Keep Your Fork; There’s Pie: More Country Fare

Bonnie Lou’s Cafe
2238 Floradale Road, Floradale
519-669-2142

A few years old now, Bonnie Lou’s Café is a shortish drive Waterloo. The café is a perfect destination that gets you out of the city and into the country-side as you enjoy a ride through farm land to celebrate this wonderful part of Waterloo Region.  The lovely country setting is perfect for the old general store that serves up simple soup-and-sandwich fare with bread and sausage meat made just up the road. It’s a quintessential country café, with a cup of coffee and four or five pies made on the premises that prove it.

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Kennedy’s Restaurant and Catering
1750 Erb’s Road (Regional Roads 9 and 4), St. Agatha
519-747-1313
www.kennedycatering.ca

As far as I am concerned, Waterloo County fare—“food that really schmecks,” as author Edna Staebler would have it—forms an important distinguishing feature as a pillar of food and cooking in the region. A country tavern like Kennedy’s in St. Agatha, in a building that has been around since the mid-1800s, is the proof in the pudding (or the stuffing in the rolled ribs as it were).

Irish for Waterloo County Fare.

It’s an open dining room with some communal tables—a country tavern plain and simple. From the large kitchen comes cabbage rolls, schnitzel, local farmers’ sausage, ribs, liver and onions, and a limburger and onion sandwich. It is all much a part of the heartiness—the “cook-the-ingredients-you’ve-got-in-your-larder” approach inspired by a Mennonite tradition that is a cornerstone of Waterloo Region.

Yet, it’s Waterloo County fare with an Irish twist, including a Guinness-soused homage to Sam Beckett, Brendan Behan, James Joyce, and Oscar Wilde on their place mats. Those Gaelic treasures likely would have loved rolled ribs, pigtails, schnitzel, and limburger and onion sandwiches in a country pub where everyone feels at home.

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Benjamin’s Restaurant & Inn
1430 King Street N, St. Jacobs
519-664-3731
www.stjacobs.com

I am emphatically not a shopper but even less so when the drudgery focuses on a seasonal 12 days; even if I could, I’d be hard pressed to give my true love a half-dozen geese a-laying. I’d prefer to keep the birds and eat foie gras.

Minutes from Waterloo, the village of St. Jacobs, is, to those less Ebenezerish than I, a mecca for shoppers and especially so at this time of the year. Quaint shops, artisans’ studios, and boutique-ish mercantile venues—nostalgically fragrant with potpourri—are Dickensian hallmarks of the town.

Amidst the B&Bs and dozens of shops (I’ll admit, the broom factory is neat and smells wonderful), are a few restaurants and cafes. Okay, I’ll also admit there was something charming about luncheoning in the stage-coach era dining room of Benjamin’s Restaurant & Inn of a weekend afternoon with a jolly crowd of fellow shoppers.

Pig tails ... wee, wee, wee all the way home.