Remingtons of Niagara

At Remingtons of Niagara, the waitstaff sing. The dining room is built around singing servers — vocalists who wait tables and perform through dinner service, an arrangement the restaurant bills as the only one of its kind in Canada — and that showmanship is the first thing separating it from the other steakhouses near the Falls. Beneath the entertainment is a conventional steak-and-seafood kitchen: prime rib carried as the house specialty, and a seafood list deep enough to anchor a table on its own. The performance is the draw; the menu is the reason it holds up to a second visit.

Prime rib is the order the menu argues for hardest. It is AAA grain-fed beef aged twenty-eight days, hand trimmed, hand rubbed, slow roasted, and served in its natural juices, offered in eight-, twelve-, and sixteen-ounce cuts so the same dish scales from a standard dinner to a full steakhouse plate. The rest of the beef holds the line: an eight-ounce filet mignon, a ten-ounce New York strip, a sixteen-ounce ribeye, and a twenty-ounce T-bone. This is the part of the menu that makes Remingtons read as a steakhouse first, before any of the singing starts.

Seafood is not a courtesy listing here. The Surf & Turf pairs a ten-ounce New York strip with a lobster tail in garlic butter, the plate for a table that wants both lanes without negotiating two separate mains. The Treasure of the Sea gives seafood its own centrepiece — lobster tail, jumbo shrimp in garlic butter, and a crab cake with ancho chipotle sauce — and around it sit halibut, Atlantic salmon, seafood fettuccine, coconut shrimp, mussels, and ahi tuna. Both showpiece plates lean on the same buttery finish, the kind of consistency that says one hand is working the shellfish. A diner who skips the beef entirely still has a full meal to build.

The singing servers turn the meal into something closer to dinner theatre, which is why Remingtons reads as a destination for birthdays, anniversaries, and celebration dinners rather than a quick weeknight stop. It draws Niagara Falls visitors and couples after an occasion attached to the meal, and the kitchen keeps dinner hours only, opening in the late afternoon. The pacing fits the premise: a table is meant to settle in, order across two or three courses, and let the performance unfold around the food instead of rushing the meal.

Couples and celebration tables have the Ultimate Couples Prix Fixe, a set dinner for two that runs all week: wine, three shared appetizers, an entrée each, coffee or tea, and dessert, with early and late seatings priced below the standard dinner window. The current kitchen feature is a bison striploin — an eight-ounce cut with seasonal vegetables and a choice of potato — the kind of rotating special that gives a regular a reason to look past the usual order. For a table wanting neither a steak nor a full surf-and-turf, pasta primavera and baked gnocchi open a lighter third route.

The name nods to Frederic Remington, the artist of the American West, and the dining room carries the reference in bronze sculpture rather than in signage. Western bronzes, a slow-roasted prime-rib program, and a roster of performing servers is not a combination most kitchens would assemble on purpose, which is exactly what gives Remingtons an identity independent of the attraction a few blocks away. On the edge of the Clifton Hill district, where most tables are sold on the view, the draw here is what happens once you sit down — aged prime rib and lobster tails in front of you, and, somewhere through the meal, a server who sets down the plates and sings.