The Curly Willow Eatery

The Curly Willow began as a lunch setup tucked inside a Hurontario Street gift shop — a few midday plates served beside the merchandise — and grew into a full Pine Street dining room that now carries a table from garlic mussels through bacon-wrapped filet mignon. That arc explains the place better than any single dish. A diner can drop in for a sandwich at noon or build a seafood-and-steak dinner at night, and the kitchen is set up for both without shifting its point of view. It is family-run, and its menu now spans lunch bowls, burgers, pasta, seafood, and a separate meatless page.

Lunch leans on the Lobster Grilled Cheese: chunks of maritime lobster and melted Swiss pressed into garlic sourdough, a familiar sandwich shape the kitchen has made its own. Around it sit a Swiss-topped Angus burger under crispy onion rings, hand-breaded crab cakes with dill remoulade and pineapple-mango salsa, a New York steak sandwich on garlic toast, and a shrimp risotto finished with shaved parmesan. A turkey burger under cranberry aioli and a crispy chicken sandwich with slaw, house pickles, and sriracha-lime aioli fill out the lunch board. Dinner widens the field. Garlic mussels in beurre blanc and coconut shrimp with Thai dipping sauce open the meal; from there the plates run to shrimp linguine, a salmon filet over coconut risotto, halibut with citrus compote and braised kale, and grilled Australian lamb chops on whipped feta and pearl couscous. The Thai Curry Bowl folds black tiger shrimp, mussels, and cod into a mild red coconut curry — the kitchen's whole seafood range condensed into a single bowl.

What holds the menu together is a refusal to pick one lane. Mushroom agnolotti in creamy rosemary sauce sits a few lines from filet mignon; chicken parmesan shares the page with a coconut curry bowl. That spread could read as a kitchen trying to please everyone, but the specifics push the other way — the dishes are built out rather than padded, and the agnolotti itself changes between the lunch and dinner menus. The clearest signal is the separate meatless page. Vegetarian and vegan diners order from spinach-and-caramelized-triangle ravioli, a couscous bowl of tomatoes, olives, and feta, and a chickpea-and-baby-corn curry bowl, instead of one modified side pushed to the margins. A restaurant shows its priorities in where it spends effort, and Curly Willow spends it on the diner most kitchens serve last.

The restaurant is family-run by Linda and Mike Sloat, whom local reporting credits with its move across Collingwood and its growth since it opened in 2015. The Pine Street dining room carries that hands-on history in its surfaces: live-edge tables, driftwood accents, and rustic pieces under bright daylight, assembled over time rather than ordered from a catalogue. Beer and wine round out the service, and a brunch and lunch trade runs alongside the dinner hours. It reads as a restaurant that grew into its address instead of being dropped into it.

Pine Street runs through Collingwood's downtown heritage district, a few blocks back from the water that pulls people to the town in the first place. Curly Willow sits in that current without leaning on it — the lobster and halibut nod to the maritime side, while the couscous bowls and lamb chops keep it from settling into a fish house. It closes Sundays and Mondays, runs lunch and dinner midweek, and holds Saturday for dinner alone. What a table finds there is a restaurant that started small and kept adding, until the menu could meet almost any order Collingwood walked in with.