Tide and Vine Oyster House

Two people who met working a downtown Toronto oyster bar decided the thing they did best deserved a permanent address. Mike Langley, a Niagara Falls native who took the Canadian oyster-shucking title in 2013, and Kat Steeves, a Moncton cook whose Maritime instincts run through the menu, spent the early years shucking and grilling out of a 1974 Volkswagen camper named Pearl — parked at wineries, farmers markets and festivals across the peninsula. What they built from it is Niagara's first and only oyster house, planted on Portage Road in Stamford, set deliberately back from the busiest tourist run of the Falls.

The raw bar is where the kitchen shows its hand. Shucker's-choice oysters arrive with lemon and mignonette; the towers — the Siren, the Kraken, the Walrus — stack the cold case into something a table works through together, with a yellowfin crudo on the chilled side. From there the menu warms without losing the thread. Kat's Seafood Chowder pulls scallops, shrimp, lobster, clams, salmon and haddock into one bowl, and the lobster roll keeps things plain with Canadian lobster, tarragon aioli and a toasted bun. The cooked mains push further — swordfish piccata with capers, lemon and brown butter, a squid ink pasta tangled with shrimp, whitefish, shaved fennel and crispy capers, whole lobster with hot butter, and a hot smoked salmon cured in a seventy-two-hour maple brine.