The Iron Skillet

A Wiener schnitzel and a bowl of jambalaya rarely share a dinner menu, but at The Iron Skillet they sit only a few lines apart. The Collingwood kitchen cooks Austrian schnitzels and a stuffed Yorkshire pudding with the same seriousness it brings to Cajun rice and Spanish-style seafood paella, and it has been doing exactly that on Huron Street, a short walk from the harbour, since 1991. The through-line is not a single country or region. It is comfort food read broadly — hearty, recognizable plates that happen to arrive from several kitchens at once.

The dinner menu makes the range plain. Schnitzels come two ways, chicken or the classic Wiener, and perogies and a stuffed Yorkshire pudding anchor the European comfort-food end. From there the kitchen travels — Cajun chicken tortellini, a jambalaya built on sausage and shrimp, and a seafood paella that is one of the clearest signs of how far the plates reach. A chicken parmesan and a two-piece fish and chips hold the middle ground, the familiar orders a table can count on. Steaks and a New York striploin cover the grill, and liver and onions stays on for the diners who still order it. The burgers carry the house's own humour, a Skillet Burger and a Redneck Burger among them, and the dessert most regulars name is the bread pudding.

What the lineup says about the kitchen is that it never picked a lane and never felt it had to. Plenty of restaurants trim a menu to a single idea; this one keeps the schnitzel, the jambalaya and the paella all on the page because its diners order across the whole thing. Portions run generous, the service reads as unfussy and familiar, and the pub-style dining room carries the mixed menu without pretending to be more formal than it is. Nothing about the place is chasing a trend. It is a kitchen that treats a wide menu, cooked consistently, as its own kind of specialty.

More than three decades in, the restaurant has settled into the weekly patterns of a town that fills and empties with the seasons. The calendar gives most nights a theme — prime rib on Sundays, when kids eat free; taco and schnitzel nights midweek; steak on Fridays and seafood on Saturdays — a rhythm that rewards regulars who already know which evening lines up with what they came in for. Large groups are welcomed outright, and dine-in shares the kitchen with takeout and delivery. Reservations are taken by phone rather than online, which matters most when a large party wants a set time. The hours are steady rather than late: lunch and dinner every day, with the doors closing at nine.

The weekends widen the schedule further. Saturday and Sunday open with a breakfast menu the weekday dinner crowd never sees — a Skillet Breakfast, a Western omelet — served in the same dining room that turns to schnitzels and paella by evening. From spring through fall a patio adds another way to sit down, and the all-week, all-day service makes the restaurant easy to fold into a day spent along the Collingwood waterfront, whether the table wants a full dinner or a quick, familiar plate.

None of this reads as reinvention. For more than thirty years the kitchen has stayed broad and stayed consistent, and that is the whole of it — a menu that crosses borders on a single page, cooked the same way season after season. The bread pudding regulars still ask for by name has outlasted most of the trends that have passed through town since it first appeared on the menu.