Good food, cut fresh, every single day.
Claire Hutton opened The Daily Slice in the spring of 2018 after spending four years as a prep chef at a farm-to-table bistro in Stratford, Ontario. She came back to Ottawa with a secondhand Berkel slicer, a list of suppliers she trusted, and a very specific idea of what a neighbourhood deli should feel like: somewhere you could walk in on a Tuesday morning, pick up something genuinely good for lunch, and maybe grab a jar of something interesting for the weekend. The space on Hintonburg's Wellington Street West was a former hardware store, and the original pressed-tin ceiling is still up there if you look.
The first year was a learning curve. Claire started with six sandwiches on the board and a deli case that was half-empty most afternoons because she hadn't figured out the ordering rhythm yet. By the second summer, she'd worked out a system: Tuesday morning is charcuterie selection day, Thursday is when the new prepared dishes go in, and the soup goes on the stove every Monday and Thursday at 7am. The bread arrangement with the bakery two streets over started as a casual conversation and turned into a six-days-a-week delivery that both sides now depend on. The pantry section grew slowly, one product at a time, each one tasted before it went on the shelf.