Roast 'N Toast Family Diner

Read the name as a menu in two words. The roast is the real thing: outside round slow-cooked in house, sliced thin, and laid between Texas toast under a ladle of beef gravy for the Hot Beef Sandwich, or stacked on grilled rye with mozzarella and grilled onions for the R'NT Rancher. The toast runs mostly sweet — double-decker French toast built around a cream-cheese filling and pushed into a dozen variations, from blueberry to a cinnamon-sugar Roast 'N Churro Dream. Between those two poles sits a Walkerville comfort diner with stools at the counter and a small-town register, on the stretch of Ottawa Street a block west of Market Square.

Breakfast is the broad middle of the menu, and it runs all day. A two-egg plate with home fries and toast holds down the plain end; the Hungryman answers at the other with three eggs, bacon, ham, sausage and a choice of toast or pancakes. Corned beef hash gets chopped and griddled with seasoned home fries and onions. The skillets pile scrambled eggs over potatoes — a Mexican one with black beans, jalapeños and crispy onions, a Meatlover's with ground beef, bacon, ham and sausage. Omelettes run from a Greek with spinach and feta to a Supreme Pizza folded around pepperoni and mozzarella. Homemade chili turns up wherever it can: on fries, inside an omelette, over a burger, or plain with a side of toast. Lunch fills in with burgers, clubhouses and wraps, and the comfort dinners hold steady — meatloaf under gravy, hand-cut fish and chips, a twelve-ounce hamburger steak smothered in beef gravy.

The sweet half of the kitchen is where the diner shows off. The French toast line reads like a dessert case — strawberry, banana-caramel, chocolate-chip and hot-chocolate versions, each a double-decker stuffed and finished on the griddle. Milkshakes and malts are hand-spun with real ice cream; floats, batch-roasted Arabica coffee and a home-brewed iced coffee round out the counter. And then the Original Evil Buttertarts, sold by the dozen with no thick crust, the sweet the diner most wants to be remembered by. What ties the two halves together is how much of the board is signed: the R'NT Burger under barbecue sauce, bacon, cheddar and a barbecue-ranch dressing, the house-named Rancher, the fries cut fresh on site, the coleslaw and chili made in house, the beef roasted in the kitchen rather than bought sliced.

Julie Coleman owns and runs Roast 'N Toast now, and the address carries more history than the current sign. By the restaurant's own account, the site opened as a destination dairy bar and restaurant almost eighty years ago; local reporting describes a roughly fifty-year run under an earlier name before the current owners reopened the kitchen. As a diner, it dates to 1963. What carried across the name changes is the working furniture of a neighbourhood diner — stools at the counter, homemade plates, two hours of free parking on its own side of Ottawa Street, and a row of independent shops next door that Roast 'N Toast counts as part of the visit.

The kitchen keeps daytime hours and closes Mondays and Tuesdays, which pushes the weekend mornings to the centre of its week. That is when the Family Breakfast Platter makes the most sense — ten strips of bacon, ten sausages, ten scrambled eggs, eight pancakes, home fries, fruit and six Evil Buttertarts, built to land in the middle of a table instead of sending everyone after a separate plate. It is breakfast as a group plan, which is most of what a diner on a neighbourhood commercial strip is built to do. Order the platter, a round of milkshakes and a hot beef sandwich for whoever skipped the eggs, and the name has finished explaining itself.