if you happen to follow chef-owner Steve Harris on Twitter, sometimes you’ll see things you’ll wish you hadn’t, such as a photo of the “throwback” staff meal of sliced hot dogs mixed with boxed Kraft Dinner and peas. Then, a few days later, Harris will tweet about his snack of seared rabbit liver, morel mushrooms, garlic scapes, and puntarella (a bitter green rarely seen outside of Italy), and you’re left wondering how this could be the same person. His quirky 140-character broadcasts make for nerdy gastro poetry and tell us everything we need to know about what motivates and inspires the kitchen at Two Six Ate. It’s an unholy communion between naughty, nostalgic beer-sponge food and refined dishes that celebrate the art of nose-to-tail seasonal cuisine. It makes one wish more of Ottawa’s new guard were similarly fuelled by a passion for food rather than the need to feed overstuffed egos. We get the impression this is how Harris would spend his days and nights anyway, restaurant or no restaurant. With such a playful attitude toward cooking, it’s easy to picture Harris at the window of a food truck, but instead he has chosen to settle down in one spot, together with his main squeeze, Emily Ienzi, to create Preston’s hippest Italian-Canadian snack-food joint, where wings and burgers and a fried PB & J get the treatment of a nonna making Sunday ragout. 268 Preston St., 613-695-8200
