The Pelham Street Grille

At The Pelham Street Grille, the homemade strawberry jam comes with the toast. So do the bacon-wrapped meatloaf at lunch and the potato, cheese and onion perogies on the comfort-food side of the menu, both built in-house rather than ordered in. The Fonthill Village address runs breakfast and lunch from eight in the morning to three in the afternoon every day of the week, with one carved-out exception: Friday evening, when the kitchen turns over for haddock fish and chips between four-thirty and seven-thirty. The shape is small and specific, and it has held in downtown Fonthill since Catherine and George Lafreniere opened the dining room in July of 2016.

Breakfast is the daypart that carries the menu. Florentine and Pacific eggs Benedict anchor the signature page, with hollandaise built to a consistent finish and the poached eggs the kitchen does not let waver. Waffles arrive with fresh fruit and whipped cream. The breakfast special bundles eggs, a meat choice — bacon, ham, or sausage — home fries, toast, and the strawberry jam, and it stays available from open to close rather than retiring at eleven. A Spanish omelette holds a corner of the menu the way it would at a working diner. The lunch turn brings burgers made fresh each day, a Reuben on the sandwich page, and a side choice of home fries or French fries.

The vegan side of the menu reads as coverage, not as a token nod. A vegan breakfast hash arrives loaded with potatoes, peppers, onions, plant-based sausage, and avocado, plated with toast and the same homemade jam everything else gets. Avocado toast holds its own slot. A Mediterranean veggie wrap covers the lunch side, and a Beyond Meat burger lands with the rest of the burger page rather than buried at the bottom. Friday is where the week turns. The kitchen swings out of breakfast-and-lunch mode at four-thirty and runs a haddock dinner through to seven-thirty — one-piece at fifteen-ninety-five, two-piece at twenty-five-ninety-five, dine-in or takeout, coleslaw and tartar on the side. The last Saturday of every month adds a prime rib dinner that the dining room takes by reservation only, a once-a-month event tucked into a kitchen that is otherwise an everyday one.

Catherine and George Lafreniere opened The Pelham Street Grille in July of 2016 at the corner of Pelham Street and Highway 20, with George running the kitchen and Catherine the front of the house. Local reporting at the time described a family affair from the start: relatives working the floor, the kitchen turned over for Pelham Cares fundraisers when a fundraiser needed a kitchen, and a young Fish Fry Friday already pulling its own evening crowd. The restaurant still presents itself as family owned and operated, and the same downtown-Fonthill block has held the address from the start. The hours have stretched only as far as Friday evening — a single dinner shift carved out of an otherwise daytime week — and the rest of the calendar has stayed put. A breakfast-and-lunch operation that gives up Friday evenings for haddock and the last Saturday of the month for prime rib has the shape of a week a family kitchen writes for itself, then keeps.

What carries forward is the use case. The dining room is built for a Fonthill breakfast routine seven days a week, a lunch counter that stays open through three, a Friday evening reserved for haddock that the kitchen plans the week around, and a once-a-month prime rib that takes a reservation in advance. The homemade jam is on the table because someone cooked it. The haddock arrives because it is Friday. Around those anchors, the kitchen keeps a small parallel line of plant-based plates and a soup of the day that gives the menu something different to lead with on a Tuesday than it had on a Monday.