Bites: Restaurant Report: The Grove in Toronto

Brittany Ross/BRossPhotography.com

The Grove has an English accent.

English cuisine has taken its hits, many of them, at least in recent years, unjustifiably. Plenty of chefs are doing exciting and innovative things in kitchens across Britain. But beyond the generic fish-and-chips gastro pub, English cuisine has not caught on in other countries.

That's beginning to change — April Bloomfield, for example, who runs the Spotted Pig and the Breslin in New York, is one of the city's most popular chefs. And in Toronto Ben Heaton has created a dedicated and creative Anglophile dining experience at his restaurant the Grove, which opened last March in the Dundas West neighborhood. Canadians are taking notice: in September, Maclean's magazine named it the best new Canadian restaurant of 2012.

So where does Mr. Heaton's Anglophilia come from? "From growing up in the culture of it," said Mr. Heaton, 36, who owns the restaurant with Richard Reyes. Though he moved from England to Canada at age 5, he has spent summers there over the years.

But Mr. Heaton did not want to be hemmed in by stereotypes. "It's not fish and chips and pies and stuff," he said. "There's an English mentality running through the food, but it's not that stodgy thing that you think of with English food."

Indeed, during a recent visit, parts of the menu read classically English — "Beef, carrots, horseradish, barley" — but without those descriptions, a diner would be hard-pressed to categorize them as anything but delicious and lovingly prepared.

That beef dish, for instance, was a contrasting duo of pleasantly chewy hanger steak and deeply flavorful and tender stout-braised beef cheek. Even better was a plate of seared Nova Scotia scallops (Mr. Heaton tries to use local ingredients whenever possible), paired with confited chicken wing and crispy chicken skin.

Seafood also shone in an appetizer of London-cure salmon with beets, kohlrabi and apple; and in an entree of arctic char served with a smoked potato purée and a sauce made from cider-steamed clams spiked with sherry vinegar and house-cured bacon. The dish of the night, though, was a starter: a parsley root soup, studded with snails, bacon and fried bread. The root purée was endlessly flavorful, redolent of warmth and earth.

The one area of the meal that was unmistakably English were the desserts, or "puddings," as they are labeled in the British tradition. A boxy apple pie, served with blackberries and custard, was very good, as was a mincemeat Christmas cake. But the standout was the sprightly "Eton mess," a traditional English dessert that incorporates meringue, custard and, in this case, lemon and huckleberry.

It all goes back to Mr. Heaton's nostalgia for his home country. "Follow your culture and know where you came from," he advised. "You'll always be better at that."

The Grove, 1214 Dundas Street West, Toronto; (416) 588-2299. Average price for a meal for two, without drinks or tip, is about 90 Canadian dollars, about the same in U.S. dollars.

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