Jamie Kennedy starts serving dinner again, this time at a re-dubbed Gilead

Jamie Kennedy is in his Corktown kitchen tonight as the Gilead Bistro—long home to the Gilead Café—serves its first dinner menu. The space seats 40 and will offer dinner Tuesday through Saturday, complete with servers (the Café only has counter service) and a multi-course menu. Unsurprisingly for a Kennedy project, the food will be seasonal, switching over to spring options towards the end of March. But that’s months away; tonight, there are hearty winter dishes like chicken noodle soup with confit gizzard ($8), gratin of agria potato ($7) and pork ragout with noodles and goulash paste ($20). All wines are from Ontario and offered by the glass, and a $20 corkage option is also available.

Kennedy was once one of the city’s dinner masters, having prepared the much-lauded plates at his former restaurants, Jamie Kennedy Wine Bar and Jamie Kennedy at the Gardiner. He placed the blame for those failures on his fervent support for the local and slow food movements. “I may have been asleep at the wheel in terms of the overall business,” Kennedy bemoans on the National Post Web site today. His focus on the Gilead indicates that he is still in driver’s seat, but far from nodding off.