A Michelin-starred restaurant in Creemore just got a sister spot
Lore is the Pine’s more casual sibling in Collingwood
Back in 2020, not many people were making the 90-minute drive from Toronto to Creemore for dinner. A trip like that meant going to the cottage or hitting the slopes, not reservations for ambitious tasting menus.
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Then Jeremy and Cassie Austin opened the Pine, a converted gas station serving meticulous, deeply personal cooking shaped by Jeremy’s years in Shanghai, Wuxi, Hong Kong and Italy. Somehow, the restaurant convinced Michelin critics to trek out to Simcoe County two years in a row, earning the restaurant a star each time. Now, the Austins are expanding with Lore, a more casual, more accessible sibling in downtown Collingwood that swaps the Pine’s three-hour tasting menu odyssey for quirky à la carte plates.
“We were like, What’s the restaurant we’d want to go to every day?” says Jeremy. The answer was a seafood-focused spot inspired by Clamato, a restaurant in Paris where every dish has an element of seafood in it. So, at Lore, briny twists sneak into everything: heritage hen is served with a maitake sauce dotted with pickled trout roe; green beans are paired with mussels; an Angus T-bone comes with sea snail butter; there’s even snow crab in the potato salad. And dessert isn’t safe either—currently it’s jersey milk soft serve ice cream with kombu caramel.
“The dishes at the Pine are Chinese through and through,” says Jeremy. “The dishes at Lore are Canadian through and through.” That means riffs on Jeremy’s grandma Cledith’s recipes alongside dishes like Digby scallop nuggets, sambal-spiked tartare and beaver tails topped with foie gras and dulse, an East Coast seaweed. Nostalgic, irreverent and unmistakably modern Canadian: a menu where global flavours, prairie comfort food and East Coast staples don’t just coexist; they feel natural together.
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Where the Pine is all hushed haute dining—lots of space between tables, hushed conversation, servers who use crumb as a verb—Lore leans gleefully in the other direction. The room is tighter and louder: there’s even a tongue-in-cheek $98 “turn down the music” option on the menu, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about the vibe.
Caroline Aksich, a National Magazine Award recipient, is an ex-Montrealer who writes about Toronto’s ever-evolving food scene, real estate and culture for Toronto Life, Fodor’s, Designlines, Canadian Business, Glory Media and Post City. Her work ranges from features on octopus-hunting in the Adriatic to celebrity profiles.
