Last summer I received a letter from Scot Woods, the chef at Habitat on Queen West. It was a long letter, civil and measured, in which Woods introduced himself and listed all the places he had worked (an illustrious résumé including time served as sous-chef at Avalon, Chiado, Senses and Canoe). The gist of it was a question, asked without petulance: what did he have to do to attract my attention? Oddly enough, I had been meaning to have dinner at Habitat for months. The place had been favourably reviewed in Toronto Life soon after Woods arrived there in the fall of 2005, and friends of mine had recommended the food with considerable enthusiasm. I just hadn’t managed to get there yet.

One evening in August, my wife and I decided to rectify this regrettable omission. We arrived unfashionably early and for an hour had the room to ourselves. First impressions weren’t fabulous. Our welcome was Queen West casual, and the decor lacked magic in the last of the daylight. The menu, however, intrigued me. Alongside the regular à la carte of starters and mains, Woods proposed small, tapas-sized mystery dishes presented in groups of three, five or seven. It took me a moment to realize that this clever arrangement offered a unique opportunity to combine a chef’s tasting menu with more conventional plates, instead of having to choose between the two formats.

“That’s brilliant,” I said to my wife. And so was our dinner. This may be the first kitchen Woods has commanded as a fully fledged chef, but his cooking has the coherence and stylistic individuality of a mature artist—and that’s not a word I use lightly. He draws on the ingredients and techniques of an amazing range of cuisines—French, Japa­nese, Portuguese, Basque, Italian, Korean, even molecular gastronomy—but the result is no patchwork. “Global cuisine” is a fashionable concept that, in the wrong hands, can end up being a muddle of odd juxtapositions and cheap flavour thrills. Woods is one of a handful of chefs in the city who can work all these subtle references into a seamless aesthetic that makes total sense on the palate.

Consider just one of his dishes—a succulent piece of pork belly. Woods started by giving it flavour with an Asian marinade of ginger, mirin and soy. He cooked it sous vide for 24 hours in the modern French way, sealed in a vacuum bag over a very low heat, then quickly deep-fried it to soften the fat. By the time it reached the plate, it was tremblingly soft and rich, the taste of the pork enhanced by the marinade. Beneath the meat Woods slid thinly sliced cuttlefish, its texture echoing that of the pork, the combination reminding me of Portuguese pork-and-seafood dishes. He added two sauces: one a tangy kimchee purée, like some Korean fantasy of elegance, the other a sweet, sticky reduction of chicken stock, soy, mirin and brown sugar, thickened with kuzu starch. The final touch was a whole poached quail’s egg, also cooked sous vide to make certain the yolk and the white shared the same almost liquid texture, and five or six crisped threads of Japanese yam.

Extraordinary—and that was just one dish out of a dozen. By the time we went home that night, I was determined to learn the provenance of my dinner, to plot Woods’s professional history and find out which of the kitchens where he once worked had coached his imagination and taught him such a variety of techniques. How come he had managed to turn his training to such delicious purpose when so many other cooks of his generation have not?

"What are your influences?" demands Jimmy Rabbitte in The Commitments when he’s auditioning Dublin lads for his band. Sitting opposite Scot Woods at Habitat a day or two later, I was tempted to be equally blunt. “I hope you weren’t offended by the letter,” he said before I could speak. Woods looks younger than his 32 years, almost boyish in a casual shirt and jeans. The self-confidence, the necessary artistic ego that finds its way into his cooking, is less obvious in the flesh. He knows he’s paid his dues, that he has the talent to stake a claim in Toronto’s culinary future, but I never met a chef who didn’t also need the reassurance that others shared that opinion.