Kettle Drums

The grilled cheese at Kettle Drums comes with five-year cheddar, brie, shaved apple, and red onion jam — built like a signature, not a fallback. That instinct, taking the most familiar plate on the table and giving it a reason to be ordered, runs through the kitchen on Hunter Street West. This is comfort food, plainly stated, but the cooking treats the word as a starting line rather than a finish. A diner finds the categories they expect — pasta, burgers, sandwiches, wings, fish and chips — and then finds each one carrying a house-built detail that pushes it past the standard pub read.

The Mac and Cheese is the clearest statement of that intent: macaroni folded with five-year cheddar, goat cheese, and parmesan in a garlic cream sauce, then finished under a panko crust. It does not sit alone. The menu runs a genuine pasta thread — house-rolled fettuccini turned into a Primavera of red peppers, asparagus, zucchini, and grape tomatoes, a Chicken Alfredo built on pesto cream, and House-Made Ravioli stuffed with sundried tomato and goat cheese under a rose sauce. The heartier plates hold their own: a panko-crusted meatloaf under portobello gravy, whiskey pork medallions wrapped in prosciutto and basil in a maple whiskey reduction, an Angus strip steak with demi-glace and sautéed mushrooms, and seared wild sockeye salmon in a sundried tomato cream. Even the starters carry weight — the Kettle Cheesedip arrives warm with bacon, onion, beer, and cream cheese, alongside deep-fried pizza dough for pulling through it.

What holds all of it together is range without drift. A table can open with southern-fried Pub Wings, sweet potato kettle chips and garlic dill dip, or prosciutto-wrapped figs soaked in merlot and stuffed with goat cheese, then split between a Prime Rib Dip of shaved AAA beef on warm ciabatta, a Portobello Pizza under gorgonzola cream, and a Roasted Beet Salad with candied pecan and curried squash — and still read as one coherent meal. That breadth is the practical case for the kitchen. It is where a group that cannot settle on a single cuisine still finds its plate, where a quick weekday lunch and a long unhurried dinner pull from the same menu, and where an order can run as light or as heavy as the table wants it.

The building earns part of the character. Kettle Drums opened in 2012 on the northeast corner of Hunter and Aylmer, in a former radiator shop reworked into a dining room after a long renovation. The patios came with it — a creekside stretch the restaurant still leans on through the warm months, plus front seating that turns the Café District corner into somewhere to settle in. Inside, a fireplace and the worn-industrial bones of the old shop give the dinner service a setting that matches the cooking's ambition without dressing it up. Pizzas were on that first menu and the sweet potato chips arrived nearly as early — much of what defines the kitchen now was already on the table then.

None of it strains for occasion. The patio and a full bar of cocktails, beer, and wine make a slow social meal easy, while online ordering carries the burgers, wraps, fish and chips, and pizzas out the door on the nights that call for less. The kitchen keeps a daily soup and rotating lunch features running under the same banner, so the everyday visit and the planned one draw on the same cooking. What Kettle Drums settled into, on a downtown corner where the lunch and dinner crowds rarely overlap, is a comfort kitchen that decided familiar was worth doing carefully. The cheesedip still rides out on its raft of fried dough, the patio still fills when the creek-side weather turns, and the mac and cheese still does most of the convincing.