Stella's Eatery

Duck liver mousse with cranberry mostarda, smoked trout croquettes under sea truffle aioli, a wild rice risotto built on lovage broth: the small plates at Stella's Eatery are rich enough to anchor a meal and varied enough to build one around. The kitchen belongs to chef and owner Leah Marshall Hannon, and the food works from a clear premise — the County's farms, the lake, and what the foragers turn up, made into seasonal comfort food with a fine-dining hand. The setting is rural, out along County Road 8 toward Waupoos, in the farm country that supplies most of what reaches the plate.

The spring menu reads as a full table waiting to be assembled. Open light with a spring greens salad — apple, fennel, walnut, and cheddar under a mustard vinaigrette — then go plush and preserved: duck liver mousse on sourdough with pickled onion, a rabbit terrine with grainy mustard and sweet pickles, a baked brie under rhubarb compote and maple pecans. Move to the lake: smoked trout croquettes with Lebanese cucumber and tarragon, a country fried catch of the day slicked with wild leek mayo and hot honey, seared rainbow trout over sauce soubise. The vegetables hold their own — asparagus a la plancha with sauce gribiche, grilled hakurei turnips with turnip-top pesto and toasted pepitas, sautéed komatsuna greens in a miso-maple caesar, the wild rice risotto carrying as much depth as the duck leg confit with blueberry barbecue or the braised beef brochettes under spruce-tip chermoula. There is a confit pork belly with spicy kimchi for the table that wants heat, and Stella's cheeseburger with Yukon fries for the one that wants a plain anchor.

What the menu says is that comfort is the organizing idea, not the ceiling. The dishes start from the familiar — a salad, a burger, a fish fry, a baked brie — then complicate it with spruce tip, sea truffle, miso-maple, gochugaru, and blueberry barbecue, the kind of pantry that keeps a returning table guessing. A meal here is assembled rather than ordered in courses: plates land in the middle and move around the table, and the vegetables get the same attention as the duck and the lake fish rather than the leftover end of the menu. It is casual fine dining that takes the casual part seriously — cooking meant to feel like a generous meal among people, not a performance.

The name comes from family. Stella's is named for Stella Pamajewon Marshall, Leah Marshall Hannon's great-grandmother, and by the restaurant's own telling the menu's sensibility — food made to gather around, the way grandmothers and mothers and daughters once cooked it — traces back to her and to the family's connection to Pickerel River and Christian Island. Marshall Hannon trained in culinary arts at George Brown and cooked in Toronto kitchens, among them Delux and Midfield Wine Bar, before opening Stella's in 2020 on Picton's Main Street and moving it out to the Waupoos farm country three years on. In 2024 she spent a summer as resident chef at the National Arts Centre, and her pickerel cakes have turned up in a Prince Edward County cookbook. The throughline is steady: local, seasonal, foraged where it can be, and plated with the care of someone who learned the food at home first.

Stella's runs on a short calendar. In the warm months dinner is a Thursday-through-Monday affair, the dining room open from five, with a Sunday brunch and, in June, mussels as the Monday feature — enough of a rhythm that the place rewards planning a County evening around it rather than dropping in, especially for a group. The drinks follow the food: County wine with the duck and the risotto, local beer or cider with the trout, zero-proof seasonal pours for a lighter table. And because the menu moves with what the farms, the foragers, and the lake hand over, the spring table you book is already on its way to becoming a different one by August.