Pinbones Fish Market

A pinbone is the thin row of bones a fishmonger works out of a fillet before it reaches the plate — the kind of detail only someone who handles fish for a living bothers with. The name is honest. Pinbones Fish Market runs two operations from one storefront on King Street West in downtown Dundas: a working seafood counter on one side, a full dining room on the other, both built on the same fish. The same visit can run from grilled octopus and a cocktail at the table to a piece of halibut wrapped for the drive home. The dining room opened in 2023, two years after the counter.

The menu reads like a fishmonger wrote it. Smoked Trout Sushi Pizza is the clearest tell — a crisp rice cake under smoked trout, sambal aioli, avocado, and sesame togarashi, a plate that sits halfway between counter discipline and outright invention. The Crab Cake comes with preserved lemon vinaigrette; the Grilled Octopus arrives with chickpeas, roasted red pepper, saffron aioli, harissa, and olive dust. The Lobster Roll gets celeriac aioli and chives on toasted brioche, frites alongside. From there the kitchen ranges wide — a Seafood Tower, Ceviche, Tuna Tacos, Whole Grilled Fish, Buffalo Halibut Cheeks, a straight-ahead Fish and Chips, and, for the table that didn't come for fish, a Pinbones Burger or Steak Frites. The drink list keeps the theme honest with an Oyster Martini, a Pinbones Caesar, and an oyster shot poured to sit beside the chilled plates.

What holds that range together is the counter behind it. Pinbones buys and sells whole fish, so the kitchen cooks from the same case the retail customer shops, and the menu moves with whatever the counter is carrying that week. The seafood is sourced with sustainability in mind, and the staff are glad to talk through where a fish came from and how to cook it — at the table or across the retail counter. They even publish recipes for what's in the case, the kind of thing a shop does and a restaurant usually doesn't. That is why the chilled side — oysters, ceviche, the tower — reads as the centre of the place rather than a starter route, and why a whole grilled fish can land on a table without feeling like a special order. On a given night, the fish being grilled whole is whatever came in whole that morning.

The through-line starts with the owner. Rebecca DeWildt grew up in Ancaster and spent childhood summers in Prince Edward Island, eating lobster and digging clams — seafood as biography long before it was a business. She was working as a sous chef at the Ancaster Mill when the pandemic cost her the job, and she answered it the way a cook does, by selling what she knew: fresh fish, over a counter, in 2021. According to local reporting, that counter is what grew, step by step, into the restaurant that surrounds it now.

In early 2026, Pinbones moved across King Street into the former Valley Charcoal space, reopening after a Valentine's Day soft launch and trading its first small room for one close to twice the size — twenty-six seats to forty-eight. The new address kept it in familiar company, on a stretch of Dundas where specialty food shops like Picone's sit close together and locals run Saturday errands from one counter to the next. The bigger dining room added seats, a longer drink list, and a reservation page, but it didn't change the premise: a Seafood Tower when the night calls for it, a Lobster Roll at lunch, a fillet wrapped to cook at home on the way past. Pinbones still works the way the original counter did, only with more tables in front of it.