Something is happening again at Le Cordon Bleu Ottawa

For a long stretch, Le Cordon Bleu Ottawa was easy to overlook. The school kept training cooks in its Tudor Revival mansion on Laurier Avenue East, but its restaurant, Signatures, opened only for occasional events and a summer terrace. To anyone outside the building, it could look like an institution idling.

That picture has changed. Two developments a year apart, read together, suggest the school is investing again in the things that connect it to the city's culinary life.

A restaurant back in service

The first came quietly. In September 2025, Signatures returned to regular dinner service on Friday and Saturday evenings, with a new executive chef, Isabelle Alexandre, a native of Marseille. The school marked the reopening on September 19 with a collaborative seven-course dinner, then handed the menu to Alexandre, whose cooking it describes as French classics reworked through the seasons.

One detail matters more than the menu. According to the restaurant, Signatures is cooked and served by a professional team chosen for their roles, rather than by students, though graduates of the school get priority when positions open. That makes it a working restaurant inside a school, not a classroom with tablecloths.

A Meilleur Ouvrier de France returns

The second development is newer. This fall, the school announced the return of Nicolas Jordan as its technical director.

Jordan holds the title of Meilleur Ouvrier de France, awarded in 2015 in the ice and ice cream category. The M.O.F. is a French state distinction earned through a long, demanding competition within a single trade, judged by juries that include past winners. Those who earn it are entitled to wear the distinctive tricolour collar on their chef's jacket. It is a recognition of craftsmanship rather than a restaurant rating, and it is awarded in specific disciplines, so his expertise is pastry and frozen desserts, not the whole of French cooking.

Still, the title is rare, and so is the path that comes with it. Jordan apprenticed under Alain Chartier, himself an M.O.F., and worked at Laurent, a two-Michelin-star restaurant in Paris. He first came to Ottawa in 2008 as a pastry instructor at the school, and won a bronze medal for ice carving at Winterlude during those years. Since then, he has taught pastry at Le Cordon Bleu Paris and led advanced programs at the École Nationale Supérieure de la Pâtisserie in France.

Beyond the students

What makes Jordan's return relevant outside the school is what he is expected to do. In a sponsored feature published by the school, Le Cordon Bleu says he will lead masterclasses for working chefs and event professionals, covering advanced techniques and the artistic side of the craft, in French, English or both. No dates have been announced.

If those classes happen at the level the school describes, they would give Ottawa's professional cooks a kind of hands-on instruction they rarely get without travelling for it.

What it adds up to

None of this transforms the school overnight. Signatures serves dinner two nights a week, and the masterclasses are a plan rather than a calendar. But a restaurant back in regular service, a chef with a clear point of view in its kitchen, and an M.O.F. returning with a mandate that reaches beyond the classroom point in the same direction.

For an institution that has trained cooks in this city for decades, it is a welcome sign of life.