Steph Ogilvie has worked in her share of high-end kitchens. The Halifax chef and Top Chef Canada finalist has done pop-up dinners at Montreal’s Ratafia wine bar, cooked at Toronto’s Michelin-recommended GEORGE and joined the kitchen crew at Newfoundland’s famed Fogo Island Inn, where Gwyneth Paltrow and David Letterman have stayed. But none compare to her grandmother Reta’s kitchen. It’s where the Petitcodiac, New Brunswick-born chef fell in love with food, long before she helmed the kitchen at the Brooklyn Warehouse, won Best of Halifax honours at Barrington Street’s Chives Canadian Bistro or started her own pop-up dinner service, Hop Scotch Dinner Club. And it’s the inspiration behind Ogilvie’s latest venture, a fine-dining restaurant bringing Nova Scotian-inspired cuisine to Halifax’s north end.
Wander into Reta’s at 3061 Gottingen Street (in the former Jekyll & Hyde restaurant), and you’ll step into a dining room filled with indoor vines, beautiful wood beams and booths, stained-glass windows and eclectic art on the walls. There are wooden birds. Crocheted lobsters. Silver tea spoons and thrift store paintings. All kinds of things that Ogilvie and her partner, Brock Unger, have been “collecting over the years,” she says, speaking with The Coast. “Funky artwork and fun stuff that we’ve had in our apartment or whatever, and have held on to.” It feels like sitting down in a friend’s living room. Which is kind of the point of Reta’s. Ogilvie calls her grandmother “the most incredible cook” and “a really great baker,” but remembers her most for how she made her guests feel at home.
“She would have the whole table set and ready to go at the drop of a hat,” Ogilvie says. “People would just show up, and it was no problem. She’d lay out a lunch and tea and have everything ready and just welcome them in.” Ogilvie wanted the same feeling for her new restaurant—one where “everybody’s welcome at the table.”
And while the food is high-end, the attitude is decidedly low-key. It feels right for the chef, who—even after all the success in her culinary career—remains as humble as ever.
From Top Chef Canada to the Hydrostone
It’s been a long road for Ogilvie, who cut her teeth at Charlottetown’s Culinary Institute of Canada. Born in New Brunswick, she moved to Toronto with her family in her childhood—where she would eventually develop as a chef working in the kitchens at GEORGE, Ultra Supper Club and Canoe. After moving to Halifax, she worked her way up the ladder at Black Sheep Restaurant, EDNA, the Brooklyn Warehouse and the former Chives Canadian Bistro. It was during Ogilvie’s time at Chives that she started Hop Scotch Dinner Club with Unger in 2018. At first, the two served tasting-menu dinners out of their home, cooking eight-to-twelve-course meals for friends and family.
“We had a little table that sat about six to eight people,” Unger told The Coast in 2020. “We just wanted to have, like, a sort of creative outlet that maybe we weren’t getting to explore as much at our jobs.”
It was with the encouragement of Chives owner Craig Flinn that Ogilvie took over the Barrington Street space to turn Hop Scotch into a brick-and-mortar restaurant in 2020. It seemed like an opportune moment: Her star was on the rise after a runner-up finish on Top Chef Canada’s eighth season. (Ogilvie calls herself a “pretty shy person,” but says the reality TV experience helped to get her “out of my comfort zone.”) But then COVID happened. Plus, the unit’s lease was coming to an end. Hop Scotch moved out of Barrington Street two years later. “It wasn’t the space for us,” Ogilvie says.
She and Unger looked elsewhere for restaurant spaces but found a dearth of options. Instead, Hop Scotch returned to pop-up dinners all over town, from Bliss Caffeine Bar to Gio to the Mayflower Curling Club. For a time, Ogilvie and Unger put their pop-up dinners on pause to work at the Fogo Island Inn. And then, by happenstance, Ogilvie came upon the space on Gottingen Street in the St. Joseph’s Square building—the former church-turned-condo development at the edge of the Hydrostone neighbourhood. It was kismet.
“It had always been kind of our dream location,” she says.
Locally grown and foraged food
Reta’s mixes fine-dining flair with down-home comfort. (“We like to say we’re not that fancy, but we kind of are,” Ogilvie says with a laugh.) On the menu, you’ll find Nova Scotian-inspired dishes like salmon and seared scallops—served with sunchoke, bacon and leafy tatsoi—along with comfort foods like tapioca pudding and deviled eggs. The eggs, in particular, have proven popular.
“It’s kind of funny, the amount of people that will come in and start their meal with deviled eggs and then order a second round for dessert,” Ogilvie tells The Coast.
Plates are seasonal and liable to change any day of the week. For the most part, Ogilvie adds, the menu is “a little bit more vegetable-forward.” She shops for fresh produce every weekend at the Halifax Brewery Market and has close relationships with Hutten Family Farm, Abundant Acres and Green Gardens. Ogilvie counts herself “pretty fortunate” to be in Nova Scotia, “with the amount of cool products that we can get our hands on, and what grows here—and that’s only getting better and better with more people finding out what we can do and pushing themselves.”
She’s looking forward to foraging for ingredients again—like sea truffle, a red algae that grows in Nova Scotia that works well in broths or as a garnish—now that she has a proper kitchen. It’s a luxury she hasn’t enjoyed for a while.
“We can pickle all the ramps, and go out and find the wintergreen and the sea buckthorn… and build our larder and pantry of those foraged things, and be able to offer that for seasons to come.”
It’s a small crew at Reta’s: Ogilvie and sous-chef Jack Vahramian make up the kitchen team, while Allison Storm—who worked as a sommelier at the Fogo Island Inn—leads the front-of-house service and sets the wine menu. The restaurant seats 36 diners at a time, with room for more on the patio in the summer.
Ogilvie has plans to do more pop-up dinners and catering under the Hop Scotch name—and eventually sees potential in inviting different chefs into Reta’s for special collaborative dinners—but for now, she’s ready to put that on hold as she settles in.
“This just feels like it’s our home now, and we’ve unpacked, and it’s ours and a fresh start,” she says. “I love everything that Hop Scotch has done for us … and I want to hold onto that.
“But also, we’re done hopping around, you know?”
This article appears in Mar 1-31, 2025.
It’s actually a new building, not a converted church at all. There was a church there that was sadly knocked down.
So expensive cabbage and lobster, traditional poor people food at prices no actual haligonian can afford? No surprises here.