Take Five Bistro

Erie Street East is Windsor's Via Italia, the stretch the city files under red sauce and espresso. Take Five Bistro opened there as a steakhouse, and that choice still sets it apart from its neighbours. The founding idea was a Chicago-and-New-York chophouse — Canadian beef aged twenty-eight days, a fully licensed bar, a dining room in dark wood and low light — dropped onto a block better known for pasta than for porterhouse. Windsor, as it turned out, had appetite for both.

The steak list is where the kitchen makes its argument. The Ribeye is the straight read on the room, beef-forward and seared to a deep crust; the White Cheddar & Bacon Filet Mignon is the richer move, a centre-cut filet layered with sharp cheddar and bacon. Tenderloin Neptune bridges the steak and seafood sides for the table that cannot choose. Around the beef sits a spread of classics that keeps the place from reading as steak and nothing else — Mini Beef Wellingtons in flaky pastry, escargot, Cajun calamari, a Chicken Oscar, French onion, the house Take Five Steak Soup. Seafood holds its own corner, with Lake Erie pickerel pulled from the water down the road, crusted salmon, and a surf and turf for the full occasion.

What the menu signals is a kitchen working in a classic lane on purpose. There is no chase for novelty; the discipline is to cook familiar things precisely — steaks to temperature, sauces balanced rather than heavy — and to let Ontario meat and produce carry the sourcing story without turning it into a lecture. The Sunday-through-Thursday prix fixe is the clearest tell. Three courses for forty-seven dollars, capped at parties of ten and set aside on holidays, it hands a first-timer a full pass through the kitchen and gives a regular a weeknight reason to return, value built on the actual menu rather than a discount parked off to the side.

Take Five has been chef-owned from the start. Cody Northgrave and Paul Sauve run it as co-owners and chefs, according to local reporting, and that arrangement explains the consistency: the people setting the standard are the same ones on the line. The name carries its own history. It nods to the jazz standard, and the building it occupies held onto a music-club atmosphere from an earlier life, a thread the restaurant has kept since it opened on Erie Street in 2011. The lineage is why the dining room lands as special-occasion without tipping into formal — dark wood and close tables read as intimate, a setting built for a date or a milestone rather than a boardroom.

The way Windsor actually uses Take Five shows up in who books it. The licensed bar and the steak-and-seafood format make it a reliable client dinner; the close tables and unhurried pacing make it a date; the catering and gift cards point it toward the planned gathering or small group that wants steakhouse formality without a banquet hall. Dessert is treated as part of the plan rather than an afterthought — the Peppered Strawberry Flambé finished tableside, a traditional tiramisu, a crème brûlée — the kind of detail that separates a steak dinner from an occasion.

Fifteen years on, the reputation has outlasted the opening buzz. A place on a national Top 100 restaurants list in 2024 put a wider frame around what Erie Street regulars already knew, and it landed for a kitchen still cooking the classics it started with. Take Five never reinvented itself; it picked a lane in 2011 and got better inside it. On a street the city reads as Italian first, the steakhouse with the jazz name is the table Windsor books when the evening is meant to count.