CapitalDining.ca

Issac's former home was in a Kanata mini mall. As of last December, it is housed in a suburban mansion in a new Stittsville subdivision. Renamed Issac's 64 Hundred, this impressive structure is more than just a restaurant.

The heart of the building is a state of the art commercial kitchen attached to an 80-seat dining room. Beyond this main room and a wall of glass doors, is a 60-seat screened in patio, with heated tile floors, retractable windows, and a fireplace. To the right of the soaring foyer is a wine bar. Beyond that are two large rooms suitable for meetings or receptions, complete with gas fireplaces and built in televisions and all the latest clever wiring. (Wine-dine-and-watch events on game nights are part of the Issac's plan.) Down a circular staircase are more banquet facilities and a second kitchen. The ladies' room has a stall designed just for the bride. At my last visit they were laying the work for the fountains and gardens.

The wild colours of the Kanata Issac's are gone. The new Issac's is beige, brown and cream, with chic leather, plush linens, Italian tile, big modern art and mirrors. Throughout these handsome rooms, pendulous crystal chandeliers hang from the crazy-high ceilings.

But here's the goofy thing. In this modern, stylish place is the cooking of yesterday. It may still have its fans, but dishes like boneless breast of chicken smothered in a Bailey's Irish cream sauce surrounded with season-be-damned vegetables, is a style of restaurant food we should have left behind us long ago. This is the bonelessly-banal, over-worked, over-stuffed, over-sauced, chemically-boosted, seasonally insignificant food of the seventies.

Of the 61 main dishes, 51 come with a cream sauce. The balance has demi-glace sauces or Hollandaise or pesto sauces all, by my palate, from a package or a bin. Two (the only vegetarian-suited dishes on the menu) have tomato sauces.

Over the course of four meals here, nothing passed muster. You can taste the MSG in the soups - even in the clam chowder - and in many of the sauces. The Caesar salad is advertised as having "simulated bacon bits." Hummus is served with stale, hard pita. Issac's escargots are coated with an acrid, salty sauce of what seems to be pesto and demi glace, tossed in a supermarket bun, untoasted.

Our server tells us that all the main dishes come with 10 to 13 vegetables, a signature of Issac's. My meals at 64 Hundred have spanned from the beginning of March to the end of June, and it's the same vegetables - woody carrots, cauliflower, broccoli, tinned baby corn, red pepper, an asparagus spear, yellow zucchini, butternut squash, red cabbage - all of them unseasoned, tasting pre-cooked and re-warmed, and all of them on every dinner plate whether you order the lamb with pistachio demi glace or salmon with a raspberry brandy cream sauce.

The menu tells me the scallops have a "European" leek and lemon cream sauce on them; they advertise "wild" Portobello mushrooms in the chicken. I'm told the salmon is fresh, but is dry and juiceless, without the qualities of a fresh salmon. The rack of lamb is a good piece of meat, cooked to order, but debased with a salty demi glace sauce studded with pistachios. Same goes for Issac's beef tenderloin (every steak is a tenderloin), coated with a béarnaise sauce that tastes like it came from a package. The skinless, boneless chicken breasts are dull and rubbery. The one stuffed with those portobellos is entirely flavourless and the sauce tastes of flour. Every chicken dish is in a cream sauce of some description - amaretto cream sauce, Bailey's Irish Cream sauce, mango and Mediterranean molasses cream sauce. Shrimp lie innocent of all flavour in a 'stir-fry' on a bed of overcooked rice with the same roundup of vegetables you find on dinner plates, a very dull sauce poured over the lot.

This is banquet cooking. And it is expensive banquet cooking, with main dishes ranging from $29 to $48. The service, though pleasant, is hardly as upscale as the tab. On two evenings, our main dishes arrive while we are still working through our appetizers.

A new pastry chef (coming soon, we're told) may soon deliver good desserts. For now, they are brought in and are more quantity than quality.

Twenty-five years ago, I do recall making a Bailey's Irish cream sauce on chicken for my prom date. But in Ottawa in 2008, we surely know better. And for a new restaurant in a big chic space to be churning out such tired food is a darn shame.

May I suggest money and thought be focused more on the food than on the fountains.

Cuisine: International
Cost: $$$$: Starters, $7-$11; pasta, $23-$28; main dishes, $29-$48

Hours: Open: lunch, Tuesday to Friday; dinner daily

Features: Fireplace dining, Patio dining, Wine list worth noting.
Accessibility: Fully accessible.

6400 Hazeldean Road, Stittsville, ON
613-836-8335

Occupying a slim space on Clarence Street, dwarfed - especially at patio season - by its roomier neighbours, it's easy to walk by Moji. But you might want to pay some attention.

Moji belongs to Mehran Hersini, who was for many years the manager at the former Ritz on Clarence. He opened Moji last March in the petite space that used to house a restaurant called The Huff and Puff, any vestiges of which have been well and truly blown away. Moji is a fetching blend of casual (garage doors open to the sidewalk patio, a small bar at the stern attracts happy regulars) and formal (black leather, white linen, brown walls, and a plethora of candles.)

The word 'moji' is Japanese, but other than a tamari glaze on the salmon, the menu leans mostly Italian. I like its length - five summery salads, a soup, three appetizers, three pasta dishes and four main dishes, plumped with a special or two.

A salad might be the way to start. The Caesar salad is playful and the elements work well: a mound of well dressed romaine, proscuitto "crisps," a hard boiled egg, halved, and no cloying flavour of commercial mayonnaise in the pungent dressing, which is something of a miracle these days.

At lunch, the warm spinach and arugula salad with pistachios, goat cheese, dried figs and a sauté of mushrooms is lively in a balsamic anointment, and the steak salad (on greens that are miraculously not the premixed supermarket stuff) pairs the rare meat with avocado in good condition and thick croutons, making for agreeable textures blending soft with sinew and crunch on a bed of fresh leaves.

The carpaccio is tarted up with corn shoots, caramelized shallots, sliced beets and a beet and horseradish aioli. These companions to the raw filet rather upstage the delicate flavour of the main attraction, though it's possible not to mind too much.

Still, there are some troubles. Soup one night is a cream of mushroom, and though the mushroom flavour is certainly evident, the soup is screaming for salt. And as good as their reduced-to-syrup house balsamic is (with its exotic edge of cinnamon), it can show up too often on this menu. It arrives with the house bread and is tossed into salads, but I also find it on my filet mignon. The meat is excellent - cooked to rare as requested, and clearly a superior cut of well-marbled, well-aged beef - but overwhelmed with a too-sweet sauce that includes the house elixir. The stuff clings to the roasted red jacket potatoes too, and the roasted cherry tomatoes. Once I've scraped off the too-sweet sauce, what I'm left with is very good. The wild salmon is a bit overcooked, but tasty enough, though the maple-ginger marinade and tamari-citrus glaze is, again, awful sweet, and the basmati rice includes undercooked grains of wild.

Full marks for the crusty skinned and moist fleshed bird, though the coating is a bit odd, tasting of a rose sauce with seedy mustard in the mix.

Back to form with linguine, tossed with chunks of seafood (scallops, shrimp, clams) and with grape tomatoes, arugula, and artichokes, moistened with a garlic infused olive oil of obvious quality.

Quality desserts too. They have a good supplier for their cakes and the house crème brulée, while not textbook texture, has a charming exotic flavour and we gobble it up.

Like the menu, the wine list is short, with an acceptable offering by the glass, though if Moji wants to charge me $41 for a bottle of Cline Syrah (which retails for $13) it had better serve it to me at the proper temperature. Red wines shouldn't arrive warm.

But no need to be grumpy. Moji has highs and lows, but on balance it's doing more right than wrong. And on this strip, where attention to fashion often trumps the food, that's pretty satisfying.

Cuisine: Italian
Cost: $$$: starters, $6 to $14; main dishes, $16 to $24

Hours: Open every day but Monday, for lunch/brunch and dinner

Features: Patio dining.
Accessibility: Fully accessible.

97 Clarence Street, Ottawa, ON
613-860-6654
website

The staying power of restaurants at this address has been problematic. By my count 1542 Bank Street has had five culinary incarnations over the last decade - from Moroccan (Kasbah) to Indian (Siraj), Ethiopian (Gojo) to Lebanese (Fairouz Chalet). And, as of six months ago, it's been taken over by the Italians.

The latest tenant is Napo, short for Napoli, and it's a cosy little keeper. Its prospects for survival at this fickle address depend to a great extent on those gastronomes willing to make the trek to Bank Street south, to a little brick house bordered by fast traffic and industry. A place like Napo, because of its location, must struggle to be noticed. More than it should have to.

It calls itself a "Farm to Table" restaurant, one that tries to follow the principles of Slow Food (a movement that has its roots in Italy with branches throughout the world, and is largely responsible for leading a back-to-the-land and back-to-the-table revival.)

At Napo, it starts with superior raw materials and ends as solidly good Italian food, devoid of any attention-seeking chic. The philosophy seems to be that there is only so much one can or should do to spruce up a lamb shank - a heap of spinach, garlic and olives does the job just fine. It's a hard philosophy to argue with.

The dinner menu is a manageable length - seven starters, four pasta dishes (also available as appetizers - very decent) and seven main dishes. The lunch menu is also to the point - three soups, panini sandwiches, a few pasta dishes. The ratio of hearty to lighter fare is just right; and the prices show commendable restraint. Only one appetizer is more than $10, and most main dishes fall below the $25 mark.

And the first taste is free. The amuse is a delicate oval of salmon terrine. House made bread arrives with two samples of Italian olive oil, one light and fruity, the other darker and more attention seeking.

Among the starters - admirable mussels, juicy grilled shrimp with a boozy cloak of Limoncello glaze, a homey straciatella soup, a lovely puree of asparagus and potato with a lily pad of fromage frais - the best of the bunch turns out to be salads. You might think a simple grilled bread salad (panzanella) a dud order. Not at all. Great bread, good olive oil, organic arugula, char-grilled squid, long, sliced caper berries and blobs of black olive tapenade pack a punch of flavours and elevate this peasant dish to something quite special. Just as good is the grilled radicchio brushed with local honey and balsamic vinegar, paired with Quebec goat cheese and fried prosciutto.

Though we recognize the broth is well made in the fish soup, an uncomfortable saltiness mars its delivery. The fish however - Arctic char, mussels and clams in their shells, shrimp and scallops - are in very good condition. A breast of Mariposa Farms duck is anise rubbed, roasted to medium-rare, sliced thin and set in a Campari and blood orange marmalade sauce. Beef tenderloin is delicious - infused with truffle oil, under the heady influence of silky foie gras, and bathed in a cognac sauce. The meat is soft and rich in the lamb shank. For the vegetarian, a slew of perfectly grilled vegetables on creamy polenta layered with bocconcini cheese.

It's important to leave room for dessert. The iconic must-have Italian dessert, tiramisu, is here reduced to its separate components and presented on long, white plate. A coffee cup of espresso and mascarpone cream, a pile of sugar dusted ladyfingers that taste home-baked, and three pools of rich custard - vanilla, coffee and chocolate are presented together in a grand performance. Lemon tart brulée with crème anglaise is the encore. Two wedges of chocolate hazelnut pate get polished off despite their unbearable richness, and a luscious ricotta cheesecake is laced with orange rind, and served with a pomegranate sauce that squarely hits the puckering notes.

This is food that requires wine, and Napo's list (exclusively Italian and Canadian) includes many bottles that won't bust the bank. Neither, for that matter, will the food bill.

Napo is off to a grand start. May it stay put.

Cuisine: Italian
Cost: $$$: Starters, $6 to $12; pasta, $14 to $16; main dishes, $18 to $36

Hours: Lunch, Monday to Friday; dinner, Monday to Saturday

Accessibility: steps to entrance, washrooms upstairs.

1542 Bank St., Ottawa, ON
613-523-9595
website