through two very different economies.

How a Fire on Holland Avenue Led to Richmond Road

The March 2019 Blaze That Ended Allium

Allium ran for about 15 years before a fire tore through the Holland Avenue building in March 2019, ending it. Jana had been cooking in Ottawa well before that — he was at Geraldo's in New Edinburgh in 2003, where the Citizen's then-critic Anne DesBrisay described his cooking as "sure-handed and appealing." Losing a room you've run for a decade and a half is normally where a career quietly stops.

A January 2020 Opening, Then Six Weeks

Instead, Brassica opened on Jan. 25, 2020, in the former Vittoria in the Village space at 309 Richmond Rd. Roughly six weeks later, the pandemic shut Ontario dining rooms. Capital Current reported at the time that Jana and co-owner Maggie Muehlen closed the doors less than two months after opening. Almost no new restaurant in Canada absorbed a hit that badly timed and came back.

What $50 Tuesdays Bought You

By last year the format had settled into something generous for the price bracket: appetizers at $18 to $22, mains at $32 to $38, a three-course Tuesday prix fixe at $50, a Wednesday tapas list running $9 to $24, cocktails at $16 and bottles from $50. Put beside a $50 tasting-menu price anywhere downtown, that Tuesday deal was one of the better-value seats west of Bronson.

Why Ottawa Keeps Losing Rooms Like This

A 50-seat independent has almost no margin to absorb shocks. Fill it twice on a Friday and you've served 100 covers — that is the ceiling, no matter what rent, food costs or wages do. Ottawa's independents have spent the last few years handling pandemic debt repayment, sharp grocery inflation and a downtown office population that never fully returned. Chains can spread those costs across dozens of locations. A single Westboro room cannot.

How to Get Your Last Slice

If the Brassica banoffee pie is on your list, treat the window as short rather than assuming there's a farewell month. A few things worth doing:

• Phone the restaurant directly instead of relying on a booking app — closing dates rarely reach third-party platforms in time.
• Spend any gift cards now. Ontario rules stop most gift cards from expiring, but that protection is close to worthless once a business shuts and stops honouring them.
• Check whether deposits on any booked group dinners are refundable, and get the answer in writing.
• Ask what happens to the pie. Chefs with a signature this durable often turn up somewhere else.

Can You Make It at Home?

Banoffee is one of the few restaurant desserts a home cook can genuinely approximate. It needs no oven work beyond a pressed crumb base, no tempering, no piping skill. The variables are the toffee and the ripeness of the bananas, and the difference between a good version and a great one is mostly patience. It won't be the same. It will cost you a few dollars a slice instead of $12.

Watch the restaurant's own channels and local food writers for the final date, because that's where it will land first. And if Jana surfaces at a new address — he's rebuilt once already, from a burned-out building into a room that opened weeks before the world closed — the pie is the thing to look for on the menu.