Beckta Dining & Wine

Wine sets the terms at Beckta. The dining room keeps a by-the-glass list that turns over with the cellar, welcomes a guest's own bottle any day for a flat corkage, and pours a house bottling — Blanc de Beckta, made with Cave Spring Cellars — that puts the restaurant's name on a label before the first plate lands. This is modern Canadian fine dining on Elgin Street, set across the ground and second floors of a restored heritage building in downtown Ottawa, where owner Stephen Beckta and wine director Jordan Sabourin treat the glass as part of the cooking rather than an accessory to it. The food is seasonal and built on Canadian ingredients; the wine is there to shape how the evening moves.

The current menu reads as cooking, not catalogue. Scallops and prawns come with lion's mane mushroom, compressed apple, celeriac-apple purée, citrus-braised endive, and a lobster bisque foam cut with jalapeño — the most composed of the seafood plates. Bavette steak gets the kitchen's full hand: roasted vegetable tartinade, black oyster mushroom conserva, grilled shishito peppers and scallions, fried artichokes, eggplant ketchup. Venison ravioli works a richer register with sunflower-seed and horseradish pistou and venison jus, and the vegetable courses carry real weight — heirloom carrots under a maple-miso glaze and dukkah, hiramasa crudo brightened with sea buckthorn, deep-fried cauliflower beneath ramp donair sauce. Even the bread does double duty: a community focaccia with whipped brown butter that sends a portion of every order to The Ottawa Hospital.

Read as a whole, the menu belongs to a kitchen working in the present tense. Sea buckthorn, tulsi, ground cherries, gai lan, Quebec chicken, Atlantic halibut — the ingredients stay regional and the technique stays current, the kind of plating that shifts with the season rather than holding to a fixed greatest-hits list. The wine program follows the same instinct. The by-the-glass list keeps moving, the cellar leans on the idea that a good bottle should carry a sense of place, and the five-course tasting menu — served blind, suggested for the whole table, with pairings offered alongside — hands the kitchen the latitude to decide the night. Beckta is at its strongest when a table lets wine and pacing do that work.

The team carries the place. Stephen Beckta has owned the restaurant that bears his name since it opened in 2003, with Clay Cardillo as managing partner and Pieter van den Weghe directing operations. Kyle Wilson leads the kitchen as head chef, and Jordan Sabourin runs the cellar as wine director and sommelier. The setting matches the seriousness: fine-dining rooms restored inside a heritage building, validated underground parking, and first-floor access through the wine bar entrance.

Beckta is built to be used more than once. Lunch fills the midday hours on weekdays with a lighter, tighter list — an egg-yolk raviolo with fresh ricotta and green-garlic pesto, seared trout over popcorn purée and smoked fingerling potatoes, a mushroom tart over parsnip cream, steak and frites with duck-fat herb fries — the kind of menu that suits a client lunch as easily as a slow one. The downtown address, the polished service, and private dining rooms available on request make it a steady choice for business meals and celebrations, while the wine bar opens a lower-stakes door to the same kitchen for a weeknight glass and plate.

The conviction underneath all of it is about wine — that a good bottle carries a true sense of place — and Beckta applies it to the plate with equal seriousness. Two decades on Elgin Street have settled the restaurant into that rhythm: the tasting menu when a table wants the kitchen to lead, a stool at the wine bar when it doesn't, and a glass poured to match either way.