Heydays

Heydays sets a raw bar beside a motel pool. The address is The June Motel in Sauble Beach, a retro-coastal property built for the indoor-outdoor rhythm of a beach day, and the kitchen reads as a New England seafood shack crossed with nineteen-seventies California coastal cooking. Oysters come with mignonette, fresh horseradish, cocktail sauce, and lemon, and a daily Oyster Hour sets two-dollar shucks and half-priced bottles of wine on the poolside patio from two to four each afternoon. None of it runs on reservations for ordinary tables — groups of six or fewer walk in — so the place fills the way a beach fills, by whoever shows up.

The menu earns the setting. The Hot Lobster Roll is the signature — buttered lobster, toasted bun, lettuce, lemon — and the Iced Seafood Platter stacks the raw side high: six oysters, eight poached shrimp, Spanish conserva, octopus aguachile rojo, and a lobster salad with cilantro, cucumber, and lime. Mussels Bravas land as a full pound of PEI mussels in white wine and garlic, finished with Spanish paprika butter, potato chips, and toasted sourdough. From there the kitchen widens: pan-seared rainbow trout over warm lentil salad with bacon vinaigrette, a sixteen-ounce dry-aged striploin served as steak frites with sauce au poivre, lobster mac and cheese on cavatappi and a four-cheese bechamel, Old Bay fried chicken under hot honey, a smash burger. A lemongrass vermicelli salad with poached prawns, mint, and crispy shallot pulls the order somewhere warmer than the lake outside.