Root & Bone

Fonthill is a village of fewer than twenty thousand, a Niagara town with more orchards than dining destinations. Root & Bone reads as the exception. Behind a Pelham Street storefront, Chef Raymond Taylor cooks a four-course dinner at a level the address doesn't advertise — a wagyu short rib Wellington wrapped in mushroom duxelles and set against truffle whipped potatoes, a dry-aged Ontario striploin, dishes that turn with the growing season. He opened the restaurant in 2018 and built it around a short card rather than a long one: prix fixe Friday and Saturday, à la carte Wednesday and Thursday, dark the other three nights.

The card rewards a table that orders across it. Classic beef tartare comes with a vodka-cured quail egg, caper emulsion and pommes gaufrettes; seared diver scallops arrive over a sweet-pea purée with Meyer lemon gremolata; char-grilled quail is plated with a sour-cherry reduction, wild mushrooms and a pistachio crumble. Among the mains, the striploin comes with spring morels, smoked bone marrow and a sunchoke purée, charred octopus is set against a chorizo emulsion and tomato jam, Ontario pickerel against a saffron beurre blanc brightened with yuzu, and Ontario lamb loin under a rosemary and stone-mustard crust with black garlic jus. The vegetable courses get the same care as the proteins — crispy butternut squash with miso brown-butter aioli and candied walnuts, a spring risotto of English peas, ramps and asparagus tips finished with aged pecorino. Dessert runs from a burnt Basque cheesecake to a warm carrot cake plated with pear ice-wine gelato and a Grand Marnier crème brûlée.

Read the sourcing and the kitchen's priorities come into focus. The pickerel and the lamb are named for Ontario, the striploin for an organic Ontario supplier, and a herb salad carries the restaurant's own name — Root & Bone Farm herbs with shaved radish and carrot, pickled cucumber and a champagne-chive vinaigrette. Farm-to-table is a phrase most kitchens reach for; here it is legible in the ingredient lines themselves. The short menu follows the same logic. A four-course format that changes with the season can only stay tight if the kitchen buys close to home and cooks what is good that week, and the card turns over often enough that a dish anchoring a spring visit may be gone by high summer. What stays is the shape: a handful of courses, edited down to what Niagara can actually deliver.

Taylor came to Fonthill with a career built in other kitchens. Local reporting from around the opening described years spent cooking internationally and a stretch leading restaurants under the Casino Niagara umbrella before he took over what had been the Zest dining room and remade it as his own. The restaurant's name came from a London dining zine, by the same account — an outsider's reference carried into a Niagara village. He had the interior rebuilt by individual craftspeople, down to a bar top of copper finished by hand, so the dining room that reopened bore little resemblance to the one it replaced.

There is more to the operation than the dinner card. The Epicure Cellar handles communal and private dining downstairs, with its own menu, booked for buyouts and event nights, while the main floor takes reservations across indoor tables, the bar and, in season, the patio. That raised, garden-style patio opens when the weather turns; through 2020, as dining rooms shut and reopened, it was the part of the restaurant the neighbourhood rallied around, and the support ran both ways. The recognition has followed: Root & Bone landed on OpenTable's 2019 list of the hundred best restaurants in Canada, unusual company for a village restaurant of its size. On a Friday in summer, the prix fixe runs the length of the evening and the patio fills under the trees, a few steps off the rest of Pelham Street.