Ottawa’s leading restaurateur has built a brand on care, humility and creating memorable food-and-wine experiences
With its classic mansard roof, the Second Empire architectural style of Grant House on Elgin Street sits resolutely next to a modern 21-storey glass office tower asserting its 150-year history as a residence in Ottawa’s Centretown neighbourhood. During interior renovations, workers carefully preserved the crown mouldings, refined millwork and the seven unique marble fireplaces that grace the heritage home’s many rooms. Serendipitously, as they gently eased away decades of old paint, the workers uncovered a swan design carved on staircase stringers that became the logo of Beckta Dining and Wine when it opened in the location in 2014.
Like the stately residence that was built for Canada’s first Surgeon-General, Dr. James Grant, which was also a popular steak house for nearly four decades, restaurateur Stephen Beckta is himself part of the neighbourhood just a few minutes southeast of Parliament Hill.
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“I grew up on Elgin Street and went to Elgin Street Public School a few blocks away. I’ve always loved this area,” Beckta says. “My brother and I used to look at this restaurant called Friday’s Roast Beef House and think one day we could eat in a place so fancy.”
He eventually leased the building, and Beckta Dining and Wine, his flagship restaurant brand which originally opened on Nepean Street in 2003, pulled up roots and moved in. The Beckta group also opened Play Food and Wine in 2009 and Gezellig, in the Westboro neighbourhood, in 2012. Yet, it’s a far cry to say that Beckta leads a merely parochial local business in the diverse and robust food-and-beverage scene in one of Canada’s largest cities: his work and his experience at Michelin-starred restaurants in other countries have helped define the character of dining in the nation’s capital.
The Beckta building at the old Grant House on Elgin Street, Ottawa.
By the time he was a 13-year-old busboy at Malibu Jack’s in ByWard Market, Beckta knew he wanted to work in the industry. After experience dishwashing, cooking, serving and management, he focussed on front-of-house hospitality – and at about the same time that he says oenology started becoming a big part of his life.
Beckta smiles when he describes how he kept “leaving the city and coming back, leaving the city and coming back.” At 21, he trekked to Amsterdam and found himself running an American comedy-dinner theatre – what he calls “an eye-opening experience.” On his return, he settled into the wine program at Ottawa’s Algonquin College, collected his sommelier diploma and worked white-tablecloth venues.
From that point, his resume includes several Michelin-starred venues: by age 24, he was in New York City as the opening sommelier – “accidently,” he says – at Daniel Boulud’s Café Boulud on the Upper East Side and refers to his time there as a “significant learning experience” which was then matched by two years at Danny Meyer’s Eleven Madison Park before he embarked on further travels. He was back in Ottawa only briefly before he flew to Paris for a stagiaire at Alain Ducasse’s Plaza Athénée and the late Jean-Claude Vrinat’s Le Taillevent (three and two Michelin stars at the time, respectively), part of a Danny Meyer exchange program.
Stephen Beckta in the Cafe Boulud cellar in 1999.
The homing instinct turned out to be a strong one for Beckta: not many sommeliers can say they turned down Dan Barber for a position as opening somm at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in New York, but Beckta wanted to be in Ottawa to open his eponymously named flagship venue. It speaks to his down-to-earth demeanour: he humbly acknowledges that these restaurateurs are icons and cites them as friends and mentors today from a period of his life that he describes as “an alternate universe” before he decided that it was time to settle back home.
What Beckta describes as “feeling respected” as a team member in restaurants – starting as that teenage dishwasher – has continued to be his touchstone in the industry and has been an over-arching philosophy of Beckta, Gezellig and Play.
“I thought if I own my own restaurant, I can choose the people I work with,” he explains. “I’ve always viewed it as my restaurant family, and my goal was to own a neighborhood restaurant – nothing super-fancy – just so I could have a good amount of joy caring for people.”
The bar area at Play Food and Wine.
The team helping oversee the brands are managing partner Clay Cardillo, director of operations Pieter van den Weghe and wine director Jordan Sabourin, and the customer-service approach runs across the brands: 140-seat Beckta has a wine bar and private dining rooms and offers modern, seasonal and local cuisine on both its à la carte and tasting menus; Play, at 120 seats, is casual dining with an open kitchen and an ever-changing wine-by-the-glass selection; and Gezellig – a Dutch word that means something like “cozy hominess” – is fine dining including small-plates brunch and international cuisine with seating for about 100. The restaurants have gotten their share of accolades and press, including Beckta Dining and Wine securing a spot as a top restaurant in this magazine in 2022.
Beckta says that Play Food and Wine on York Street focuses on great ingredients simply prepared in contrast to the more elaborate menus: for example, the most expensive “large plate” on the Play dinner menu is $33, and ten dishes can be paired for a 2-for-$30 lunch combination. In a way, Play was a check-and-balance on the group’s energy and momentum to keep pushing boundaries, to want to do something bigger and grand like Beckta’s five-course daily dégustation.
“I didn’t want to get too far away from what I was always looking for in terms of guest care and so I wanted to take things back a bit and make something really simple where we still use the same great products but cooking in a very simple, a very affordable way,” Beckta says of the aptly named casual restaurant. “That’s why Play Food and Wine was created.”
Beckta dining room.
On the Beckta restaurant website, “Curated by Beckta” identifies wine packages tailored to specific tastes, monthly wine-club subscriptions and fine-dining meal kits for special occasions, the latter a highly successful vestige of the darkest days of the pandemic shutdowns, according to Beckta.
“In two years, we did 30,000 fine-dining meal kits delivered to people’s homes or for pickup. It obviously helped get through the period, helped retain staff and helped keep our name and the restaurant alive.”
Setting up in his home, Beckta would record a short 15-minute video showing customers how to finish the meals – it’s something he still does for any meal kits they do, including the recent Valentine’s Day kits that sold out – adding that Curated by Beckta allows him, and the brand, to connect with guests even though not in person.
Play Food and Wine focuses on great ingredients simply prepared.
More generally, the program captures the essence of the brand, at least as Stephen Beckta tells it. In observing a food-and-beverage scene he has known for decades, he sees Ottawa restaurants, for the most part, as quite distinct from, say, Toronto restaurants, describing them as a “lovely, tight-knit community” that reflects Ottawa’s culture in general and which tends to be warm and approachable.
“When I was in New York, restaurant teams from Toronto would visit regularly so that they could learn from the great spots. In Ottawa, I think our aspirations are different. I think there’s a certain distinct humility here and a lot more of a connection to our roots, to the farmers and agriculture around us. I think we are very collaborative and less competitive here.”
Beckta restaurants, like all restaurants, strive to serve their customers very good food, but the brands take their lead from Beckta’s philosophy “of being on the guest’s side” – what he calls “hospitality in its truest form” where staff across the group are hired and retained because they enjoy caring for customers within the whole food-and-beverage experience.
“Good food and wine are tools in order to be able to do that,” he says. “It doesn’t mean that we don’t take both things very seriously, but we recognize that at the end of the day what we’re really trying to do is to have people leave feeling cared for, whether that’s done in a small plates place like Play or a special-occasion spot like Beckta. That experience is the important thing.”
– Andrew Coppolino is a restaurant reviewer, book author and food columnist advocating for local chefs, restaurants and food businesses
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