Ted's Range Road Diner

Few roadside diners keep alligator on the appetizer list and caribou among the mains. Ted's Range Road Diner keeps both, alongside elk, bison, and venison — a wild-game spread parked, improbably, on Grey Road 112 a few minutes south of Meaford. It is the kind of roster most steakhouses would not attempt, and the kitchen treats it as ordinary. The exotic meats are the reason people make the drive, and the diner has built its identity around them for decades. What keeps the place from tipping into novelty is that none of it crowds out the prime rib.

The dinner list runs along two tracks. On the game side sit Bison Steak, an Elk Special that also turns up in an Arctic stir-fry, Caribou Medallion, and Venison Steak, with quail and ostrich rounding out the rotation — the wild-game lane the diner built its name on. On the steakhouse side are Prime Rib with Yorkshire, a Cajun prime rib listed on its own, and the BBQ beef ribs the menu tells diners to phone ahead for rather than expect on demand. The seafood half is no afterthought: Seafood Bake, Blackened Trout, lobster tail, and Mushroom Caps with Seafood for a table that wants to start light. Between the three tracks, a single party can run from alligator to lobster tail to a Yorkshire-topped prime rib without anyone settling.

That range is the point. Plenty of kitchens keep one token game dish on as a novelty; here the caribou and bison are everyday mains, priced and plated next to burgers, breakfast plates, and prime rib rather than staged as a dare. The comfort-food base does real work — it lets the diner seat a carful of people with different appetites and send every one of them home fed, the adventurous and the cautious at one table. It also points to a kitchen that has cooked these proteins long enough to make them routine; venison and elk turn tough and livery when handled casually, and a menu that keeps them in steady rotation is making a quiet claim about its competence. A wild-game list reads as a gimmick when it is thin and a real kitchen when it is deep, and this one is deep.

Ted's has been doing this since 1987, family-owned across nearly four decades on the same rural road. The setting is half the appeal: the dining room sits inside a Quonset hut, the arched corrugated-steel kind you would sooner expect to store farm equipment than to plate caribou, and the metal arch makes the building hard to mistake for anything else on the road. The hut has long doubled as a music hall, and weekly jam nights have run here long enough to become a tradition of their own — a standing event regulars measure the calendar by, and one local coverage has followed across a quarter century. Dinner and a band under that curved roof, on a quiet county road, is a specific kind of evening, and the reason a meal here runs longer than the food alone would explain.

The hours match the destination logic. Ted's opens Thursday through Sunday, three in the afternoon to nine at night, and takes its reservations by phone — a place you aim for on purpose, not one you wander into on a Tuesday. Closed Monday through Wednesday, it asks to be built into the week rather than caught on a whim. It suits a divided table: the alligator-curious, the prime-rib loyalist, and the person who only wants lobster tail all order from one menu. The drive out to Grey Road 112 is the cost of admission. The mountain of BBQ ribs is worth the phone call from the highway.