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.

None of that breadth is decoration. A beach-motel restaurant can coast on a patio and a burger; this one runs a daily raw bar with a serious kitchen behind it. The plant-based cooking is the clearest tell — the Herb Falafel Torta is a full handheld of pickled turnip, endive, beet, cucumber, red onion, pepperoncini, and garlic tahini sauce, not a token side, and it sits next to garlic-and-tahini hummus with muhammara and zaatar, blistered shishito peppers in chili-ash salt, and baby greens under green goddess. The effect is a menu where a table that can't agree still finds its plates, whether the order leans raw bar, comfort, or vegetable.

There's a rhythm to ordering here. A first visit starts with the Hot Lobster Roll, which says more in one plate than a survey of the menu would. A larger table spreads the Iced Seafood Platter as a shared opening act, then lets the raw side give way to heavier plates: the lobster mac, the steak frites, the half-bird of Old Bay fried chicken under hot honey. Burrata with olive-oil-poached tomatoes and a salumi-and-cheese board round out the start for a table that wants to graze before it commits.

Heydays is the dining room of The June Motel, the Sauble Beach version of the retro-motel concept that opened here in 2020. Evan and Emma Baulch run it through their Amabel Hospitality group, and by local accounts the same operators are behind The Dunes and Whippoorwill nearby — a small Sauble Beach hospitality cluster rather than a one-off. The executive chef is Tyler Cunningham, whose work runs across those kitchens, and the current menu is his. That shared bench is part of why a beach-motel address carries dry-aged steak and a daily raw bar instead of a short list of patio snacks.

The setting is the point, though it isn't the whole story. A meal here folds into the shape of a Sauble Beach day — the motel pool, the patio, the lake a few minutes off — so the oysters and the lobster roll arrive attached to a place, not just a plate. Two o'clock comes around every afternoon, the bottles get marked down, and the shucking starts again.