Taps and Tunes Bar and Grill

Taps and Tunes puts its whole premise on the sign: beer and live music, on a downtown Collingwood stretch of Huron Street with an older live-music history. What the name leaves out is the kitchen, and the kitchen is the part that runs latest — plates still leaving the pass while a comedian works the Tuesday open mic or a Wednesday karaoke crowd finds its nerve. Locals shortened the whole thing to TNT a while ago. It works as a place to eat, a place to drink, and a place to end up, and most nights it is asked to be all three at once.

The menu reads like two or three restaurants agreed to share a kitchen. A pound of wings comes with celery, carrots, and ranch or blue cheese; the TNT Burger stacks bacon and crispy onions and arrives with both fries and onion rings; the fish and chips is beer-battered haddock with tartar. Then the same page turns to the momos, which come three ways — Himalayan Momos steamed and filled with vegetables or chicken, Mountain Momos steamed and lightly fried, or Momos in Sauce tossed in chili, creamy white, or butter chicken sauce. The clearest expression of the whole idea is the Butter Chicken Poutine: fries and curds under butter chicken sauce and pulled chicken, a plate that only makes sense in a kitchen cooking pub food and dumplings off the same line. Penne arrives three ways, there is chicken parmesan and a plate of tenders with plum sauce, and the appetizers run from calamari and beer-battered pickle spears to samosas, spanakopita, and Moroccan cigars of spiced ground beef in phyllo.

That range is not a novelty act. It is what lets a table of six order in six directions and still eat together — someone on the burger, someone on the momos, someone splitting the Crispy Trio Medley of TNT fries, sweet potato fries, and onion rings across the middle. It is the kind of ordering, shareable plates and a pound of wings and something fried to pass around, that suits a night that is going to run long. It also matches the way the room gets used: the food is priced to be ordered in rounds rather than as a single occasion, there is beer and wine to keep the table going, and the kitchen runs until close, which in Collingwood makes Taps and Tunes one of the few kitchens still sending out food after midnight.

The storefront opened in 2023, but the live music on Huron Street is older than the sign. Local reporting at the time described an owner who had come up from Toronto, taken to the space, and wanted to keep its music legacy running rather than start something from scratch. "We are trying to grow this place organically," he told a local paper, framing the aim as a steady spot for cold beer and live music rather than an overnight club. The weekly calendar is where that plan shows: comedy open mic on Tuesday, karaoke on Wednesday, an open-mic jam on Thursday, live acts on Friday and Saturday, and an industry-night karaoke on Sunday for the cooks and servers coming off their own shifts.

Nothing here is precious. There is no reservation line to clear and no dress code to meet, the seating is bar and table, and ordering runs through the counter or Uber Eats; a Friday even brings a Ramen Night from six to eight before the music takes the front of the house. The address sits on the Huron Street waterfront, in the old shipyards end of downtown, and it has been asked to do the work a whole strip of separate places might do elsewhere — dinner, a drink, a stage, and a late table. By one in the morning the momos and poutine are still going out to whoever is left: the cooks from other kitchens, the band, and the people not ready for the night to end.