Fauna

Ramps and morels run straight through Fauna's spring menu — tucked into a foie-stuffed rabbit, folded into orecchiette with pine nuts and buckwheat, melted into the ramp butter over a dry-aged PEI ribeye built for two. The kitchen cooks the season as it arrives, and the board moves with Ontario's calendar rather than against it. This is a dinner-first restaurant on Bank Street in Centretown, open seven nights a week from half past five, and its food is Contemporary Canadian in the working sense of the phrase: small plates and full-sized ones, sourced locally where the season allows, plated with precision and no particular appetite for fuss.

The early part of the menu rewards a table willing to share. Beef tartare comes sharpened with gochujang, sesame, orange, and bonito over fried potato, a long way from the steakhouse version. Caviar for two arrives with marinated duck egg, scallion pancakes, gherkin, and crème fraîche, while a half-dozen oysters land under a passionfruit mignonette and a ghost-pepper hot sauce. Scallop crudo — blue potato, miso mayo, ginger, sweety drops, sunchoke chips — is the cleanest first impression going, bright and textural without tipping over into precious. Even the lighter dishes carry an idea: an asparagus salad dressed in lemon poppy-seed vinaigrette with boquerones and puffed rice, a shrimp rangoon finished with herb cream cheese and a tamarind reduction.

What that opening run tells you is a kitchen treating seasonality as a discipline rather than a slogan. The repetition of ramps, morels, and asparagus across half the board is not a shortage of ideas; it is a kitchen buying what is good that week and finding several honest uses for it. The larger plates carry the same logic and the same hand — stuffed rabbit with bacon, foie, and a knoedle in sherry cream; halibut in a herb broth with fingerlings and asparagus; the ribeye for two over asparagus risotto with ramp butter and jus. Stuffed morels with foie gras and asparagus purée read less like a starter than a statement of where the kitchen's attention sits in May.

The drinks program is built to match rather than decorate. Natural wines, classic and curated cocktails, and craft beer share equal billing, and the heavier plates — the rabbit, the ramp-pesto orecchiette — give that wine list something to actually do. The bar keeps later hours Thursday through Saturday, running past eleven on Friday and toward midnight on Saturday, which is when a dinner reservation has room to turn into a longer evening without anyone consulting the clock.

Fauna is run by Jon Svazas, its chef and owner, alongside Billy Khoo, the chef de cuisine and a partner in the restaurant. The two have kept the kitchen current across a decade: Fauna opened in 2014 and passed its tenth year still cooking forward, a continuity local reporting noted when it marked the milestone. The dining room carries the same patience. A two-year renovation rebuilt it around local and sustainable materials, leaving a wine-cellar atmosphere that sits close to the table rather than locked behind glass.

That patience shows in how the restaurant gets used. Beyond the standard two-top, there is a private room that seats up to twenty-five, main-floor capacity that runs to sixty for an event, and a patio that takes group bookings once the weather turns. A birthday, a work dinner, a long Saturday that drifts from oysters into one last cocktail — the layout holds all of them without asking anyone to relocate. The ribeye comes out for the table that wants an occasion; the crudo and a glass of something natural carry the one that just wanted a good Tuesday.