Cannery Restaurant

The slow-roasted prime rib comes off a AAA Canadian cut, plated with a baked russet potato, a garlic-and-chive Yorkshire pudding, Niagara farm vegetables, and red wine jus. It is the dish the Cannery Restaurant has built its name on, and the one the kitchen still treats as the heart of the menu. Inside Pillar and Post, the historic inn at the edge of Niagara-on-the-Lake's Old Town, the Cannery reads as a steakhouse first — a dining room where a good cut of beef, cooked with care and sent out with proper sides, is the whole proposition.

The steak list runs well past the prime rib. There is a ribeye finished with truffle mashed potatoes, green beans, mushrooms, a Bourbon peppercorn sauce, and crispy onions; a bacon-wrapped beef tenderloin under a stilton crust with pommery mustard jus; and, among the chef specialties, a braised short rib laid over roasted garlic mash with heirloom carrots and chimichurri. A lamb shoulder gnocchi arrives in a mushroom ragout with sundried tomato pesto, winter truffle, and crumbled asiago. Seafood holds its own ground — blue crab cakes with creole aioli and fennel slaw, pan-roasted Atlantic salmon over fingerling potatoes with Kalamata olives and a caper Provencal, PEI mussels steamed in chardonnay and cream.