NGA2 Steakhouse and Grill

The quickest way to understand NGA2 is to order the pizza. Jerk chicken, sliced pears, mozzarella, and brie land on the same crust — a plate that makes the restaurant's argument before the steaks get a word in. Chef David Nganga runs the kitchen as an Afro-Italian steakhouse, tucked onto Secord Drive on the commercial edge of St. Catharines, and the food reads exactly the way that pairing of words suggests: grill-room cuts on one side, Kenyan and Caribbean seasoning on the other, Italian pizza and pasta holding the middle. It is a specific point of view for a dinner room, and the menu spends its length proving the point rather than stating it.

The starters set the tone. Coconut shrimp arrive in a golden coconut breading with a Vietnamese sweet chili mango dip; mussels come steamed in white wine with pistou and crostini; grilled octopus meets a Mediterranean relish, and fried snow crab cakes get a spicy aioli. A French onion soup baked under gruyere and a roasted beet salad with goat cheese, arugula, and pecans keep the opening rounds familiar. From there the menu forks. The pizza section carries a wild mushroom pie with goat cheese and truffle oil alongside the jerk chicken; the pasta runs to gnocchi in gorgonzola cream with roasted chicken and a penne rasta pasta that threads jerk chicken through peppers, spinach, and cream. The grill is where the steakhouse keeps its promises: a ten-ounce striploin steak frites with truffle fries and red wine jus, an eight-ounce beef tenderloin under mushroom sauce, a twelve-ounce ribeye finished with cognac jus. Wild salmon with chutney, a stuffed pork chop, and a rack of lamb in blackberry fig jus round out the entrees for a table that wants something other than steak.

What holds all of that together is the seasoning, not the format. The jerk-and-mango line that starts with the coconut shrimp keeps reappearing — in the NGA2 jerk chicken plated with slaw, mango chutney, and coconut rice, in the penne rasta pasta, in the mango heat that cuts the sweetness of the breading. This is not a steakhouse that bolted on one novelty dish for colour. The cross-cultural idea runs through the appetizers, the pizzas, the pasta, and the entrees, and the plates arrive composed — sauces, garnishes, and sides doing real work rather than a cut of meat left to speak for itself.

The range makes more sense next to the chef's own map. David Nganga was born in Kenya and cooked through a string of Toronto kitchens — Chiado, Fred's Not Here, Red Tomato — before a long run alongside chef Greg Couillard at Manyata, Couillard's Spice Room and Chutney Bar, and NumberFOUR in Ajijic. He spent summers at the Almara Beach Club in Montenegro, consulted on The Local Grill in Kenya, and took the executive chef post at Lord Erroll in Nairobi. The St. Catharines restaurant he opened in 2024 is where all of those kitchens land at once, which is why a single dinner menu can hold coconut rice, truffle fries, and buffalo mozzarella without any of it feeling like a stretch.

The drinks and the calendar fill out the rest of the night. Cocktails, beer, and non-alcoholic options are built into the plan rather than parked at the end of it, and the week carries its own programming — salsa on Mondays, line dancing on Wednesdays, cornhole on Thursdays — that turns a quiet midweek dinner into something louder without ever tipping into a food special. It is priced for a planned evening, and it rewards one: a group that cannot agree on steak versus seafood versus pizza can settle the whole argument at one table, open with a round of coconut shrimp, and let the jerk chicken pizza make the case all over again.