There are some restaurants you find because they sit on a busy road, with a giant sign and a parking lot full of cars. Others take a little more work.

Areeba’s Kitchen is one of the latter.

We were coming from Almonte, where we had spent the day by the Blakeney Rapids, and by the time we made our way back toward Ottawa we were getting pretty hungry. The drive took us through the industrial parks around the airport, with planes occasionally lifting into the sky in the distance. It wasn’t exactly the kind of setting that made you think you were about to sit down for a leisurely meal.

Then again, that was usually when things got interesting.

Areeba’s Kitchen is tucked into the Merivale industrial corridor at 70 Bongard Ave., Unit J. It isn’t far from 50 Two Sandwiches, one of the legendary sandwich spots we covered in the early days of Eat the Strip. The area is mostly warehouses and industrial units, the sort of place you drive through because you have somewhere else to be.

We pull up on a Saturday around 5:30 p.m., stuck in that awkward gap between lunch and dinner when you’re hungry enough for a proper meal but early enough that most restaurants still feel like they’re waiting for the evening to begin.

Areeba’s Kitchen feels a little different.

The space looks as though it has been converted from a garage, but it’s bright and airy, with green walls, photographs of nature and some lounge music playing quietly through the speakers. There are only five or six tables, giving the room an intimate feel, and in one corner is a collection of board games, including Snakes and Ladders. At the counter, a lineup of chutneys and hot sauces sits ready to be used, all made in-house. The whole place has a welcoming, homey quality to it, more like a comfortable kitchen you happen to be able to sit down in than a traditional restaurant dining room.

Two gentlemen greet us at the counter and we place our order. One is our server; the other, we soon find out, is Bilal, one half of the husband-and-wife team behind the restaurant. From the Pakistani side of the menu, we go with the beef biryani. From the Hakka section, we order chicken chow mein.

There is another business operating in the same building, too. An event hall is hosting a fashion show while we’re there, and Areeba tells us the space is also used for concerts, trade shows and all kinds of other events. It’s an unusual combination, but somehow it fits the place.

Before our food arrives, we’re asked about spice.

We say we want the real deal.

Bilal looks at us and asks if we’re sure.

We say yes.

I start with the chow mein. It’s exactly what I want from Hakka food. The egg noodles are cooked properly, the vegetables still have a satisfying crunch and there’s a distinct eggy flavour running through the dish. I’m particularly fond of the red chilies and peppers, which bring the heat we asked for without overwhelming everything else on the plate. It’s spicy, but it isn’t just spicy for the sake of being spicy; there’s plenty of flavour underneath it.

Then there’s the biryani.

The beef is remarkably tender, with pieces that have picked up a beautiful char. Danielle immediately notices the saffron and cardamom, which dominate the dish in a way that feels deliberate rather than heavy. There’s something about the biryani that reveals itself gradually. You take a bite and think you’ve figured it out, and then a few seconds later another spice appears. It’s the kind of dish that seems to sneak up on you, revealing a little more of itself as you keep eating. And for $13 for the chow mein and just $15 for the beef biryani, it’s hard to argue with the value, especially when both dishes come with the kind of portions and flavour that make you want to keep digging in.

And while we’re eating, it becomes easy to understand why Areeba’s Kitchen has started to build a following.

Areeba and Bilal, the co-owners, are both from Pakistani families. Bilal grew up in the Greater Toronto Area, although his family traces its origins back to Karachi, Pakistan. Areeba grew up in Lahore and moved to Canada in 2019. Long before there was a physical restaurant, though, there was Areeba’s Kitchen online.

She had already been sharing her cooking through YouTube, Instagram and blogging, building an audience around recipes and Pakistani food. She has more than 100,000 people in her Facebook group, along with a WhatsApp group and other online communities where people can learn from one another.

Opening a restaurant had always been a dream for her.

Areeba had also worked in restaurants before, so the idea wasn’t completely foreign, but turning that experience and her online following into a business of her own was another matter entirely. For Bilal, meanwhile, his professional background was in animation.

At the beginning of 2025, the restaurants where Areeba had been working closed. Suddenly, there was a choice to make. They could find another job and continue along the safer path, or they could take the opportunity to try something completely different.

“We can get another job, or this is a golden opportunity to take a leap of faith,” Bilal recalled.

They chose the leap.

They started Areeba’s Kitchen as a small catering operation in May 2025. From there, they offered catering and a weekly tiffin service, particularly for students. It was a small beginning, with the business operating out of a kitchen and gradually building a customer base.

Then, in December 2025, they bought the current space.

Since then, things have been moving.

“It’s going very well,” Bilal told us.

The growth hasn’t happened overnight. Areeba says it started slowly, helped along by the audience she had already built online. People who knew her from Instagram began showing up in person, and gradually the customer base grew.

Now, they have people making the trip from across the city.

“We have customers that come all the way from Orleans,” Bilal says.

It’s a good distance to travel for a meal, but Areeba’s Kitchen isn’t really built around the idea that you should simply come in, eat and leave.

That seems to be the larger vision.

Areeba talks about wanting to build a kitchen where everybody feels comfortable. If you’re bored, she says, you can talk to her or Bilal. They have hosted local comedy events and even a lipstick-making workshop. The food is part of it, but so is everything happening around the food.

There’s something particularly fitting about that when you look at how Areeba learned to cook in the first place.

She was the only female child in her family and spent a lot of time with her mother, watching her cook. She remembered sitting and watching from the counter, absorbing what was happening in the kitchen and looking forward to getting involved herself.

Many of those recipes had been passed down through the family.

Areeba had started teaching cooking classes from her home in Lahore after graduating in Pakistan. What started online became a community of people sharing recipes, asking questions and learning from one another.

Now, that community has followed her into a physical space.

The idea of family comes up repeatedly when we talk to her.

This is a family business, but Areeba seems to mean something broader when she talks about family. She wants the restaurant to eventually have furniture that feels more like a dining room than a commercial space. She wants people to walk through the door and forget, at least for a little while, that they’re in a restaurant.

She wants them to feel like they’ve walked into a family home.

“If you come regularly, we’re going to start talking to you like you’re family,” she says.

It’s a simple idea, but you can already see it taking shape.

The food is at the centre of it, of course, but the menu itself reflects the kind of kitchen they’re building. There are several different sections, including Pakistani and Hakka offerings, and the menu is constantly evolving. The biryani, wraps and chow mein are among the best sellers, but Areeba says temporary dishes also appear from time to time, giving them room to experiment and giving regular customers something new to come back for.

The catering menu, for now, is focused entirely on Pakistani food and is available through their Instagram and website.

But Areeba has bigger ambitions than simply expanding the menu.

She wants to grow the business and eventually have more kitchens, while continuing to explore different kinds of food. For her, being a chef means having the freedom to cook and create rather than being boxed into a single definition of what the restaurant should be.

It makes sense when you hear her talk about food. For Areeba, cooking seems to be less about preserving one rigid definition of what belongs on a plate and more about sharing what she knows, teaching others and creating something people can gather around.

We finish off the chow mein and biryani as the fashion show continues next door.

Outside, the industrial park is still doing what industrial parks do. Cars move through the lot. Planes continue climbing into the evening sky. There’s nothing particularly glamorous about the surroundings.

But that’s kind of the point.

Some of Ottawa’s most interesting food experiences have never been about the neighbourhood they’re in. They’re about the people who decided to open a little kitchen somewhere that made sense for them, then slowly built something around it.

Areeba’s Kitchen is still young. The owners are upfront about that. They’re growing slowly, figuring things out as they go and changing the menu along the way.

But there’s already something here that feels bigger than a restaurant.

Areeba started by teaching people how to cook from behind a screen. Now she has a physical kitchen where people can eat the food, meet her, attend an event, play a board game and, eventually, become one of the regulars she will start treating like family.

That might be the real ambition behind Areeba’s Kitchen.

Not just more tables or more locations, but a community.

And for a little restaurant tucked away in an industrial corridor near the airport, that feels like a pretty good place to start.