Inn On The Twenty Restaurant

Seared scallops come to the table in a brown butter built on Sue-Ann Staff Riesling. The beef tenderloin leans on a Cave Spring demi-glace, and the lobster tagliatelle is bound in a chardonnay cream pulled from the same valley's bottles. Inn On The Twenty cooks its neighbours' wine straight into the food — a wine-country argument made on the plate rather than printed on a placard. The dining room sits in the oldest section of a historic Jordan Village winery, its windows facing west across the Twenty Valley, and it treats the vineyards outside less as scenery than as a working pantry. Regional travellers and local tables marking an occasion come for exactly that: the surrounding wine country tasted instead of toured.

The current dinner menu carries that logic across its length. Foie gras arrives on toasted brioche with a charred-rosemary Cave Spring Riesling gastrique; chili-marinated tiger prawns sit over corn soubise with a corn fritter; a half-dozen oysters come dressed with a tequila-and-tajín mignonette and the kitchen's own fermented hot sauce. The mains run classic without going generic — duck confit over duck-fat fingerlings, chicken ballotine under a black garlic demi, an Ontario bone-in pork loin with BBQ-glazed pork belly, and walleye finished in a preserved-lemon beurre blanc. Lunch loosens the collar. The Inn On The Twenty Poutine layers Upper Canada cheese curds and optional pulled short rib over salted frites; the Twenty Valley Beef Burger folds in Niagara gold and a pepperoncini aioli; Pickerel and Chips keeps a beer-battered Lake Erie fillet in the local-fish lane. Even dessert keeps reaching, from a triple chocolate cheesecake to a pistachio-rhubarb cream puff finished with torched meringue.