North & Navy
226 Nepean St., 613-232-6289,
northandnavy.com
Open:
Dining room closed due to COVID-19, takeout Wednesday to Sunday 4 to 8 p.m.
Prices:
dinners for four to six people at $85 and $115, plus items a la carte; delivery through Love Local Delivery, $5 or more, depending on distance
Five years ago, in the early days of North & Navy, I enjoyed a succession of treats both large and small.
Celebrating with out-of-towners, we tucked into a 46-ounce porterhouse steak, modelled on Italy’s iconic dish of Bistecca Fiorentina, which was our feast’s splurge-y, beef-alicious centrepiece. Bite-sized but still very appealing in their own right were North & Navy’s versions of cicchetti, the bar snacks of Venice that were a preamble to dinner. And then there were the mid-sized but stand-out house-made pastas that elevated humble ingredients to the point of luxury.
Had life in the spring of 2020 been more normal, I would have revisited North & Navy to see if the experience there still delivered wow-worthy Northern Italian-inspired food, served in a handsome, elegant setting by poised staffers.
But of course, like most of us, I’m housebound. And like all Ottawa restaurants, North & Navy, which cracked the 2018 Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants list, has shut its dining room since mid-March to help halt the spread of the novel coronavirus.
However, like scores of its peers, the Centretown restaurant remains open with skeleton staffing to prepare takeout and delivery orders. We had North & Navy to go last week, and while it didn’t, and couldn’t possibly, equal the thrill of enjoying chef-owner Adam Vettorel’s refined, from-scratch fare at his restaurant, our Friday night dinner was, like so many pandemic experiences, the next best thing.
This month’s take-out menu posted on North & Navy’s website offers about a dozen or so items from bread to pastas to tiramisu. North & Navy, like its fellow fine-dining restaurants Orto Trattoria, Stofa and Brassica, among others, offers family meals that bundle together courses and that’s the route we took.
The more expensive of North & Navy’s two family meals ($115) consisted of a half loaf of bread, endive Caesar salad, strozzapreti (a hand-rolled pasta not unlike cavatelli) with locally grown Le Coprin mushrooms, spaghetti pomodoro, beef short ribs, a side container of carrots, plus slices of tiramisu and cheesecake.
Billed to feed four to six, the meal filled up the five of us and left a fine, multi-course lunch for one the next day.
Ours was a dinner that, as well made as it was, comforted more than it dazzled. The only letdown was the spaghetti, which struck us as overly basic. But the other pasta was both more interesting and lusciously toothsome, and it better attested to the heights Vettorel can hit.
The course that generated the most excitement at our table might have been the endive radicchio salad, with its truly savoury Caesar dressing and pleasantly bitter notes that offset the richness of other dishes.
Hefty slabs of cheesecake and on-point tiramisu ended dinner on a crowd-pleasing note.
North & Navy’s fare arrived in premium take-out packaging and seemed to have degraded not too much despite a 15-minute trip in the car. Stapled to the paper bag was a thoughtful note that said the restaurant had taken all precautions regarding COVID-19 safety, and that its diners should wash their hands thoroughly after unpacking the meal.
With food to go, the restaurant also offers a selection of Italian and Canadian wines priced between $50 and $75.
Last week, Vettorel told me that North & Navy’s takeout business sells out on many nights, although there’s no predictability to it. “There’s no rhyme or reason, I feel like days of the week don’t exist anymore,” he said.
In addition to making pastas and salads to go for paying customers, Vettorel has begun offering free lunches once a week to front-line coronavirus workers at the Brewer arena assessment centre.
Vettorel has also been using his virus time to launch a podcast called At The Pass, in which he discusses Ottawa’s restaurant business. Last week, he speculated that COVID-19 will kill even some well-known and well-regarded Ottawa eateries. He added that he didn’t know if North & Navy would survive.
While I’m not saying that alarm or pity should dictate your meal choices, I would say there are good reasons beyond the simply satisfying food to order from North & Navy.
phum@postmedia.com