Gerti's

At Gerti's, a burger is a starting point, not a finish. The Crunch Mac makes the case in a single bite: two four-ounce hand-pressed chuck patties with a crisp corn tostada laid between them, the whole stack rolled into a flour tortilla with a three-cheese blend and iceberg. That instinct — take the familiar shorthand of pub food and rebuild it from the inside — runs through the kitchen at this Hunter Street West gastropub in downtown Peterborough's Café District. The shorthand is still there on the menu; it rarely arrives unaltered.

The reworking is most obvious in the fryer. Kettle Cooked Fish & Chips takes a five-ounce haddock filet in beer batter, rolls it a second time in crushed kettle-cooked potato chips, and serves it with hand-cut Cajun fries and honey Dijon coleslaw. The handhelds keep pulling the same trick: a Birria Grilled Cheese on sourdough with braised beef and a consommé for dipping; the Gerti Bird, buttermilk fried chicken under thick-cut bacon and housemade spicy ranch; the Primal Cuts Burger on a seven-ounce chuck patty with smoked-paprika aioli; Gerti's Pulled Pork in smoky barbecue with honey Dijon slaw; Nashville Hot Chicken on Texas toast. Past the handhelds the kitchen widens out — a ten-ounce Hunter Street Strip under crispy onions and demi-glace, seared rainbow trout with lemon-dill butter and crispy capers, a Carbonara that carries the Gerti name, Truffle Pesto Fettuccini on a mushroom cream. Vegetarians are not handed a single token plate but a run of them: Buffalo Cauliflower and its taco version, eight mozzarella-stuffed ravioli fried and dropped into vodka rosé, a beet salad with candied walnuts and goat cheese. Dessert lands on cheesecake — lemon-lime one visit, Neapolitan the next — rotating often enough to be its own reason to come back.

What the menu says about the kitchen is partly in the names. Gerti Bird, Gerti's Pulled Pork, Gerti's Carbonara, the Hunter Street Strip — a kitchen confident enough to sign its plates is one that expects to stand behind them. The featured board turns over on its own schedule: Angry Bird, a Thai Chicken Rice Bowl, Tropical Fish Tacos, fried ravioli, whatever the next cheesecake happens to be. None of it is built for a quick turn. Gerti's keeps no televisions over the bar, and its heated, covered patio holds up well past patio season — the kind of setup made for a table that means to stay through a second round and a shared dessert rather than eat and clear.

The restaurant opened in 2005 under Gerti and Alban Sina, whose first name still hangs on the door two decades on. Diana and Sean Hunter took it over in 2019; according to local reporting at the time, Diana had carried the idea of her own restaurant since growing up around her late mother's catering and deli work, and Gerti's is where it landed. The Hunters kept the name and the gathering-place footing rather than gut what already worked. They kept it civic, too: local coverage has tied the kitchen to a hospital-foundation fundraiser run off feature-dish sales, and the calendar has carved out stand-up comedy nights between dinners.

Two decades in, Gerti's reads less like a pub that grew ambitious than a kitchen that never accepted the ceiling pub food is supposed to have. The Café District around it trades mostly in coffee and quick lunches; Gerti's runs longer, stays open later on Fridays and Saturdays, and asks a table to settle in for an evening. There is even a quiet coincidence on the menu — a ten-ounce strip steak named for Hunter Street, plated now by a family named Hunter — that the kitchen lets pass without comment. The name on the door is still Gerti's, kept through the handover because it was never the thing that needed fixing.