Rare Restaurant

Rare is filed under steakhouse, but the kitchen's most telling dishes are the ones the label would never predict. Citrus-cured frog legs, confit beef tongue under horseradish and stone-ground mustard, a tartare cut from tenderloin with sprouted mustard and housemade potato chips — the premium cuts are here and they anchor the menu, but the cooking on Brock Street is plainly more interested in range than in the usual downtown steakhouse script. This is chef-led fine dining built for a composed dinner in the centre of Peterborough, the kind of table a group books when the night calls for more than a familiar order.

From the butcher, the cuts run a seven-ounce tenderloin, a ten-ounce New York striploin and a twelve-ounce ribeye, each plated with market vegetables, glace de viande and a choice of pommes puree, confit fingerlings or triple-cooked frites. The Rare Burger makes the same argument in a lower register — an eight-ounce patty ground in house from tenderloin, striploin and ribeye, stacked with parmesan reggiano, tomato jam and pickled onions on a toasted brioche bun. To start, the table can share a cast-iron loaf of housemade French bread with aged balsamic and compound butter, or a farmer platter of cured meats, Canadian cheese and house preserves. Around the beef, the menu keeps reaching outward: roasted bone marrow with confit garlic and grilled baguette, miso-butter charred octopus, five-spiced duck breast with a wild honey gastrique, grilled lemongrass pork loin with bamboo shoots and shiitake, a seared tuna nicoise finished with nuoc cham, and Bay of Fundy salmon over stone-fruit panzanella. Desserts stay in-house, from sticky toffee pudding to a vanilla creme brulee and a chocolate terrine plated under berry sauce.

That outward reach is the tell. A kitchen that sets beef tongue and frog legs beside its ribeye is one confident enough to trust its guests, and the Southeast Asian thread running through the plates — lemongrass, nuoc cham, five-spice, ponzu, pickled Asian pears — reads as a personal hand rather than a borrowed template. The cooking happens in an open kitchen, so the technique that earns the bill stays visible from the table: the butchering, the saucing, the careful plating done in full view. Even the vegetarian dishes get real attention, from garden gnocchi with whipped ricotta and mint to triple-cooked parmesan truffle fries. French method, steakhouse backbone, and a cook's curiosity about what else the plate can carry.

Andrew Lewin and Mai Dong gave Rare its current shape in 2022, taking over a Brock Street address that already carried the Rare name — the former Rare Grill House — and relaunching it as Rare Restaurant + Bar. The two own and run it together, and the French-Vietnamese accents on the menu trace directly to that partnership. Dong's standing in the city is a matter of public record beyond her own kitchen: Fleming College named her its 2023 Alumna of Distinction, citing her culinary work and community service. Local reporting at the relaunch framed the project the same way the food does — new owners keeping faith with a known Peterborough address while putting an unmistakably personal stamp on it.

For all that range, Rare runs as an evening restaurant with a clear sense of occasion. Saturday brings a prime rib feature, offered as a single dinner or a three-course format built around slow-roasted beef, and the kitchen runs occasional chef's tasting nights when it wants to stretch further than the standing menu allows. The dining room takes private gatherings of up to forty, and the kitchen will work around gluten-free and lactose restrictions when guests flag them ahead. Reservations are the sensible way in, especially for a weekend table. It is a short walk from the rest of downtown Peterborough, dressed up enough for an anniversary and curious enough that the regulars rarely order the same thing twice.