Jacksons Landing

The starter that best explains Jacksons Landing is a plate of seared ahi tuna pressed onto sushi rice, dressed with caramelized pineapple, sweet peppers and a slick of sriracha mayo. It is a cooler, sharper opener than the fried standard a suburban bar-and-grill usually leads with, and it marks the range the kitchen is working in. Jacksons Landing sits in Burlington's Appleby Village as one location of The Landing Group, a polished-casual bar-and-grill that trades in breadth: sushi and gyoza on the same page as pizzas, pastas and a forty-day-aged striploin.

The shares menu keeps that global habit going. Wagyu beef dumplings come with sweet peppers and sriracha soy; crispy Korean cauliflower is tossed in gochujang and peanuts; burrata is plated with prosciutto, arugula, basil pesto and house-made bread. From there the kitchen turns toward comfort — a carbonara built on house-smoked chicken, bacon and a fried egg over spaghetti, beef tenderloin rigatoni in a red-wine tomato sauce with whipped parmesan, steak frites finished with gremolata. Pizzas, burgers, wings and a maple-cider half chicken hold the middle, so a table rarely has to choose between the person who wants dumplings and the one who wants a burger. The house line leans into that middle — a Landing Burger, Landing Wings, a naan chicken club — familiar orders a regular reaches for without reading the menu twice.

That breadth is the point rather than an accident. The globally-inflected shares are not a separate cuisine bolted onto the grill; they run alongside the pizzas and pastas as equals, which is how a contemporary Canadian menu reads in practice — everything is fair game, and the confidence comes from execution rather than from a single tradition. Beer and wine, a patio, private dining and easy parking sit under all of it — the quiet infrastructure behind a kitchen asked to cover lunch, brunch, drinks and a group dinner in the same week. Jacksons Landing has worked this territory since 2015, long enough for the Appleby Village neighbourhood to fold it into the regular rotation of lunches, brunches and nights out.

Brunch is where the kitchen makes its clearest case. Lobster Benedict sets crispy lobster and soft poached eggs on house-baked cheddar scones under hollandaise and a dusting of togarashi. Chicken and waffles pairs buttermilk-fried chicken with smoked bacon gravy and sriracha honey. Steak and eggs plates that same forty-day striploin with three sunny-side eggs, Cajun potatoes and tomato jam, and a maple-glazed peameal Benedict works the local register. It is a brunch with enough identity to justify the trip on its own, which is not the usual case for a bar-and-grill weekend service.

The drinks and the clock are part of the design. The bar runs house cocktails and shared-format drinks alongside a wine list that goes half-price by the bottle every Wednesday. Happy hour lands twice a day — three to five in the afternoon, then again from nine until close — and the late window is the more useful of the two, because it keeps real food on the table rather than only snacks: steak frites, the carbonara, a plate of Moroccan curried chicken with almond butter, basmati and grilled naan. For a group that starts its evening late, that second window turns a nightcap into something closer to a second dinner.

Jacksons Landing does not stake itself on one signature dish. What it offers instead is optionality — the reasonable bet that a table of six arriving with six different appetites will each leave with the plate they came for. On a Friday that reads as a full arc: pressed tuna to share at seven, mains through the evening, and steak frites off the late menu closer to midnight, all at one table on New Street.