NeXT

The plate that tells you the most about NeXT is a head of cauliflower. Kapow Cauliflower comes out crisp and lacquered in sweet soy-sambal, scattered with crushed cashew and pickled goji over a swipe of avocado — comfort and heat arriving in the same bite, with no meat anywhere to make the case. That instinct, to let a vegetable carry as much intent as a steak, runs straight through Chef Michael Blackie's cooking. NeXT is his contemporary Canadian restaurant on Hazeldean Road in Kanata, a west-end Ottawa kitchen that takes Canadian roots and pulls them toward Asian and European edges, and the cauliflower is the whole argument in miniature.

The rest of the dinner menu reads like a kitchen that refuses to pick a single lane. Pork-belly bao, steamed soft and slicked with gochujang, sit a few lines from Dan Dan peanut curry udon, wasabi pea-crusted tuna sashimi pizza, and tempura-fried cheese curds. The larger plates carry the same reach without losing the thread: pan-seared sea scallops set against Portuguese chorizo, crisp lima beans, harissa-spiced polenta, olive, and burnt lemon; a dry-aged P.E.I. ribeye; duck leg confit; genmaicha green tea-crusted ling cod; linguine bound in guanciale carbonara. Blackie's Crispy Chicken and guajillo-spiced prawns fill in around them. It is a long, deliberately restless list, sectioned and sized less for one person's entree than for a table reaching across itself.

What holds all of that together is the way NeXT asks you to eat. The kitchen's clearest move is the blind tasting: eight dishes across four waves, six savoury and two sweet, chosen entirely by the chef. Order it and dinner stops being a list of decisions and turns into a sequence someone else is pacing — which is the point, since the plates are built to travel and the open kitchen makes the cooking part of the evening rather than something hidden behind a wall. It is a confident thing to ask of a suburban table: hand over the ordering, share everything, and trust the waves to land. The à la carte list runs seven nights a week from five to nine, and the blind tasting is there every one of them for anyone willing to take the offer.

Blackie is the reason it all coheres rather than scatters. His name runs in the menu's footer and on the chicken that carries it, and the food reads as the product of a long cooking career instead of a concept assembled to a brief. When NeXT opened in 2013, local reporting framed it as bringing a more urban style of dining to Stittsville — a genuine chef's restaurant in a part of town that had not really had one. Thirteen years on, that framing still holds. The reach across Canadian, Asian, and European cooking is not a gimmick bolted on for variety; it is one cook's range, worked out plate by plate over more than a decade behind the same Kanata storefront.

The fullest version of the idea arrives on Sunday mornings. Brunch here is not eggs bolted onto the dinner concept but a ten-dish tasting across five courses from ten to one, beverages included and mimosa service optional, running through Kapow cauliflower, bao, Blackie's Crispy Chicken, and Dan Dan udon before the sweets — with a working note that because the courses are shared, a table of two flags allergies for both, while larger groups can be handled plate by plate. For the nights you want the cooking without the pacing, curated takeout sets go out seven days a week, and reservations are the norm for the dining room itself. Whichever way a table arrives at it — the blind tasting, a built spread, or a slow Sunday through five courses — the meal lands the same way: NeXT is at its best when the table stops choosing and lets the kitchen build the momentum.