Flame + Smith

The Smith in Flame + Smith comes from the Dutch smid — the artisan, the craftsperson with a hammer and a forge. The restaurant says so plainly in its own copy, and the dining room argues the point: a working hearth set ten feet across, an open kitchen visible from every chair, a menu that asks the cooks to read a fire the way a smith reads heat. Flame + Smith has run on Bloomfield Main Street since 2018, dinner only, Thursday through Monday, four-thirty to eight-thirty.

The current menu, dated late May 2026, opens with food meant for the table — wood-oven sourdough with whipped butter, a mezze board, liver mousse and crackling under wildflower honey and violas — and moves through a careful set of appetizers before the fire-cooked mains arrive. Albacore tuna tartare lifts the opening round with avocado chutney, citrus ponzu, sesame, garlic oil and corn chips. The little gem caesar lands beet-stained egg, white anchovy and pea shoots into what is usually a stock plate. Burgundy escargot arrives with garlic butter, Paris mushrooms and baguette. A warm goat cheese salad runs arugula, blood orange vinaigrette, Peruvian peppers and hot honey; an heirloom beet salad reads citrus and chili vinaigrette, pickled ginger, goat cheese foam, candied pecans and a seedling salad. All of it is doing real work before the night turns toward fire.

The mains are where the kitchen's two organising ideas — hearth and garden — sit on the same plate. Hay-smoked duck breast arrives over green asparagus, fiddleheads, wild leeks, king oyster mushrooms, soubise and a honey-thyme jus, the seasonal half of the kitchen carried by a smoke that comes from the same fire as the steaks. Goat cheese gnudi runs morels, fava beans, wild leek pesto and pine nuts. Charcoal-grilled seabream sits with sweet pea butter, baby gai lan, pickled sea asparagus and preserved lemon. Grilled octopus and veal sweetbreads come with ember-roasted artichoke hearts, Kalamata olives, baba ghanoush, chermoula and preserved lemon — fire and brine and char on the same plate. Butter-poached white asparagus arrives with glazed ham, hollandaise and a poached hen's egg. The steaks come in as the night's loudest dish — a twelve-ounce dry-aged rib eye, a nine-ounce skirt steak frites — and the thirty-five-day dry-aged tomahawk, sized for sharing and confirmed with the server, is the centrepiece order for a table that built the evening around it.

The kitchen is run by Sarah Soetens and Hidde Zomer, named in local reporting since the 2018 opening and again in 2024 coverage of the garden across the street. Zomer's pathway runs through Amsterdam and a Toronto cooking resume before the move to Prince Edward County, where the founding concept was a wood-fired kitchen built on local supply. Soetens and Zomer planted the garden directly opposite the restaurant and built the menu around what comes out of it, supplemented through County producers — Vicki Emlaw, Edwin County Farms, Honey Wagon Farms, Prinzen Poultry Farm, Campbell's Orchard. According to local reporting, the open kitchen holds ten feet of fire cooking, the hearth and the cook's tools artisan-built for the work they do. What changes on the menu next week is set by what the garden and the County producers send across this one.

A four-course Chef's Menu sits inside the dinner list as the cleanest first-visit path, whole-table only, snacks through dessert. The beverage side runs house cocktails, draught and packaged beer, cider, mead, alcohol-free options, dessert wine, and a deeper shelf of brandy, grappa, whiskey, Scotch, mezcal, tequila, rum and amaro. Reservations are the safer move on a five-night week that closes before nine, though the bar and the patio keep walk-in seats in play when the dinner runs to capacity. The last seating goes at eight-thirty, and the garden across Main Street keeps the menu moving with the season.