Restaurant Review: Naagan – Owen Sound’s Indigenous Tasting Menu that Serves Stories of the Land

Take a meandering drive northwest of Toronto, and after approximately 190 kilometres (or two-ish hours the way I drive), you’ll arrive in Owen Sound, a sleepy town surrounded by Georgian Bay’s pristine waters. The average person doesn’t arrive here by accident, and until recently, Naagan has helped transform the town into a destination. In fact, it was recently name as one of the World’s Greatest Places of 2026 by TIME magazine.

Naagan, a 17-seat Indigenous fine dining restaurant by Chef Zach Keeshig, occupies a modest space in downtown Owen Sound’s historic Chicago Building, a few blocks from the harbour where the Sydenham River empties into Georgian Bay. Naagan means “dish” in Ojibway. It’s a humble name for what happens inside, which is less a dinner service than a recitation, a memoir told in twelve small chapters, each one rooted in the soil, the water, and the rich history of the Saugeen Peninsula. The space has the warmth of a log cabin. The dining room walls are pale pine rubbed with hemp oil to a soft waxy sheen; bundles of dried herbs and flowers hang from the ceiling, and shelves of pickled ingredients line the shelves. Tables are slabs of live-edge tree trunk made by a local artisan.

Keeshig grew up in Neyaashiinigmiing, the Chippewas of Nawash Unceded First Nation at Cape Croker, where he spent his youth foraging with his grandmother – long before he knew his culinary fate. He studied at Georgian College, and cut his teeth at some of the country’s most prestigious kitchens, including Michael Stadtlander’s Eigensinn Farm, Restaurant Pearl Morissette, and Langdon Hall.

Naagan began as a pop-up dinner series at the local farmers’ market. When the permanent restaurant finally opened in Owen Sound in late 2024, it did so without investors of any kind. I was impressed to learn that Keeshig bootstrapped the whole operation. This is worth dwelling on, because self-funding a tasting menu restaurant in a town of twenty-two thousand people is a bold move.

Keeshig cooks in an open kitchen he built with his own two hands (with hand-gathered beach stones), plating with precision and patience. He shares you where the ingredient came from, who harvested it, it’s meaning. The storytelling is stitched intricately within the experience – much like the spine of the meal – and from early on, you understand that you have made the trip for something few dining rooms in this country can offer.

The tasting menu opens with hand-held snacks. First up is Keeshig’s grandmother’s recipe for “Bannock,” or Bakwezhigan, a dense fry bread made with local flour and yogurt, draped with smoked pickerel and capers, and brightened with a jelly and garden herbs that taste uncannily of lemon and anise. Bannock carries a complicated history, a food born of colonial rations that Indigenous cooks transformed into an emblem of resilience and home, and Keeshig’s version holds all of that in a few bites.

Then comes “Bison,” or Bizhiki, a flavourful tartare of bison dressed with black currant oil intricately placed on a Bison-shaped cracker of dehydrated mushroom with chives, oregano, nasturtium, and a dusting of dehydrated wild ramp powder. It’s the kind of bite that rearranges your plans. The meat’s clean, faintly sweet minerality mirrors the land it comes from. And I witnessed this first-hand. The following day, I took a short drive up the road to Snowy Creek Bison, a farm in Kemble where Keeshig sources the meat.

The farm sits north of Owen Sound in rural Georgian Bluffs, where the pastures open wide enough to hold an animal that once moved across this continent in the millions. I had never stood within reach of bison before, and the calm that settled over me was intense. Within minutes I understood what the farm’s owners, Cornelius and Lizette van Zyl, must have felt when they first laid eyes on these gentle giants. The van Zyls raise their herd on grass across two farms, no hormones; no grain. It’s part of a wider effort to restore an animal that was very nearly erased from this continent. Watching the herd shift with tectonic grace reframes the tartare entirely. These animals live on grass and open sky, minutes from the restaurant that honours them.

Back at the table, next is a tartlet of young kohlrabi with hazelnut vinaigrette, salad greens and chives was pretty but the quietest thing all night. It is not a failure so much as a pause, a palate-level small talk between the bison’s declaration and what comes next. One suspects it exists to give the diner a moment of rest. Then, menu deepens – the way the woods do as you walk into them. A wild-rice croustade “manoomin” cradles freshwater cod from Lake Huron (which Keeshig refers to as “poor man’s lobster”). It’s steamed and dressed in a birch-coal oil emulsion under shards of crispy chicken skin. Whitefish from Georgian Bay follows, with lemon thyme, a stinging-nettle sauce of green intensity and grilled kale and other greens from the garden, paired with a bright rhubarb and rose tea. This was a standout.

The beverage pairing deserves its own paragraph. Naagan has no wine list, and you won’t miss it. Instead, a procession of teas and infusions that crescendo in taste: cedar tea, then rhubarb and rose, strawberry and sweet gale, lemongrass and nettle, and finally a chaga cold brew. Each pour accompanied by a note on the plant’s medicinal role in Anishinaabe tradition. It is one of the most coherent and multi-dimensional non-alcoholic pairings I’ve had.

The palate cleanser comes just before the last savoury course. First-of-season strawberries, macerated and jellied, dressed with black currant leaf oil, arrive beneath an edible medicine wheel dusted in red currant powder, activated charcoal, sugar made from white pine needles, and squash powder. My only qualm with this dish the thick hand-whittled spoon, which are stunning to look at, but awkward to eat from – a recurring theme with the boar course.

Wild boar closes the savoury courses; a quiet flex of technique disguised as comfort. Confit in its own fat and finished over coals until the exterior crackles and the smoke gets into everything, it’s served with a birch syrup vinaigrette, a wild garlic dipping sauce scattered with chive blossoms, and a milk bun of my dreams. It was the pinnacle of the meal; the kind of dish that makes conversation stop in its tracks.

Dessert opens with a jolt of nostalgia. An elevated ice cream sandwich made for a more refined adult palate. Sweet woodruff lends a faint vanilla-like flavour to the ice cream. Its wafers fried in rendered bear fat, layered with a praline of roasted hazelnuts. The main dessert honours chaga, the medicinal fungus that grows on birch trees and holds deep significance in Anishinaabe culture. Keeshig concludes the sweet courses with a chaga tartlet shaped literally like the fungus itself, and delivered through a low fog of dry ice that drifts across the table like weather rolling in off the bay.

It’s topped with strawberry gelee, sweet clover cremeux, pepitas, wild mint, clover, and sweet gale powder. Consumed with the chaga cold brew, it closes the circle the cedar tea opened hours before. Petits fours include a sponge toffee made from unpasteurized honey. Before you step out into into the quiet streets of Owen Sound, don’t sleep on a restaurant tour by Keeshig himself, where he share stories that truly round out the full experience.

What Keeshig has built here, on his own dime and his own terms, is a distinct tasting menu where Indigenous traditions of past and present are told through food – by the man who lived, and continues to live them. Book the seats. Drive to Owen Sound. Allow Naagan to share its beautiful story.

Bisous,

Mme M. xoxo

4/5 étoiles

La rubrique de Madame Marie
1 étoile – Run. Before you get the runs.
2 étoiles – Mediocre, but nothing you couldn’t make at home.
3 étoiles – C’est bon, with some standout qualities.
4 étoiles – Many memorable qualities and excellent execution. Compliments to the chef.
5 étoiles – Formidable! Michelin Star quality. Book a reservation immediately.