Shy's Place Restaurant

The 1896 house on Coreslab Drive was nearly cleared for a gas station. A 2014 purchase kept it standing instead, and the restored heritage home now does work no developer had planned for it: plating carbonara, pouring cocktails, turning weekend mornings over to brunch. Shy's Place reads first as a building with a reprieve — a casual fine dining room that treats its restored rooms as the main argument and the kitchen as the proof. The cooking is scratch-made and occasionally sells out, which tells you how the place keeps its footing: small enough to run out, serious enough to care.

The menu makes its case in specifics. Steak Bites arrive as crispy-coated tenderloin under maple-garlic sauce and smoked aioli, the clearest first read on the kitchen's polished-comfort lane. The Honey Hot Pizza builds on scratch-made dough — dry-cured pepperoni, pickled pepperoncini, fior di latte, marinara, and a hot-honey drizzle that gives the pizza list its sweet-heat marker. Garlic-parm fries and a gluten-free-dusted calamari with kalamata and curry aioli round out the table's shared start. Pasta runs richer, led by a Fettuccine Carbonara of pancetta, sweet peas, red onion jam, fresh egg yolk, cracked black pepper, and grana padano. Seasonal plates push further out — a ten-ounce bone-in pork chop with sweet soy marinade and roasted pineapple — while lunch keeps a global-comfort streak alive in the Moroccan chicken sandwich, all mango chutney, goat cheese, and curry aioli.

What the cooking says is that Shy's is not chasing a single cuisine. Italian leanings anchor the dinner menu, but the kitchen reaches into Mediterranean and Canadian-comfort registers without apology — burrata dressed with pineapple salsa and prosciutto, a lemon-pistachio fettuccine bright with arugula and goat cheese, summer-fried broccoli loaded with seeds, nuts, and dried cranberries. The through-line is not a flag on a map; it is the scratch kitchen itself, fresh enough that dishes run out and confident enough to keep the range wide. Gluten-free options and dedicated fryers sit alongside a plain warning that the kitchen is not allergen-free — the kind of detail a place includes when it expects to be taken at its word.

The origin is the building. The home dates to 1896, and the choice to buy it in 2014 — rather than let it fall to a gas-station lot — shaped the restaurant before a single plate left the kitchen. Shy's opened in 2018 inside those restored rooms, and the heritage setting still does more identity work than any cuisine label: historic décor and memorabilia carry the dining areas, and the casual-fine-dining framing follows from the house rather than from white tablecloths. Early on, area readers named it one of the region's best new restaurants — recognition that landed on the preservation as much as the cooking.

Brunch is where the breadth shows. Saturdays and Sundays get a service of their own — buttermilk chicken and French toast, a rotating set of Benedicts — running separate from the weekday lunch of handhelds, salads, and a daily soup. It gives the kitchen several front doors: a steak-bites-and-cocktails happy hour with five-dollar drinks on Tuesday and weekday afternoons, a pasta-and-pizza dinner, a weekend brunch, and a patio when the weather turns. Each one is a different reason to book the same restored house.

The booking comes with rules that say as much as the menu does. Reservations are encouraged because seating is not guaranteed, regular tables cap at ten, and larger parties move to private events; there is no corkage, and cakes need advance notice. The house that almost became a filling station now fills its calendar weeks ahead — brunches, date nights, and celebrations, all planned rather than stumbled into.