Betty's Restaurant

Betty's seats close to five hundred people and still cooks like the twenty-one-seat fish-and-chips counter it began as. The haddock is the order the kitchen points to first — fried, grilled, or baked, with fresh-cut fries or mashed potato and coleslaw alongside — and it remains the clearest first read on how this place cooks. But fish and chips is only the front door. Behind it runs a menu wide enough that a roast turkey dinner, a tray of cabbage rolls and perogies, a plate of meat-and-four-cheese lasagna, and a breakfast served until two in the afternoon all answer to one idea of Niagara home cooking. It is the Chippawa restaurant a whole table can agree on when nobody wants the same thing.

The menu reads like a survey of Canadian comfort cooking. The Prime Rib Dinner anchors the upper end, a full roast plate that turns up in the weekly specials with dessert built in. Roast Beef and Yorkshire, roast turkey, and a hot turkey sandwich keep the Sunday-dinner register going all week long. The Lasagna is the homestyle pivot — meat and four cheeses, a homemade tomato and fresh basil marinara, garlic bread on the side — for the table that wants warmth over seafood. Chicken and veal parmigiana come over penne in that same marinara, a gluten-free version available. A ten-ounce New York steak arrives with mushrooms or onion rings and can be set up with jumbo shrimp; a Ham Hawaiian carries pineapple, and a vegetarian dinner of peppers, onions, and mushrooms over penne covers the table that needs one. And the seafood runs well past the famous haddock: Atlantic salmon baked or grilled, halibut done three ways, and a seafood platter that puts fish and shrimp on a single plate.