Shepherd's Pub

Shepherd's Pub has been a fixture on East Mill Street in downtown Elora since 2004, and it still leads with "Thank You For Supporting Local" across the top of its own homepage. That posture fits the room: this is the dependable village pub, open most of the week, taking phone reservations, takeout and large bookings, with a menu wide enough — pub classics, curries, wings, burgers, poutines and a full plant-based section — to be the default answer when a group can't agree on anything else.

The pub classics anchor it. Shepherd's Pub Pie is the house-named centre — seasoned ground beef with peas, corn, carrots and onions under mashed potatoes and gravy. The Beef & Guinness Stew arrives the traditional way, with bacon, mushrooms, a Yorkshire pudding and mashed potatoes alongside. Fish and Chips runs beer-battered cod with tartar and coleslaw, and turns up again as The Cod Father Sandwich on brioche or as Cod Bites to start. The Lamb Burger is the most specific burger on the board — an Ontario lamb patty with feta, garlic sauce and mint chutney — and the kitchen keeps a German streak too, with Schmiegi's Oktoberfest Dinner of three sausages over sauerkraut and the Currywurst that goes with it. There's even an Indian corner, with butter chicken, chicken curry and a vegetable korma served with basmati and naan.

The menu has a sense of humour, and it shows most in the wings and the sides. Fresh Ontario Wings come by the pound with a long list of sauces and rubs — NINE LIVES Habanero Honey, Forty Creek BBQ, Bombay Curry, Sweet Chilli Thai — built to be ordered by flavour rather than as a default. The poutines lean into the puns: The Lambassador piles ground lamb, feta and mint chutney over curds and gravy, while the Pierogi Burger and Pulled Pork Mac & Cheese hold down the comfort-heavy middle. Pub Pierogies with beer-braised onions and bacon, Shepherd's Fries with garlic sauce and hummus, and Thai Cauliflower Bites open the table.

What sets Shepherd's apart from the standard wings-and-burgers room is how seriously it takes the plant-based side. This is not a token veggie burger buried at the bottom: there's a Vegan Currywurst on Beyond Sausage, a Beyond Banh Mi Burger with pickled carrot and sriracha mayo, a Beyond Classic, a Loaded Garden Veggie Wrap and the Vegetable Korma. A mixed table can put a Beyond burger and a plate of wings on the same order, which is rarer in a pub than it should be.

The bar carries the Irish backbone, with Guinness, Harp and Kilkenny on tap and a rotating craft-beer chalkboard to check around the room, plus wine by the glass, cider, pub cocktails like the Shepherd's Caesar, Scotch, Irish whiskey and Canadian rye. The seasonal soups — a rotating feature and a French onion — run October through May, there's a proper kids menu, and the room takes standard reservations with a separate path for parties of sixteen or more. Twenty-two years on, that breadth is what keeps the bookings mixed: a family, a vegan and a table of wing-eaters can all land in the same room on the same night.