Ravine Vineyard Estate Winery

At most winery restaurants, the kitchen is built to stay out of the wine's way. Ravine Vineyard Estate Winery, in the St. Davids corner of Niagara-on-the-Lake, runs the opposite way: the food program is the reason to plan the trip, and the wine comes along with it rather than the other way around. The bistro sends out handmade pasta and prix fixe menus, the bakery turns out bread and pastry through the week, a garden behind the restaurant grows what ends up on the plate, and a pizza patio opens to the vineyard in season. All of it sits on a single thirty-four-acre farm, which is what keeps the breadth from reading as a list of amenities.

Dinner is where the kitchen is most composed. The Handmade Paccheri Pasta is the dish to order — wide tube pasta with lobster, a tomato chili sauce, heirloom tomato, and lemon herb ricotta — and it sits inside a two-course and three-course prix fixe format that can be taken with wine pairings. Around it the dinner menu runs through grilled octopus, beef tartare, lamb shank, wild Chinook salmon, and a za'atar cauliflower steak for the table that wants the kitchen without the meat. Starters lean the same direction — a chicken liver parfait, French onion soup, charcuterie and cheese — and dessert runs to a Basque cheesecake or a rhubarb éclair from the bakery. Lunch keeps the ambition but loosens the collar: Steak Frites, built on a Beverly Creek Farms striploin with Café de Paris butter, is the midday order, with pan-seared trout, potato gnocchi, and a Ravine bacon cheeseburger filling in around it.