CapitalDining.ca

It's nice they give free refills of my iced tea. Yes, I agree, with my 15-year-old. That is nice.

We're quiet for a while. He picks at his dish, I pick at mine. He's a nice boy, this boy of mine. Slow to find fault. His dad's genes dominate.

"Do you like your chicken?" I ask. "It's OK. A bit dry, I guess," he says.

Do you like your pasta, he asks me, in turn. Naw.

He takes another sip of his second iced tea, and I take one of my wine, and we both agree we really like the feel of the place. Fresco Bistro Italiano (once called Frescocielo, and it's still called that on the restaurant's awning) has a relaxed ambience. We like the old brick walls, precision-hung with framed black and whites of ordinary Ottawa scenes. We like the quirky wine cork display nailed to the pillar at the copper-topped bar, and how the lighting balances the retro with the modern, flattering the complexion of both the middle-aged and mottled. We like the bistro feel of brown paper covers over white linen, the long black leather bench and the little candles on every table. One of us likes the TV over the bar tuned into the Senators game, albeit going badly.

And so it went at my fourth and final visit to Fresco Bistro Italiano on Elgin Street. Looks, 10. Food, three.

The Ottawa restaurant scene is many scenes, of course, and this restaurant belongs to a "scene" that has a remarkable and puzzling endurance. I refer to Italian-ish restaurants. They arrived in the 1980s and their bill of fare really hasn't changed much in decades. They almost always have Sambucca shrimp, for instance, and bruschetta, regardless of season, deep-fried, battered calamari and a goat cheese and grilled vegetable salad. They do dishes they call risotto (which in this case turns out to be mushy rice) and gnocchi (which taste like they come from a bag) and you can always, for a price, add grilled chicken or tiger shrimp to any pasta dish.

You can now request gluten-free pasta (add $2) or multigrain spaghettini. The other bit of modernity is the sharing platter that favours compilation over cooking. Fresco has two of these. I've only tasted the seafood one.

The Antipasti di mare was $17 of defrosted rings of rubbery squid, three grilled shrimp, which tasted mostly of salt, a few mushy smoked mussels that tasted of their tin, two rolls of smoked salmon (fine enough), a lemon wedge, a few capers and a pile of olives and pickled vegetables from any supermarket. In other words, an assembly of what ate like inferior ingredients, many of which seemed resentful of being thrown together, priced heftily.

The fried calamari ($12) tasted only of oil and batter. Beneath the crisp brown wrappers, one could be eating anything.

The soup of the day - chickpea, roasted red pepper and pancetta - had good flavour, but the peas were undercooked. The grilled vegetables in the goat cheese salad were dull and very cold. The citrus beet salad with toasted pine nuts, feta and orange was a better bet and the carpaccio, though not stellar, was good enough.

The pastas on offer go like this: you choose your noodle, you choose your treatment. The pastas on offer taste like this: pasta cooked earlier, reheated with sauce on top. I have yet to eat anything al dente, or any sauce that sings, or any pasta that binds with any sauce. They use comical amounts of garlic.

The gnocchi is trumpeted at every dinner. I ask if it's made in-house. They admit not. But the sauce, they tell me, is to die for. True, put enough cream, bacon and mushrooms on something and it masks all kinds of fundamental problems. Gnocchi should taste of potatoes. These were stodgy, flavourless bullets. We were told the ravioli was homemade, but the pasta wrappers were too thick and the filling (portobello mushrooms and cheese) was glue that took some serious tongue work to dislodge from the roof of my mouth. And please, please, if you aren't willing (or unable) to go the distance to turn firm kernels of rice into creamy, al dente magic, then don't put risotto on your menu. This risotto was mushy, oversalted cafeteria fare.

I thought the vegetables were nicely done with the main dishes, but most of the entrées I tried were flawed. The duck ($28) was tough and overcooked, the chicken was a bit dry, and the veal, which should be an Italian restaurant's crowning moment, was grey and sinewy and far too thick for scallopine. I thought the pickerel pretty good - it tasted fresh, was encrusted with cornmeal, and served with a beet relish - but that turgid side of white wine and parmesan risotto brought it down.

Servers are pleasant enough, but they all use cheat sheets. Every time. At every hour. Please memorize the day's soup and the day's two specials; if you can't, you shouldn't be a server in a restaurant with main dishes upward of $25.

We liked the tiramisu and the carrot cake, moist and carroty with a pleasant roof of cream-cheese frosting. The lemon tart, however, managed to be puckering yet only dimly lemoned, its pastry a bit soggy.

The bill we were given at each visit made me grumpy. For the same price, I can point you in all sorts of delicious directions. So why is this place so busy? A puzzle that.

My son is grumpy too, but mostly because the Sens lost. Though, lucky him, he doesn't have to write about it.

Cuisine: Italian
Cost: $$$: Starters, $10-$16; pizza/pasta, $14-$22; mains, $23-$35 description

Hours: Open: Lunch, Wednesday to Friday; dinner daily

Features: Late dining.
Accessibility: Easy access into restaurant, but washrooms are dow.

354 Elgin St., Ottawa, ON
613-235-7541
website

Unless it was your nursery food, German cooking may hold little appeal beyond being ample, comforting and working well with a pitcher of Bavarian beer.

If there is a nouveau, lighter style of German cuisine, I have not encountered it. And you won't find such a thing at Lindenhof. For 30-some years, from a variety of Ottawa locations, this German restaurant has dished up the plates it has always served.

Lindenhof's menu has survived its latest move intact. (It is now settled in the middle of the smorgasbord of cuisines that lately flavours Little Italy.) So have the prices, I'm happy to report - a rarity when a restaurant relocates and has all those relocation bills to pay.

Here still are the schnitzels, schweinshaxe, and sauerbraten, still served with spaetzles, sauerkraut and tart red cabbage. Here are the slow-cooked, steadfast dishes based on meat and starch that we have come to associate with central Europe.

Lindenhof's last home on Forest Road in Ottawa West, was a tired, dreary-looking space, with a surplus of fake vines and dusty bunches of grapes. I don't miss it.

This Preston Street location is smaller, brighter, busier, though also more generic-looking. The same space has been home to

Italian restaurant Gusti and, more recently, to Four Cuisines Bistro. Lindenhof's pale walls are outfitted with a few gnarly planks of reclaimed wood, and adorned with Bavarian beer memorabilia, Deutsch porcelain and assorted München bric-a-brac. There is music, of course, to provide mood (and lights on full blast to take some of it away).

There are appetizers, but you won't need them. Main dishes come with soup (reliably good) or salad (fine). Pork edges out the other meaty mains - the schnitzel is pounded flat tenderloin, breaded and fried and served with spaetzles, or with bacon and onion home fries and red cabbage. It is tender, tasty and fine enough. And there are the wursts, garlic sausages, served with sauerkraut, mashed potatoes and a daub of strapping mustard. Is that riesling in the mushroom cream sauce that naps the pork tenderloin? It's good.

But I prefer the braised dishes - the schweinshaxe (pork hock), the meat falling from the bone as it should, and the sauerbraten of roast beef, soused for days in a sour cocktail with juniper berries and cloves, resulting in slabs of very tender, very juicy beef. This comes with a solid dumpling and shredded vegetables, colourful on an otherwise shades-of-brown plate, and served al dente.

In a cheeky mood one night, I order the vegetarian platter. Not Lindenhof's finest dish, more a hasty collection of the few non-meat bits on the menu - zwiebelkuchen (an onion tart, much like a quiche, of cream and egg and nutmeg, with soft onion on pastry, that tasted overheated, a bit dry) plus apple-red cabbage, the house sauerkraut, a mountain of yummy home fries, plus some salad and vegetables.

There is strudel, of course, but we find it has little apple flavour, and there is Black Forest cake and custard, neither of which, I regret to tell you, I have tried. With bags of leftover schweinshaxe and such, it's always seems absurdly piggy to ask for a round of desserts.

But I have tried the beer. Four are available on tap. The Lindenhof lager goes well with much of this food, or if you favour a darker brew, the Warsteiner Dunkel. My favourite was the Hacker-Pschorr.

Service is darling and efficient, with a dash of the maternal. You are cared for without being fussed over by a charming pro. She loves the food and wants you to love it, too. You don't love it as much as she. But you understand its appeal.

Cuisine: Eastern European
Cost: $$: Starters, $7 to $10; main dishes, $16 to $28 description

Hours: Open daily, for lunch and dinner

Accessibility: Steps to entrance, washrooms in basement.

268 Preston St., Ottawa, ON
613-725-3481
website

GANANOQUE, Ont. - I've been looking for a compelling reason to eat in this town again.

Casa Bella used to draw me off the highway pretty regularly, but since it closed in 2007 (its chef-owners Stev George and Deanna Harrington moved to Kingston, opening an Italian restaurant called Olivea in 2008) Gananoque's gastronomy hasn't really beckoned.

Yes, there's good eating in Kingston and in Prince Edward County, but Gananoque has always appealed for practical reasons. It has the great advantage of being reachable in a matter of minutes. No great detour is required to pop off the fast food 401 and head south for a real meal. Indeed, take exit 645 off the highway and, if the lights are co-operating, you're in Gananoque's city centre in three minutes. Turn right at the water and seconds later, you'll see the Athlone Inn, a Victorian mansion constructed in 1870, operated as an inn since the 1950s.

It sits pretty much across the street from the truly spectacular Victoria Rose Inn, which operates as a bed and breakfast. Though the smaller and less architecturally imposing Athlone Inn pales a bit in comparison, it has the great advantage of a top-notch dining room.

It had been my plan to explore the good eats in the Thousand Islands region this summer, when many restaurants come out of a winter hibernation. But a chance e-mail from an Athlone fan had me veering off the highway on a homeward bound trip from Toronto, seeking sustenance on a 34-below evening.

Miranda McMillan's welcome was warm. She and her husband, Jason, have done a splendid job of refurbishing the old house, highlighting the height and depth of its mature bones, while resisting the all-too-common urge to doily-up the old place or paint it all dusty rose with floral print trim.

The restaurant is spread over two rooms. Elegantly dressed and formally appointed, its tan walls display the address's original architectural drawings, its tables are set with tulips.

Chef Jason McMillan, who trained at the Jasper Park Lodge and in restaurants and inns on Vancouver Island, shows equal restraint with the menu. French in focus, it relies on time-worn classic dishes, quality ingredients and beautiful presentations.

It was a night for French onion soup with a cap of crostini and Gruyère cheese. The onions were soft, but still had some bite, and the beef broth was deep, dark and boozy. A shell of puff pastry, buttery and fresh, supported an abundance of well-garlicked snails, in a stew of lardons, browned pearl onions and woodsy mushrooms. Its sauce had a voluptuous body. The first-rate house bread mopped it up nicely.

Two main dishes to report on - both meaty, both worthy. A filet mignon of rare beef on a bed of mashed potatoes and buttered green beans was escorted with a triumphant sauce bordelaise fragrant with tarragon. You may add a side of woodland mushrooms and I recommend you do that. You will receive a generous variety paddling happily in more of that anise-scented sauce.

A nubbly coating of hazelnuts, grated parmesan, and chopped mint clung to a hunk of lamb with a glue of grainy mustard. It was roasted to a desired medium rare, perched on minted fingerling potatoes and served with vine tomatoes of remarkable tomato flavour.

For dessert, house-made ice cream topping a lovely almond and rhubarb cake overlaid with a strawberry compote did the trick.

In the summer, my sources tell me, there is a patio for al fresco dining. Once the snow's off it, I'd like to be on it.

Cuisine: French
Cost: $$$: Starters, $9 to $14; main dishes, $22 to $30. description

Hours: Open Thursday to Sunday from 5 pm in winter months, Tuesday to Sunday from May to October

Features: Fireplace dining, Patio dining.
Accessibility: Steps to front door.

250 King St. W., Gananoque, ON
613-382-3822 /
website