Actinolite: The Ossington Restaurant Where No One Is Called Chef

The door at 971 Ossington opens onto a small room with no tablecloths, servers dressed in clothes they chose themselves, and a kitchen that settled most of tonight’s menu based on what turned up at the farmers’ market that morning. Fourteen years in, Actinolite still runs on that kind of nerve — and on a rule you won’t find printed anywhere: nobody here is called chef.

The town Justin hammered into the walls

Actinolite is a village in eastern Ontario, and it’s where owner Justin Cournoyer grew up. He opened the restaurant in 2012 and lived above it for 12 of its 14 years, with his wife and their two kids. The decor came from home, and so did everything else. “There are traces of him building, hammering everything, all this place together, the way you do a home,” says Jeremy, who now runs the kitchen alongside Kieran.

That first decade was Justin’s, built around a system for seasonal, sustainable cooking. COVID forced a rethink. He stepped back — he still lives down the street — and handed the room to a younger crew: Miguel Gauthier on the floor, Jeremy and Kieran in the kitchen, Antoine behind the bar.

Why nobody here is called chef

“We don’t use the word chef for ourselves,” Jeremy explains. Between him and Kieran there is no hierarchy, and the idea extends to the whole team. “We want people to relate to the food through their own hands, because they’re cooking it.” The menu never repeats itself: one to three new dishes a week, pulled from the market and from a pantry the team ferments, forages and preserves across the year, so spontaneity is always affordable.

You feel that structure as a guest. Cooks carry plates to the table themselves, and when a question comes up nobody vanishes into a back room to fetch an answer — the person who made the dish is standing right there. “A lot of work to make something simple,” is how Miguel sums up the style.

Dinner at $135, or the neighbourhood version

The full menu runs six to seven courses at $135. There’s also the Neighbourhood Menu — three to four courses, $60 — a shorter version built for people who live nearby. Miguel calls the register casual fine dining, and on a busy night the small room gets loud and vibrant in a way tasting-menu restaurants rarely allow. His approach to service is deliberately unfashionable: “almost old school,” he says, closer to inviting someone into your house and cooking for them than to choreography.

The wine that answers the plate

Miguel builds the list, leaning natural and biodynamic, and when it travels abroad he looks for producers with a family story rather than a scoring sheet. He’d rather find a bottle that connects to a dish metaphorically than one that matches it on paper. Antoine, who came from Pompette, keeps three cocktails at a time — classics infused with what the kitchen already uses, from East Coast dulse to Nova Scotia fir to Ontario sumac — and turns preserving liquids into non-alcoholic drinks instead of pouring them down the drain.

What Miguel is proudest of

Not a plate. Repeat guests have doubled and tripled since the handover, he says, and monthly regulars went from a dozen to a crowd. And Justin, after 14 years, now leaves at night to play hockey with his kids. “It doesn’t seem like a big thing, but the fact that we are involved in that is really special.”

Written by Daniel Neuhaus
Photography by Daniel Neuhaus

Updated on July 24, 2026

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