The Ship

The Ship was a craft-beer pub before downtown Hamilton had many of them. The chalkboard of Ontario taps came first, the kitchen grew up around it, and at one point the place even brewed its own — a small-batch house beer poured alongside the rotating guest lines. What sits on Augusta Street in Hess Village today still leads with the beer, but the menu has caught up to it: Erie-style perch, Cajun catfish, crab chowder poutine, and a long list of charbroiled burgers that carry more ideas than the category usually bothers with.

The dish that explains the kitchen fastest is the crab chowder poutine — fresh-cut fries under blue crab, cheese curd, and a bacon clam chowder that does the work a gravy would somewhere less ambitious. The burgers run long and a little theatrical. The Big Pickle stacks fried pickle strings, bacon, Cheddar, pickled onion, and a honey-lime sriracha; the Black and Blue leans on Boneshaker IPA-braised onions, blue cheese, bacon, and smoky barbecue sauce; the Big Smoke, the Mushroom Meltdown, and the Greek fill out a list that keeps finding new variations on a charbroiled patty. The fish lane is just as serious — Cajun-breaded catfish with slaw and tartar, Lake Erie perch and chips, fish tacos on breaded perch, and a catfish po'boy for the table that wants a sandwich instead of a plate.