North & Navy

Most kitchens that call themselves Italian reach for the whole country. North & Navy reaches for one corner of it. The cooking is rooted in Northeast Italy — the Veneto and the regions around it — and runs that narrow inheritance through Eastern Ontario's seasons, so a spring menu turns on ramps, asparagus, and morels while later in the year it leans on squash and sea buckthorn. Cicheti, the Venetian tradition of small bites eaten standing with a glass of wine, sets the register for everything that follows: precise, regional, and uninterested in the red-sauce shorthand most diners expect from the cuisine.

The menu moves in the classic order — antipasti, primi, secondi, dolce — and rewards a table that follows it. The opening stretch runs to Polpette, Vitello Tonnato, Frico & Smoked Fish, White Asparagus & Pecorino, and a Braised Leek & Smoked Scallop, small plates built for sharing before the meal turns substantial. Pasta is treated as a course that matters rather than a bridge between courses: Smoked Char Agnolotti, Shortrib Raviolo, Corzetti con Rucola, and a spring ramp risotto finished with La Sauvagine. The secondi carry the weight — Halibut with morels and asparagus, Quaglia with polenta, Tournedos Rossini, and the Bistecca alla Fiorentina, a large-format steak built for a table to gather around. Dessert holds up its end too, from the Zeppola alla Tiramisu to a Sea Buckthorn Tart and a Gianduja Budino. The kitchen is open about the menu shifting with the season, and notes that gluten-free and vegan pasta can be made on request.

What keeps all of this from reading as a single formal track is the Bacaro at the back. Modelled on the Venetian wine bars where a few cicheti and a glass of something sparkling stand in for a full sit-down, it gives North & Navy a second way in. From Monday to Thursday a diner can pull up for small bites and a drink without committing to the entire progression, which quietly changes the math of a visit. Wine runs through both modes — a list to browse at the bar, a pairing to follow the six-course tasting menu when the evening is handed over to the kitchen. The same kitchen can be read in half an hour or given the whole night, and neither version asks the diner to pretend the other does not exist.

The setting earns part of the occasion. North & Navy keeps house in a converted townhouse on Nepean Street that longtime Ottawa diners will remember as Beckta's former address, and the conversion suits a restaurant built for planned nights — intimate, a little formal, warmed by an open kitchen rather than chilled by white-tablecloth distance. A private dining room handles hosted dinners that still want the working menu rather than a banquet substitute. It has held the townhouse since opening in 2015 under co-owners Christopher Schlesak and Adam Vettorel, with Vettorel running the kitchen as executive chef; local reporting still ties both names to the restaurant. That tenure shows up off the menu as well: in May of 2026 the dining room was given over to a benefit dinner for the Parkdale Food Centre — the sort of turn a restaurant makes once it has been part of a neighbourhood long enough to feel some responsibility to it.

North & Navy works because it refuses to be only one thing. It is a serious Northern Italian dining room and a casual Venetian bar, a seasonal kitchen and a table built for an occasion, and it leaves the choice of which one to use to the diner sitting down. The reward goes to those who order with intent: a few cicheti to start, one pasta that earns its slot, a shared main when the night calls for it, and a dolce worth lingering over. The corner of Italy this kitchen cooks is a small one. The number of ways it gives a diner to eat it is not.