The Underwing

An underwing is the vivid hindwing a moth keeps folded out of sight until it opens up to fly, and the restaurant that took the name has built its dining room to match: commissioned insect portraits line the walls, and the lighting stays low enough that each plate arrives like a small reveal. The Underwing occupies a corner of Cambridge's Gaslight District and opens for dinner only, a kitchen with upscale ambitions that roams from Thai to Mexican to the Middle East without ever losing sight of Ontario. It is less somewhere you drop into than somewhere you plan an evening around.

The throughline is smoke. Hay-smoked duck breast, smoked mozzarella bites, a hot-smoked pickerel dip, Crispy Smoked Tofu that reads as a dish in its own right rather than a default meat-free option — the smoker touches proteins, cheese, and vegetables alike. Charred Octopus, framed by harissa and romesco, is the clearest opening move a table can make: smoky, peppery, layered, a fair preview of how the kitchen thinks. From there the menu fans out. Spicy tuna tartare and beef tartare tacos cover the raw and the handheld; pistachio dukkah pickerel and tamarind coconut mussels reach toward the Middle East and Southeast Asia; a duck prosciutto flatbread and a burratini hold down the shareable middle, and a Grilled Striploin anchors the table when dinner is meant to stretch. Bread comes as sourdough with hot honey butter, and dessert can land on a house-made buttertart — the one plate that gives away where all this globe-trotting is actually cooked. The sweets keep the same wandering instinct, a Thai tea and yuzu ice cream on one end and an honest honey cheesecake on the other.

What that range tells you is a kitchen with a point of view rather than a theme. Plenty of restaurants advertise fusion and mean a short reel of the familiar; here the smoker and the spice pantry are doing real work across the whole menu, and a diner is expected to cross a few flavour borders inside a single meal. The Ontario grounding is the tell that keeps it honest — pickerel turns up twice, once dressed in pistachio and dukkah and once smoked into a dip, and the buttertart closes things on a Canadian note. It rewards the adventurous without stranding anyone: there is a striploin and a plate of truffle fries for the table that would rather stay closer to home, and enough contrast between the bold and the familiar to keep a mixed group happy.

The Underwing opened in 2023 as part of the Gaslight District, the reworked industrial precinct at the old Galt end of Cambridge that has become the area's night-time draw, and it has made itself that district's dining anchor. Inside, the character is deliberate — the painted menagerie on the walls, the dramatic lighting, a speakeasy hush that makes the place feel discovered rather than advertised. It stays camera-ready without arranging itself around one photogenic corner; the visual identity carries through the whole dining room. On a menu this willing to wander, that design does the work a named chef might otherwise do, making plain that the people behind it have decided exactly what kind of evening they are running.

Which is why dinner here rarely ends at dinner. The kitchen keeps a separate late-night menu, the bar runs a full list of beer and wine, and the calendar leans on live entertainment, so a Friday or Saturday booking can carry a table from a first shared plate through to a midnight last call. Booking ahead is the sensible move for the weekend or any night with something programmed nearby; this is a restaurant built for the planned evening rather than the walk-in. The Gaslight District supplies the rest — an evening's worth of reasons to stay out, gathered around one square. It is the kind of night the name had in mind all along: the drab forewing folded over something brighter, waiting until the lights go down to show it.