The Olde Angel Inn

The fish is battered by hand and fried to order, the pies arrive under puff pastry with Guinness gravy worked through the beef, and the kitchen at The Olde Angel Inn cooks all of it the way a British pub is supposed to. What sets the cooking apart is where it lands: a low dining room of exposed hand-hewn beams and thick plank floors, in the Old Town core of Niagara-on-the-Lake, a few steps off the wine-country tourist trade on Queen Street. Plenty of historic buildings in this town have been turned into something to look at. This one still sends out supper every day, doors open from late morning until one in the morning, takeout on the side.

The menu stays loyal to that idea. Fish and chips comes in a house beer batter with fresh-cut fries and coleslaw, flagged by the kitchen as an Angel favourite. Shepherd's pie is the deepest read on the comfort-food lane — ground beef and mixed vegetables under mashed potato and cheese, with Guinness gravy and a side of peas, carrots and fresh bread. The savoury pies go further: a steak-and-Guinness pie of slow-roasted beef and sauteed onions under pastry, and a steak-and-kidney version with beef kidneys in the same dark gravy. Bangers and mash brings pork sausages, baked beans and more of that gravy, and the homemade English sausage rolls arrive with grainy beer mustard and pickled onions. The range stretches past the obvious — a braised Australian lamb shank, liver and onions with double-smoked bacon, escargots baked in garlic wine sauce, French onion soup, a gluten-free baked chicken curry over basmati rice — but it never wanders far from the British spine.