The Innsville Restaurant

Turn one way through the door and it is a low-lit country dining room laid for prime rib and oysters; turn the other and it is a pub pouring domestic pints with a carved roast beef sandwich on at lunch. The Innsville runs both under one roof on Highway 8 in Stoney Creek, a roadside inn that has always cooked like a steakhouse first. Prime Rib of Beef Au Jus anchors the dinner menu — slow roasted to hold its juices, carved to order and sent out with hot horseradish — and the kitchen treats it as the house specialty the rest of the board orbits. Everything else, from the AAA steaks to the pub sandwiches, arranges itself around that one plate.

The steakhouse lane runs deep, and the seafood is no garnish to it. Filet mignon comes wrapped in applewood-smoked bacon in six- and eight-ounce cuts; a braised lamb shank falls off the bone over mashed potatoes and vegetables; surf-and-turf is there for the table that refuses to choose. Oysters are shucked to order on the half shell, by the half-dozen or the dozen, and Atlantic salmon is cooked plainly and well, poached or oven roasted with lemon and butter, with a catch of the day rounding out the board when the kitchen has one. The starters set the register before any of it lands — calamari fritti fried golden with ancho chipotle and orange ginger sauces, Caribbean coconut tiger shrimp with a Thai dip, and a bruschetta flatbread brushed with roasted garlic and finished with feta, pesto and balsamic glaze.