*By: Deepi Harish*
Not every great meal is around the corner. Across Ontario, there are restaurants tucked into small towns that are worth jumping in the car for. From destination tasting menus to laid-back neighbourhood gems in unexpected places, here are eight Ontario restaurants you’ll want to plan your next road trip around:
8 Ontario Restaurants Worth The Drive
1. The Royal – Prince Edward County
If you’re only in Prince Edward County (PEC) for the day, dinner at The Royal Restaurant inside the Royal Hotel is a must. The hotel is about two hours from Toronto, in Picton, which is the largest town in PEC. The hotel itself is beautiful: a restored 19th-century Victorian railway hotel. In fact, it’s earned Michelin Keys two years in a row, but what genuinely impressed me was just how hyper-regional the dining program is. Nearly everything is made in-house, from the pastries, pasta and breads to the mortadella, condiments and cured meats. Even the honey comes from the chef’s own farm. The menu is deeply tied to PEC’s seasonality, with produce, maple syrup, grains and meats sourced directly from Edwin County Farms, a 650+ acre farm 20 minutes from the hotel. Everything is intensely fresh and vibrant. The food tastes like it came from somewhere, not just arrived somewhere.
2. The Pine – Creemore
The Pine is the kind of restaurant people keep talking about long after their meal. Set in a former gas station in Creemore, the Michelin-starred restaurant offers a tasting menu that’s ambitious without feeling overly formal. The chefs’ years of experience working in China show up in the food, with techniques and flavours woven into dishes that are built around local Canadian ingredients. The menu changes with the seasons, with the kitchen preserving and saving ingredients throughout the year so they can bring certain flavours back when they’re no longer available fresh. Dining at The Pine is more than just a meal, guests are taken through an 18 to 21 course experience, with the staff explaining the stories behind each plate along the way.
3. Lore – Collingwood
If The Pine is the special-occasion destination, Lore is its more relaxed sister restaurant in downtown Collingwood. About a two-hour drive from Toronto, the intimate 32-seat restaurant serves a 12 to 15 course tasting menu that changes weekly, with the option of individually plated dishes or family-style. Signature dishes like the foie gras beaver tail and shrimp cocktail have earned permanent spots on the menu. The ambience is just as memorable as the food. This is not a quiet, hushed dinner. In fact, the menu jokes about asking the restaurant to turn down the music for $98, which pretty much tells you what kind of night you’re walking into. The team doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it takes the cooking very seriously. At its core, Lore is about celebrating generational cooking traditions through the lens of a constantly evolving tasting menu.
4. Restaurant Pearl Morissette – Niagara Region
About 80 minutes from Toronto, Restaurant Pearl Morissette in Jordan Station isn’t somewhere you stumble upon. You go there with intent (and reservations secured way in advance). Set on the top floor of the Pearl Morissette winery overlooking a 42-acre property, it’s become one of Canada’s most talked-about dining rooms. It’s also the only two-Michelin-star restaurant in Ontario. The menu is driven first by what’s being harvested just steps from the restaurant, supplemented by ingredients from small Ontario farms, foragers, fishers and producers across Canada. Guests often arrive early for a garden tour, tasting herbs and vegetables in their raw form before seeing them reworked on the plate. In winter, preservation and cellar techniques carry the cooking through the colder months, keeping the focus on what the land can offer year-round.
5. Fat Rabbit – St. Catharines
About a 75-minute drive from Toronto, Fat Rabbit is part butcher shop, part restaurant and a good reason to make a stop in St. Catharines. The focus is on whole-animal cooking, with a zero-waste approach. The charcuterie goes well beyond the usual board staples. Alongside coppa, mortadella and ’nduja, you’ll find specialties like lamb soppressata and duck prosciutto. The menu changes often, depending on what’s been butchered, but you can always count on a strong, mostly local wine list and cocktails made in collaboration with Dillon’s. Then there’s the burger, which recently landed on the World’s 101 Best Burgers list. It’s not trying to reinvent the wheel, it’s just an eight-ounce beef patty with sherry-caramelized onions, Gruyère, dijonnaise and pickles. When the ingredients are this good, that’s all it needs.
6. Down Home – Grey County
This 16-seat restaurant sits on the same property where the owners live, garden and cook. The 10-course tasting menu at Down Home is shaped by nearby farms and whatever’s growing just outside the kitchen door. In the summer, guests are can wander through the gardens before dinner, where many of the herbs, fruits and vegetables on the menu are grown. In winter, the focus shifts to preserved ingredients and cooking over fire. They often cook with unexpected ingredients like peach leaf, black currant wood and carrot tops, proving that some of the most interesting flavours come from ingredients that are overlooked.
7. Odd Duck – Kitchener-Waterloo
About 75 minutes from Toronto, Odd Duck skips the usual fine dining formula altogether. There are no signature dishes or seasonal menu launches, just a constantly evolving menu built around what’s coming in from small Ontario farms and whatever’s inspiring the kitchen that week. During peak growing season, it’s not unusual for several dishes to change between visits, so no two meals are ever quite the same. The cooking relies heavily on local ingredients, including herbs you don’t often see on restaurant menus, like anise hyssop, bee balm, lime balm and marigold leaves. But what really sets Odd Duck apart is their approach to wine. Instead of pairing bottles with finished dishes, the team starts with small wine producers—not unavailable at the LCBO—and builds the food around them. The kitchen works in real time, constantly evolving with the seasons, the deliveries and the wines.
8. Isabelle – Burlington
Located inside The Pearle Hotel in Burlington, about 45 minutes from Toronto, Isabelle is entering a new chapter through Pearle Hospitality’s first large-scale collaboration with Patrick Kriss, the chef behind Alo. The partnership brings Kriss’s signature style of cooking beyond Toronto in a hotel setting for the first time. The menu is Mediterranean, built around seafood, grilled meats, vibrant dips and seasonal Ontario produce, much of it grown on the property’s own farm. Designed for sharing, it’s the kind of place where ordering a few things quickly turns into ordering more. Overlooking Lake Ontario, the dining room strikes a balance between polished and relaxed, equally suited to a long lunch on the patio or a celebratory dinner by the water.
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