River's Edge Tap & Table

The lake-and-sea section is where River's Edge Tap & Table shows its hand. Pickerel comes pan-fried with rice pilaf, lake perch arrives lightly breaded with fresh-cut fries and coleslaw, and frog legs turn up dusted and tossed in Sandy's sauce — the kind of old-school freshwater order most Windsor pubs dropped years ago. The Detroit River runs past Olde Riverside, and the kitchen cooks like it: haddock fish and chips grilled or battered, mussels by the pound in marinara or roasted-garlic cream, coconut shrimp, calamari, and fish tacos built on seasoned haddock with pico de gallo and grilled pineapple. A whole stretch of the menu is given over to what comes from the lake or the sea, and the water stays the through-line even where the menu wanders.

Away from the catch, this is full pub comfort. The Over The Edge Burger stacks bacon, a fried egg, cheddar, and sautéed onion; the Pizza Burger answers with pizza sauce, provolone, pepperoni, and mushrooms. There is a meatloaf dinner under gravy with mashed potatoes, a mac and cheese built on the kitchen's own cheese sauce with chicken and bacon, and a steak sandwich of tender striploin on ciabatta with garlic aioli. The grill turns out a ten-ounce New York strip finished in garlic butter, plated on its own or pushed into a surf-and-turf alongside four garlic shrimp. Starters lean shareable — wings by the pound, cajun-dusted calamari, spinach and artichoke dip with pita points, and East Coast Pepperoni Bites, a Maritime favourite served with honey mustard.

Breadth is the point. The pasta list runs from a seafood linguini — shrimp, halibut, mussels, and clams in garlic cream — to a shrimp scampi in white wine and garlic, to a Mediterranean chicken with feta, spinach, and olives in a blush sauce. Lighter and meatless paths hold their own: eggplant parmesan over penne, a beet and quinoa salad with candied walnuts, a grilled pear and bleu cheese salad under apple-pear vinaigrette, a chicken Caesar wrap with sweet potato fries on the side. It is enough that a diner could skip the seafood entirely and still eat well.

That two-sided menu — Great Lakes fish on one hand, loaded burgers and grill plates on the other — is not a hedge. It is inheritance. The address fed Olde Riverside under earlier names, most recently as Menard's Fish Shack, and the seafood lean reads as continuity rather than a trend the kitchen chased. A Maritime thread runs under it too, from the East Coast Pepperoni Bites to the frog legs in Sandy's sauce. River's Edge kept the fish its predecessors were known for and built the comfort menu around it, so the catch is always on the table and never the only thing on it.

River's Edge opened on the Riverdale Avenue site in 2016, taking over ground that has carried a tavern in Olde Riverside for decades. The name does real work. Little River runs alongside, and the patio that fronts it is the reason to come once the weather turns warm, when seafood, a burger, and a round of wings make more sense outdoors than across a dinner reservation. Inside, the colder months keep things cozy; the grill even nods to the address, its signature plate The Edge — that garlic-butter New York strip with sautéed mushrooms and onions, a baked potato, and vegetables. Beer is part of the visit here, poured alongside the wings and the seafood rather than kept as a sideline, and on Friday and Saturday the kitchen runs past midnight — the one stretch of the week it tilts later than dinner.

The patio sets the calendar. When Little River warms up, the tables move outside and the order skews to shareable starts — wings, calamari, coconut shrimp — with perch or a burger to follow. When it cools, the same crowd moves indoors for steaks, meatloaf, mac and cheese, and a double-fudge brownie to close. The kitchen pulls the fryer for haddock and fires the grill for a strip in the same dinner service, a few steps from the water that gave the place its name.