Afterlight

Kanata is not the first place you'd go looking for a serious taqueria, which makes Ay Dios Mío Tacos something of a welcome disruption in the west-end suburbs.

Little Italy in Ottawa has a way of producing restaurants that lean on nostalgia as a substitute for ambition — the red sauce, the Frank Sinatra, the sense that Italian-American sentiment is doing more work than the kitchen.

Maria's Tacos is not a restaurant in any conventional sense — it's a window cut into the wall of Maverick's on Rideau Street, and that distinction is the whole point.

Seau de Crabe sits on Tenth Line Road in Orléans — not the kind of address that appears on anyone's instinctive short-list, but the operation has built a following on a format that resists trend-chasing: shellfish cooked to order, sauced…

Twenty minutes north of Ottawa, across the river and into the Gatineau Hills, L'Orée du Bois occupies a building that reads as half Normandy farmhouse, half turn-of-the-century Quebec country home — and the distinction matters.