Road Trip!
Lush Niagara farmland and a tight-knit foodie community have turned St. Catharines into a dining destination. Here, a guide to the best of the best
Fat Rabbit
34 Geneva St., 905-688-6553, fat-rabbit.ca
1 If one place embodies what’s so irresistible about the Niagara region’s food scene right now, this is it. Fat Rabbit, which opened last fall, is a restaurant that’s also a butcher, a commissary and a scene for food-industry folks with tattoos of leafy greens. They’re drawn to chef-owner Zach Smith, who is hale and gregarious and earned his stripes as a chef at Bar Raval and the short-lived Matty Matheson Fort Erie restaurant Meat and Three. His cooking is big, flavourful and fun, taking full advantage of his connections to small family farms, local wineries and artisanal producers. Lunch features porchetta sandwiches and smash burgers made from fresh-ground chuck. The dinner menu changes weekly but often stars Smith’s house-cured charcuterie, intricately spiced sausages, gingery jerk shrimp with nubs of salty bacon, oysters Rockefeller and heaving seafood platters. For a main, your server invites you to the butcher case to select a cut.
What to eat: A luxuriously marbled T-bone that’s been aged for three weeks until it’s richly funky and flavourful.
What to drink: A raw (meaning unfiltered) malbec by Niagara-on-the-Lake winery Big Head.
Di’s Pizza Pies
115 St. Paul St., no phone, dispizzapies.com
2 This past spring, a cuteness bomb exploded in the form of this vintage-as-heck slice shop. The name is a nod to Diana Sweets, the diner that occupied the spot for most of the last century and was known for cherry sodas and hot-beef sandwiches. The ice-cold retro sodas are back, just the right balance of sweet and tart, but the hot beef has been replaced by New York–style slices, the kind with a crust that’s charred and sturdy yet easily foldable while you’re walking home after a great night out.
What to eat: The Di-zza, another ode to the diner that was, which combines a gravy reduction, house-made pastrami, mozzarella and slices of potato. It’s tangy, hefty and just greasy enough.
What to drink: Hand-pulled cherry soda, obviously.
Hometown Ice Cream
1267 Niagara Stone Rd., Virgil, 905-988-6174, hometownicecream.com
3 Certain ice cream aficionados believe that the only way to judge a shop is by its vanilla. At Hometown, which recently moved into a space with the Grove farm store in the nearby village of Virgil, the vanilla is terrific. It’s made in-house with whole milk and cream, pure vanilla and no preservatives. But don’t miss the rest of the rotating ice cream menu, especially the cherry balsamic, the maple butter tart and the awesomely rich milk chocolate. The shop is an ideal pit stop between wine tours—Lakeview Wine and Wayne Gretzky Estates are steps away.
What to eat: The seasonal peach ice cream, swirled through with homemade peach preserve.
What to take home: A pecan butter tart pie.
Stoke Deli Bar
55 Geneva St., 905-324-7357, stokedelibar.ca
4 Chef-owner Jess Marshall’s obsession with wood fire began while grilling pizzas and steaks at a rural Soho House in Somerset, UK. Later, she followed her life partner, Cait Bermuhler, back to Niagara. Their business—which shares a space with bakery and coffee hub De La Terre—is a provisioner (known for fiery hot sauces and snappy pickles) and a made-to-order counter serving sandwiches stuffed with layers of protein (pork belly, grilled salmon, halloumi) and local leafy greens. This past summer, they opened a second location in neighbouring Fonthill.
What to eat: The grilled salmon on focaccia with cucumber, mint, pepperoncini and pickled onion.
What to take home: A bottle of house-made Hot Maple sauce, which combines chili and Canadian syrup and is equally amazing drizzled on pizza and ice cream or spread on a sandwich.
Pharmacii
22 King St., @pharmacii_restaurant_bar
5 Is Korean bar food the best of all bar foods? Whatever side of the debate you’re on, there’s no argument that it goes terrifically with the exquisite cocktails at this otherwise laid-back, huge-“Hello!”-at-the-door spot from co-owner and chef Ryan Jeong. This is grade-A bar snacking: the kitchen brews its own soy sauce for a tower of soba noodles, cabbage slaw and beef bulgogi; coats fried chicken in sticky house-made chili sauce; and presses its own tofu (made with Niagara soybeans) for a platter of kimchi and pork belly.
What to eat: Beef tartare with Asian pear, nori and gochujang sorbet.
What to drink: A late-summer smash of puréed local watermelon and fresh basil with strawberry gin from Niagara distiller Dillon’s.
RPM Bakehouse
3839 Main St., Jordan, no phone, rpmbakehouse.com
6 Daniel Hadida and Eric Robertson, apparently not busy enough running their heralded Restaurant Pearl Morissette, opened this casual outpost in 2022. The baked goods and pastries are ultra-seasonal: biscuits made with wild garlic in the spring, choux buns stuffed with cool whipped cream and local berries in the summer, and hearty loaves flavoured with nuts and cheeses in the colder months. Lunch follows the same principle: garden salads and sourdough sandwiches give way to tourtière and seafood chowder.
What to eat: A cobb salad of greens picked that morning on the PM farm, with roasted chicken and buttermilk–blue cheese dressing.
What to drink: Bottles of PM wines often sell out upon release, but many are available here by the glass.
Dispatch
386 St. Paul St., 289-273-2392, dispatchrestaurant.com
7 Married chefs Gizem and Emre Afsar arrived in Niagara via cooking stints in their native Turkey and, briefly, Alaska. Their menu, which trots the globe from Germany (crispy chicken schnitzel) to Greece (pan-seared halloumi) to Japan (fries tossed with togarashi, dried seaweed and furikake), makes a virtue of eclecticism. The elegantly spare room, tailored for date nights with table lanterns, cocktails and slick service, is a block from the city’s buzzy new performing arts centre.
What to eat: Steak with a Café de Paris sauce topped with shoestring frites tossed in herbs and asiago.
What to drink: The restaurant’s bartenders occasionally produce limited-edition bottles using products from Niagara distillers and winemakers, including a perfectly puckery limoncello.
The Burgh
1 Albert St. W., Thorold, 905-680-8088, theburgh.ca
8 Take a short trip up the Niagara Escarpment to the sleepy community of Thorold to visit this takeout counter in a hidey-hole behind a corner pub (ambitiously named Harry’s New York Bar). The Burgh does one thing very well: smash burgers made from hand-ground triple-A Alberta beef and brisket, seared on a flat-top and served on a pillowy brioche bun. The fries are crispy perfection, and even the medium wings are scorchers.
What to eat: The Big Cheese, which is smothered with two types of cheddar (extra old and American) and cheddar mayo, plus bacon.
Where to eat it: Staff will deliver your burger to a table inside Harry’s, where the big screens are (usually) tuned to the playoffs.
Groundswell Coffee
Various locations, check website for schedule, groundswellcoffeecompany.com
9 Stop by a winery tour, a pick-your-own farm, a running club meetup or an indie craft market and there’s Kristie Willms’s handsome jet-black trailer—a coffee shop on wheels. She’s known for serving exquisite espressos and pour-overs, her beans sourced from a rotating list of small-batch roasters like Hamilton’s Detour, plus home-baked goodies. This autumn, she’ll be appearing at the Dillon’s Distillery fall market, the Cicada Music and Arts festival and Niagara Falls’ annual HandMade holiday market, among other pop-ups and events.
What to eat: A heavenly vegan cranberry cookie.
What to drink: The sounds-so-wrong-but-tastes-so-right marriage of cold brew and lemonade, a quencher with a kick—especially popular with the above-mentioned runners.
OddBird
52 St. Paul St., 905-322-4034, oddbird.ca
10 With its copper bar, graffitied walls, patio of picnic tables and menu that ranges from buckets of buttermilk fried chicken to full caviar service, OddBird has become the definition of a high-low Niagara restaurant—and spawned a dozen imitators in the process. Between them, co-chefs and owners Justin Duc and Scott White have cooked in some of the best local winery restaurants as well as Montreal’s renowned Au Pied de Cochon and Toqué. Those latter gigs explain their fondness for foie gras, which they serve with pork belly, on pancakes and in an ice-wine terrine.
What to eat: Follow one of those foie gras apps with a fried-chicken sandwich on a brioche bun slathered in tangy Big Mac–style sauce.
What to drink: An occasional star of the ever-changing drink list is the Miami Vice—a sharable piña colada and strawberry daiquiri served in a hollowed-out frozen pineapple.
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