Is this Ontario city Canada’s next great food destination? | Canada Voices

It’s a muggy midweek afternoon in June and the two adjoining dining rooms at Fat Rabbit, a buzzy restaurant and butchery on an unlikely corner in downtown St. Catharines, Ont., are, well, hopping.

In one of them, servers carry platefuls of beef, lamb and fowl to hungry diners while drop-in customers check out the meat and condiments for sale in the front-of-house shop. In the other – which was only recently carved out of space next door, more than tripling the three-year-old restaurant’s capacity – head butcher Justin Upper is demonstrating his skill with a knife and a hacksaw for a gaggle of foodies from Toronto.

“Nothing goes to waste,” Upper says as he breaks down a side of locally raised lamb, creating the chops and filets that will later be served alongside such inventive side dishes as honey-coated broccolini tempura.

In 2024, Fat Rabbit’s way with both meat and produce was recognized by none other than Michelin, which hailed its “superb slices of bresaola” and “green bean salad dressed with anchovy vinaigrette and toasted pine nuts.” It wasn’t a star rating, but it was enough to put the restaurant – not to mention St. Catharines itself – on the culinary map.

Until recently, Niagara-on-the-Lake was the region’s epicentre for high-end food, even if its hotels and restaurants have traditionally been on the twee side. Michelin’s recognition of Fat Rabbit, however, has shifted at least some of the spotlight to nearby St. Catharines, a longtime manufacturing hub to which distant gourmands now make regular treks.

“Most of our out-of-town guests come from the Greater Toronto Area as well as upstate New York,” says executive chef and co-owner Zach Smith, a B.C. transplant who served as chef de cuisine at Toronto’s Bar Raval before relocating to St. Catharines – his wife’s hometown – during the pandemic.

“I never had international aspirations – absolutely not,” he contends. “But I did want to swing for the fences. I didn’t want to just be a small-town restaurant. I wanted to be more than that.”

Consider that goal met – and then some. On the day that I visited Fat Rabbit, it had just been included on the list of the World’s 101 Best Burger Places, the only Canadian restaurant to make the cut. Its cheeseburger – a thick beef patty topped with caramelized onions, Gruyère, pickles and Dijon mayonnaise – was ranked 38th overall. Earlier this year, Fat Rabbit also showed up on the list of Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants, coming in at 48.

On the strength of the restaurant’s success – and to absorb some of its customer overflow – Smith and his team also launched Bar Les Incompetents, a “French-ish” bistro that focuses on cocktails and seafood, just down the street in October.

“Being from Vancouver, I grew up eating a lot of seafood,” he says. “Since Fat Rabbit is very meat-focused, my intention with Bar Les Incompetents is to showcase the other end of the spectrum, to explore my food memories and my passion for seafood.” (I can vouch for the deliciousness – and freshness – of BLI’s tuna tartare tart.)

At the same time, St. Catharines’ developing foodie cred rests on more than just a single restaurant. A short walk down St. Paul Street from BLI, for instance, is oddBird, an intimate, open-kitchen eatery launched by co-chefs Justin Duc and Scott White in 2017.

“Practically speaking, downtown St. Catharines is a great spot for restaurants,” enthuses Duc, who, like White, grew up in the region. A decade ago, “there was a lot of turnover among businesses in the area, making it easy for us to find a prime location.” In addition, the city “isn’t just located in the middle of the wine regions, but also among a lot of great farms, making it easy to source good product from nearby.”

That latter advantage – an abundance of unique local ingredients – is a cornerstone of oddBird’s playfully avant-garde menu, which currently features such delicacies as seared beef tongue with pickled garlic scapes and chicken liver mousse laced with ice wine.

“To be honest, we didn’t always think it would land,” Duc says of their menu, “and we were prepared to fall back on fried chicken and burgers if we had to. Now, almost 10 years later, St. Catharines truly feels like the dining hub of the region.”

Indeed, Fat Rabbit and Oddbird have upped the city centre’s hip quotient, giving still gritty St. Paul Street a Brooklyn-esque vibe. It wasn’t always so trendy.

“We were told many times to open up our shop elsewhere,” says Tayler Book, who was born and raised in St. Catharines. In 2015, she and her business partner, Shane Belanger, had staked their culinary claim on the street, launching Beechwood Doughnuts with a simple mission: to make great doughnuts that also happened to be vegan.

“But this location made the most sense to me. Downtown is where my community was, so naturally it was where I wanted to be.” Her instinct proved prescient. In the intervening years, “Niagara’s first and only 100-per-cent vegan doughnut shop” has amassed a cult following for its highly original offerings, which include everything from peach fritters (Niagara is known for its peach, plum and cherry orchards) to long johns (long, cream-filled doughnuts topped with a chocolate glaze).

“Our best sellers, though, are definitely our cronuts, which are made from laminated croissant dough cut and fried like doughnuts,” says Book. The most popular: the cronnoli, a sugared cronut filled with mascarpone-style cannoli filling with mini chocolate chips.

Currently, Beechwood’s charming store, where as many as 3,000 doughnuts are turned out daily, is the only place to sample its goods. (It does offer next-day delivery, but only within the Niagara region and to the nearby cities of Hamilton and Burlington.) “We have no plans for expansion,” says Book. “Our focus will continue to be on making our store the best that it can be.”

Just as fixated on hyper-locality is another culinary landmark about a 15-minute drive west of Beechwood: Restaurant Pearl Morissette, located in the town of Lincoln. Opened in 2017 by co-chefs Daniel Hadida and Eric Robertson, the acclaimed farm-to-table restaurant takes seasonality seriously, drawing on local farms and food purveyors (plus its own regenerative garden) to create its ever-changing menus.

Last year, it became only the second restaurant in Canada to receive two stars from Michelin, which gushed over such dishes as the roasted guinea hen with chanterelles, mokum carrot and fig. Adding to the restaurant’s allure is its location on the top floor of the Pearl Morissette Estate Winery, an idyllic 42-acre property specializing in low-intervention wines, a growing category in the region.

“This area has changed so profoundly over the last few years – I am so proud to be from here,” says local vintner Carolyn Hurst, who feels that the people in and around St. Catharines have been starting to assert their own distinct identities as makers and producers.

Unlike Niagara-on-the-Lake, St. Catharines lies on the west side of the Welland Canal, in a microclimate known as the Benchlands.

“The Benchlands do indeed have their own identity within the Niagara region,” says Hurst, who left the area after graduating from high school in the 1970s but returned with her husband about a dozen years ago to launch Westcott Vineyards, a boutique winery whose small-batch pinot noirs and chardonnays are served in a number of local restaurants, including Pearl Morissette.

As their name suggests, the Benchlands are comprised of gently sloping hills – aka benches – that tumble down the side of the Niagara Escarpment. The elevated terrain and clay-like soil of this landscape result in wines that are crisper and more mineral-driven than those produced closer to Niagara-on-the-Lake, where they’re sweeter and more fruit-forward.

According to Hurst, the vintners on her side of the canal also tend to be small business owners with entrepreneurial streaks, their footprint encompassing at least 50 boutique wineries between St. Catharines and the town of Grimsby. These range from such well-established properties as Hidden Bench Estate Winery to female-owned outfits like Mason Vineyard.

“Most of us are self-made people who have invested our life savings in the vineyards,” Westcott says. “We all know each other and help each other out when necessary. We are innovative by nature and share experiences and experiments.”

That same spirit of experimentation characterizes the food scene in St. Catharines, where almost all of the restaurants making waves can be classified as labours of love, passion projects, studies in new ways to eat.

“It is so exciting to see so many other people choosing to grow in St. Catharines and the Niagara Region,” says Beechwood Doughnuts’ Book. “There’s no place I’d rather be.”

If you go

Reservations for Fat Rabbit, oddBird and Pearl Morissette are a must. Walk-ins are more easily accommodated at Bar Les Incompetents and oddBar, oddBird’s more casual sister establishment a five-minute walk away.

If you’re staying overnight in the Benchlands, consider checking into Inn on the Twenty, located in historic Jordan Village. Among its amenities are an acclaimed farm-to-table restaurant and a full-service spa.

Before heading home, be sure to pick up some cheese from the Upper Canada Cheese Company, a Pearl Morissette supplier whose offerings include Camembert-like Comfort Cream and award-winning Heritage Cheddar.

The writer was a guest in some instances of Tourism St. Catharines and Niagara Benchlands, which did not review or approve this article. Stories are based on merit; The Globe does not guarantee coverage.