Crafted 1885

The fries at Crafted 1885 can arrive naked. Order them that way and a plate of fresh-cut potatoes comes over for you to finish yourself at a condiment counter stocked with more than thirty-seven toppings, sauces and spices. That counter is the organizing idea of the kitchen: comfort food assembled to your own specification, on a base built from scratch. The setting frames it in local history — a dining room lined with wood and shingles pulled from a Fort Erie barn more than a century and a half old, and a name whose 1885 predates the restaurant itself by more than a hundred and thirty years.

Two threads lead the menu, and both are built to be customized. The signature subs come on fresh-baked bread — the Buffalo Chicken Bacon, the Philly Steak, the Italian Trio stacked with prosciutto, mortadella and black forest ham, the TBH layered with smoked turkey, bacon and ham. Poutine is the other, running from the Classic of fresh-cut fries, gravy and cheese curds to the Buffalo Chicken Bacon Signature and the Tex Mex Dorito Crunch, loaded with ground beef, Doritos, sour cream and salsa. Local reporting singled out the Buffalo Chicken Bacon Sub and the Philly Steak among the early standouts, and both are still on the board.

The rest of the board widens from there. Burgers include a smoked smashed-brisket patty and a hot-sauce chicken build finished with dry-aged cheddar and onion rings. House-made mac and cheese comes as cavatappi under a six-cheese sauce, sometimes crowned with crushed Doritos, or breaded chicken and bacon for a Buffalo version. Wings arrive with a long run of sauces — honey garlic, chipotle, Thai sweet and spicy, Frank's Red Hot, creamy garlic, the house Crafted Hot Sauce. Around them sit the everyday extras: mozzarella sticks, jalapeño poppers, a grilled-chicken rice bowl with garlic sauce, and a vegetarian Buffalo chick'n sub for the table that needs one.

What ties all of it together is choice. Almost everything can be routed through the same set of toppings, sauces and spices, which turns a sub or a plate of fries into a decision rather than a default. The from-scratch base is what makes the customization land — fresh-baked buns, fresh-cut fries, a house six-cheese sauce — so the parts a diner controls rest on parts the kitchen won't hand off. Portions run generous, and combo platters are sized to feed a shared table as readily as a single diner. Chicken fingers, poutine and sandwich bundles turn up in the combo deals, the kind of order that feeds a family without much math.

Crafted 1885 opened in 2020, in the thick of the pandemic, and by July 2021 another Fort Erie family had taken it over — the current owners, who kept the from-scratch kitchen and the community footing intact. The history in the walls is deliberate. The name points to Snake Hill Grove, an 1885 gathering ground, and to Erie Beach, the amusement park that once drew crowds to the town's Lake Erie shoreline; the barn-wood interior, the mural by local artist Melani Pyke and the Victorian postcards set at the tables carry that memory into the present. The drinks keep the thread local too, in a Loganberry Banana Blast smoothie and a Maple Madness milkshake made with bourbon-barrel-aged maple syrup bottled in Fort Erie.

Open every day from late morning through dinner, with dine-in, takeout, delivery and phone orders all on the table, it settles into the role of a subs-and-poutines shop that treats where it stands as part of what it serves. A plate of fully loaded poutine under a barn-board wall, a sub built exactly to order, a milkshake keyed to a local flavour — the everyday kind of place that puts Fort Erie history at the table and leaves the rest of the meal up to you.