There’s never a dull moment in Halifax’s food scene. The year 2024 brought more than its share of dining headlines to our coastal city, from a trawler’s haul of new waterfront restaurants to the closures of Salty’s, El Chino and Birch & Anchor, to a Haligonian (once again) reaching the final of Top Chef Canada. And 2025 is already shaping up to be another doozy.
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From a spate of changes coming to Halifax’s Hydrostone neighbourhood to new openings (and closings?) on Quinpool, in Dartmouth and beyond, there’s enough food and drink news to keep your plate full for a long time—and some of it’s right around the corner.
Here at The Coast, we’ve got you covered with seven new eateries to whet your appetite all year long, plus a little more:
Angélique French Café (6466 Quinpool Road)
Change is afoot at the corner of Quinpool and Beech Streets. In the former Taishan Asian Grocery, Angélique Chevolleau is renovating the space to open a proper patisserie. She’s calling it “a slice of Paris” in Halifax.
Chevolleau registered the cafe’s business name last August. Details are scarce at the moment, but her cafe has a website. The Coast has reached out to Chevolleau, but could not arrange an interview before publication. We’ll keep you posted with updates as they come.
Darty Brewing Co. (35 Portland Street)
After The Coast broke the news that Lake City Cider would be opening an offshoot brewery in 2025, now we have more details: Darty Brewing Co. is set to open this spring in the former Brightwood Brewery space on Portland Street. Shiny new brewing tanks are already filling the new backroom.
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Joining the new venture is Halifax brewer Adam Campbell, who has been leading the efforts at Revelry Beer Co.—the in-house brewing label of The Brewery by Quinns, which also provides beer to Quinn’s Arms and The Brown Hound—since 2022. A veteran of Halifax’s craft scene, Campbell has also brewed for Propeller Brewing Co. and worked for Alley Kat, Grizzly Paw and Blindman Brewing in Alberta. Last year, he won silver and bronze at the Canadian Brewing Awards for Revelry’s blonde ale and double IPA.
There’s a decent chance that the beer—or some of it, anyway—will be ready before the new taproom’s renovations are complete, so keep your eyes peeled on Darty’s Instagram for updates on where it will be pouring first. Expect a core of four to six beers once they’re up and running with seasonals added later.
Hop Scotch Dinner Club (3061 Gottingen Street)
Four years after the chef Steph Ogilvie shut down her Barrington Street restaurant and switched to pop-up dinners amid the COVID-19 pandemic and all its industry chaos, she’s found a new home—and this time, it’s in Halifax’s north end. The Hop Scotch Dinner Club opens Wednesday, Jan 8 in the former Jekyll & Hide, near the edge of the Hydrostone neighbourhood.
A finalist of Top Chef Canada’s eighth season, Ogilvie was the former chef de cuisine at the award-winning Chives Canadian Bistro (which occupied the Barrington Street space before Hop Scotch). It was while working at Chives that she started Hop Scotch with partner Brock Unger in 2018. At first, the two served tasting-menu dinners out of their home, cooking eight-to-twelve-course meals for friends and family.
“We had a little table that sat about six to eight people,” Unger told The Coast in 2020. “We just wanted to have, like, a sort of creative outlet that maybe we weren’t getting to explore as much at our jobs.”
It was with the encouragement of Chives owner Craig Flinn that Ogilvie took over the Barrington Street space for Hop Scotch in 2020.
“He really wanted to give us that opportunity to be able to have our own restaurant,” Ogilvie told The Coast at the time.
Hop Scotch moved out of Barrington Street two years later, returning to pop-up dinners all over town, from Bliss Caffeine Bar to Gio to the Mayflower Curling Club. Then, in March 2023, Ogilvie and Unger put their pop-up dinners on pause for another opportunity: To work at the famed Fogo Island Inn. Now back in town, the two are putting the finishing touches on Ogilvie’s latest venture. And judging by her New Year’s Eve tasting menu dinner—which sold out—there’ll be plenty of diners ready to line up for a table.
The Brown Hound Hydrostone (5545 Young Street)
The Hydrostone finally gets an English-style pub. According to a notice issued by Nova Scotia’s alcohol, gaming, fuel and tobacco division, the owners behind the Brown Hound have applied for a lounge license for a third Halifax location, destined for the space beside Salvatore’s Pizzaiolo Trattoria (in the former L K Yarns shop). Co-owners Paul Thomas and Scott Aitchison took over the building’s lease at the start of the month.
Speaking with The Coast, Aitchison says he and Thomas had been thinking “for a while” about bringing a pub to the north end neighbourhood and were waiting for the right spot. The two opened The Brown Hound on Agricola Street in 2018 and expanded to a second location on Ironstone Lane (behind the Halifax Brewery Market) in 2020. (Thomas also owns the Quinn’s Arms and The Brewery by Quinns—the latter of which is for sale.)
Aitchison says the new Brown Hound will be familiar to regulars of their other locations, albeit with a few menu additions thanks to the opportunities provided by a bigger kitchen.
“It’s a different building, but the same sort of game plan, you know?”
The new Brown Hound is slated to open in late April or early May.
The Commons on Portland (635 Portland Hills Drive)
Joanne and Adam McCullough know how to get a restaurant off the ground. The couple behind the Millstone Public House restaurants in Dartmouth, Bedford and East Hants have been serving up craft beer and cozy pub fare since moving back east from BC in 2015 with a few slabs of wood earmarked for a bartop. Four restaurants later, the McCulloughs have designs on another venture in Dartmouth: A “community pub” in Portland Hills. They’ve signed a lease for the former Finbar’s location—and while they’ve been renovating the space for months, the overall feel won’t stray too far from its predecessor.
“We’re not going to change a whole lot,” Adam says. “It’s pretty much set up and geared to go.”
The Commons on Portland was first teased in November and is slated for a February opening. Expect “elevated pub food,” McCullough tells The Coast.
“Everything will be handmade from scratch.”
Casa di Stefano (111 Cobequid Road)
If you want to do wood-fired ovens right, according to Maayan Harel, you’ve got to go to Naples. The president of Casa di Stefano—a soon-to-open pizzeria, bistro and bakery in Lower Sackville—has been dabbling with wood-fired pizzas for years, selling them out of his home-built backyard oven under the moniker The Burning Log until permitting hurdles forced him to stop.
“It was… not very legal from a food establishment point of view,” he jokes, speaking by phone with The Coast.
But it built him a clientele. And cemented a love affair with Neapolitan-style pizza. Soon, Harel and his business partners will take that devotion a step further, opening Casa di Stefano on Cobequid Road in the same plaza as MediTerra Kitchen. Harel envisions a space that goes well beyond the usual take-out pizza fare, offering sandwiches, calzones, pastries, baguettes, rolls, cookies and other baked goods—“anything that can get kissed by fire,” he says—all made in a wood-fired oven imported from Italy.
The aim, Harel tells The Coast, is for a dine-in restaurant that falls somewhere between fine dining and a standard take-out pizza joint.
“It’s going to be affordable, it’s going to be casual, it’s going to compete with [other take-out pizza] prices, but it’s a whole different level of ingredients,” he adds.
Like the oven at the heart of Casa di Stefano, the flour will be imported from Italy. (“It’s the Rolls Royce of pizza flour,” Harel says. “It’s very hard to get in Halifax.”) Harel and his partners have also been building relationships with local producers, including Ciro Comencini, who founded Roma Cheese after moving from Italy to Hants County.
Michal Balas, a former pastry chef at The Bicycle Thief, is another partner in the venture, along with her husband Nissim. Harel’s wife, Rita, rounds out the foursome and will handle the sourdough loaves, rolls, cookies and “much more.” Harel says he expects the restaurant will seat as many as 60 people at a time. The four are targeting an opening in March.
De la Dori (Queen’s Marque, 1741 Lower Water Street)
Okay, we teased this one last January—but we’re sneaking it in again, as it finally opened in late November. Down in the Queen’s Marque building and sandwiched between Peace by Chocolate and Sapori, this sushi-slash-cocktail bar offers a lunch takeout counter with poke bowls and maki rolls starting at $14. At night, it’s a cocktail bar serving late-night bites.
It’s owned by Freehand Hospitality—and not to be confused with the similarly named ToriDori (which opened last August), though the two restaurants do share the same ownership group, as well as a rear wall.
But despite De la Dori’s opening on Nov 26, there’s still a fair bit of unknown about the new sushi and poke bar: Its website doesn’t list opening hours. Nor do the bar’s Instagram or Facebook pages. (A Google business listing suggests the restaurant is open for lunch seven days a week and offers dinner service from Thursday through Saturday, but we’ve yet to confirm that.) We’ll let you know more when we can.
On the move and expanding
Frabjous Delights (2530 Agricola Street and 6070 Almon Street)
Ever since Inge Kiss and Marshall Parker opened their specialty foods and chocolate shop in a basement in Halifax’s north end, they would walk past the storefronts on Agricola Street and dream about one day making one theirs. Cue January 2025, and they’ve taken over the former Local Source Market near the corner of Agricola and Charles Streets.
“It’s pretty much the opposite [of how we started],” Kiss says, speaking by phone with The Coast. “We were literally in a basement that was kind of tucked away and very cozy. This is huge and vast and airy with high ceilings and double the space.”
Originally from Boston, the couple moved to Halifax in 2022 along with their business, Whim Chocolate—a small-batch label for the Belgian chocolate bark they made with fruit-and-nut combos ranging from gooseberry and chamomile to pineapple, lime and cachaça. They envisioned a store where they could sell their chocolates, alongside other hard-to-find odds and ends ranging from imported cheeses to European sweets. They plucked the name Frabjous from a Lewis Carroll poem—a “mash-up of the words fair, fabulous and joyous.”
Parker says the two were drawn to the north end by the “creative energy” of the neighbourhood, along with the number of independently-owned businesses. And they believe in the area enough that they’ve doubled down, opening another location in the newly-built Richmond Yards at the corner of Almon and Clifton Streets.
“I don’t know if other communities in and around Halifax are like this, but the north end is very supportive, and they shop local—and they support small businesses,” Kiss says. “They’re fierce about it, and it’s been so nice. We’ve built such a close relationship. A lot of customers, we know by name, and it’s just been a really wonderful experience to get to know the community.”
Chaii Samosa (793 Bedford Highway)
One year after Muntadhr Naji opened Chaii Samosa on Quinpool Road, the serial restaurateur behind Turbo Chicken and Charger Burger is opening a second location of his Indian-street-food-spot-meets-cafe. And this time, he’s bringing it to Bedford.
The Iraqi-born Naji has done it all since arriving in Halifax in 2009, from cutting hair to launching a wholesale bakery for other cafes. But even after getting three different restaurants off the ground, Naji couldn’t have predicted how quickly Haligonians would embrace his dream of a chai shop. Business has been “very good,” he says, speaking by phone with The Coast. “Very busy. It was something needed in Nova Scotia.”
The new Chaii Samosa will take over the former Mark’s Angels Catering space on the Bedford Highway near Mill Cove. It’s slated to open next week. And it isn’t the only change in Naji’s mini food empire: He tells The Coast that Charger Burger on Spring Garden Road will be moving to Quinpool, sharing the space with Turbo Chicken.
Jean’s Chinese Restaurant (516 Pleasant Street)
As first reported by Halifax ReTales’ Arthur Gaudreau, the longtime Spring Garden Road destination for Chinese food is set to take over the former Kim Feng Chinese Restaurant in Woodside, just down the road from the ferry terminal.
Jean’s owner Kong Jean told Saltwire in 2023 that he would be forced to move or close his perennial Best of Halifax favourite as the area around Spring Garden Road and Robie Street will soon be redeveloped to add four high-rise apartment/commercial towers.
This article appears in Dec 19, 2024 – Jan 31, 2025.