North & Navy
226 Nepean St., 613-232-6289, northandnavy.com
Open: Monday to Friday, 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., 5 to 10 p.m., Saturday 5 to 10 p.m.
Prices: small appetizers $3-4 each, small pastas and salads $8-12, main courses $24-28
Access: steps to entrance
If you equate Italian food with tomato sauce, North & Navy should make you reconsider.
I’ve eaten my way through much of the concise yet multi-course menu at the much-buzzed-about Nepean Street restaurant and not missed the red stuff a bit.
As its name hints, the restaurant, opened in early February by Christopher Schlesak and chef Adam Vettorel, takes its inspiration from Northern Italy generally and Venice in particular, which makes it surprisingly unique in Ottawa, where crowd-pleasing southern Italian food has flourished for decades.
That’s what Vettorel served when he worked for the Valente brothers at Fratelli in Westboro a few years ago. But North & Navy’s dishes are closer in spirit, if not in details, to the elevated fare Vettorel later made while cooking under chef-owner Steve Wall at Supply and Demand.
Much of Vettorel’s food on Nepean Street is a classy, well-crafted and culturally specific wrinkle on small plates, beginning with “cicheti” ($3 or $4 each, spelled cicchetti elsewhere), or Venetian bar snacks of a bite or two, served on bread.
Cicchetti platter at North & Navy (Wayne Cuddington / Ottawa Citizen)
I’ve tried all six of Vettorel’s canape-like affairs and found his mellow, smooth salt cod topped with capers and raisins to be the most enticing, followed by loosely packed and supremely moist pork and beef meatballs, and well as a smear of smoked ricotta topped with pickled fennel. Only the bresola lettuce wrap underwhelmed.
Also, quickly devoured and appreciated as appetizers were some crisp, deftly salted fried smelts ($12).
Fried smelts at North & Navy
Three fresh house-made pastas were off-the-beaten-path winners. Top marks went to the wow-inducing torteletti ($10), simultaneously humble and luxurious, nestled in a potato-skin broth, stuffed with potato, pecorino, parmesan and ricotta, and drizzled with aged balsamic. At a recent Montreal dining event, I had an umami-rich tortelli dish from a Michelin-starred Swiss chef that was similar and not markedly better.
Torteletti at North & Navy (Wayne Cuddington / Ottawa Citizen)
Bigoli ($8), Venice’s rendition of thick bucatini noodles, came with a subtle sauce that melded anchovy, white wine and onions. Rounds of stamped corzetti pasta ($8) came firm and incisively accompanied with pancetta and walnuts.
Bigoli in salsa at North & Navy
Corzetti with walnuts and pancetta at North & Navy
A fourth primi dish, minty risi e bisi (rice and peas) was softly textured comfort food ($8).
Salads at North & Navy, our server told us, are meant as palate cleansers that offer refreshing acidity before the tuck-in of the secondi main courses. A well-dressed, Technicolor citrus salad ($12) of blood and navel oranges and pink grapefruit certainly fit the bill, while Caesar-dressed endive ($10) hit its bitter and savoury notes well. Mushroom carpaccio with truffle oil ($9) intrigued, but captivated less than the other dishes.
Citrus Salad at North & Navy (Wayne Cuddington / Ottawa Citizen)
Endive Caesar Salad at North & Navy
Mushroom carpaccio at North & Navy
When there were six of us at dinner, taking North & Navy out for a grand spin, we splurged on the Bistecca Fiorentina, a $130, 46-ounce porterhouse steak. While the menu says it serves two, it fed our table just fine after our parade of cicchetti, shared pastas and salads.
Sous-vide Bistecca Fiorentina at North & Navy
The meat was locally raised and not from the celebrated beef-alicious Chianina cattle of Italy. Nor was it simply grilled as you would expect in a Florence kitchen. Cooked sous-vide in a water bath and then seared, Vettorel’s steak was a perfect medium rare and enjoyable, if not revelatory. An endless supply of excellent potatoes and greens plus a nicely seasoned red wine jus made us feel like we were feasting.
Vegetables accompanying the Bistecca Fiorentina at North & Navy
If there’s a trick about North & Navy, at this meal it involved getting one’s head — and stomach — around the flow of courses, the smaller proportions and one’s wish to share or resistance to sharing. Next time for dinner, I’d go with fewer people, probably skip gorging on cicchetti but prioritize pasta, share a salad and keep a smaller main course to myself.
At a lunch visit, I sampled two of those more conventionally portioned mains, which are also on the dinner menu. Octopus and potato salad ($22) was a nice composition, with its chunks of seafood tenderized by sous-vide cooking and offset by a nuanced mustard dressing and the bite of pickled carrots and celery. Perhaps a little grilling of the octopus would have made it even better.
Warm Octopus and Potato Salad at North & Navy
The star dish at lunch consisted of two pieces of impeccably fresh and properly cooked pickerel, topped with garlicky zucchini and completed by a perfectly seasoned slurry of diced potato cooked risotto-style ($24).
Pan seared Walleye at North & Navy (Wayne Cuddington / Ottawa Citizen)
At lunch, there was also a white bean and guanciale soup ($7) of considerable depth of flavour, rustic in its roots but carefully made.
White Bean and Guanciale Soup at North & Navy
For dessert, a spot-on, light and refreshing lemon tart ($10) was a delight, tiramisu ($8) was voluptuous, while the chocolate-bomb “Giuseppe Luigi” ($9) harkened not to Venice but to Quebec, with its vanilla-cream-cheese-bolstered remake of a Joe Louis cake.
Lemon tart at North & Navy
Tiramisu at North & Navy
Giuseppe Luigi at North & Navy
Meanwhile, the restaurant is a collection of handsome spaces. A long marble bar attracted the well-dressed on a Friday night for wine and cicchetti, while a nearby, room allowed the six of us to converse in privacy. More private dining can be had upstairs. The front room, where we ate lunch, is attractive too.
At both of our visits, hospitality from servers and a sommelier was uniformly convivial and well-informed.
Of course, upon opening, North & Navy had big shoes to fill, inheriting its space from Beckta Dining and Wine after that top table’s relocation to Elgin Street. But Schlesak and Vettorel have established their restaurant’s bona fides quickly with an enviable concept and seriously appealing dishes and ambience.
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