Catch 22 Fresh Market Grill

Wasaga Beach runs on summer crowds and casual food — the kind of town where dinner often means a patio, a basket of something fried, and a walk back to the sand. Catch 22 Fresh Market Grill works against that grain. It ages its own steaks in-house, carves steak tartare beside the table, and treats a weeknight meal as an occasion rather than a stop between the beach and the car. This is a family-run steakhouse that gives seafood and Italian cooking equal billing, the place a table along this stretch of Georgian Bay turns to when the evening is meant to count. It opens for dinner only, Tuesday through Saturday, and takes its reservations by phone.

The grill is the spine of the menu. The ribeye arrives under garlic Provençal butter, and the cuts run from a New York striploin to a baseball top sirloin to filet mignon — steakhouse anchors handled with steakhouse seriousness rather than beach-town shortcuts. The tartare is the clearest tell: prepared next to the diner with the kind of small ceremony that turns an appetizer into the start of an event. Order a steak here and the kitchen treats it as the centre of the night, not a default for the guest who didn't want fish.

The seafood side carries equal weight, which is where the name earns its meaning. Fresh oysters and a seafood tower open the raw bar; mussels come in tomato and Sambuca, and the Catch 22 seafood selection gathers the kitchen's coastal range onto one plate. Crab cakes and Sambuca shrimp round out the shellfish, and a seafood paella arrives for the table that wants one big dish to share. Italian runs underneath all of it — chicken parmigiana, a carbonara, rigatoni alla Zozzona, lobster ravioli, and the lobster linguine that anchors the seafood pastas. The starters are built to pass around: carbonara arancini, burrata bruschetta, calamari, and a whipped ricotta cheese board to graze on before the mains land.

That range is the argument. A list this wide risks reading as indecision; here it reads as a kitchen sure enough of itself to cook in three directions at once and let the table sort out which one it came for. It also means nobody has to compromise: steak for one, seafood for the next, pasta for the third, all off one menu. The comfort plates make the point — Chef Zack's mac and cheese, a braised lamb shank, a steakhouse burger, the cavatapi bake — rich, familiar food sitting a few lines below the tartare and the oysters. The cooking does not pick a lane, and it does not apologize for it.

The kitchen has a family behind it. The Bickmores cooked in Collingwood for eight years before bringing the restaurant up the shore to Wasaga Beach in 2012, and they still run it themselves — Bob Bickmore as proprietor, his executive chef Zack Bickmore as the reason the mac and cheese on the comfort list carries a first name. More than a decade in, the cooking has a settledness the beach-season turnover around it never manages. A family that has fed this part of Georgian Bay that long knows what its regulars order before they sit down.

All of it points the same way: a planned dinner, not a stop on the way home. Catch 22 is where Wasaga Beach books the birthday, the anniversary, and the night visiting family is in town. The dining room leans romantic and a little dressed-up, the dessert list runs long enough to make a finish of it — Catch 22 cheesecake, sticky toffee pudding, molten lava cake, crème brûlée, an affogato martini — and the reservation-first rhythm makes the evening easy to plan around. The town outside stays seasonal and casual. Inside, the steaks age, the tartare gets carved at the table, and the kitchen keeps cooking like the calendar doesn't apply.