Muskoka Surf and Turf

At Muskoka Surf and Turf, the Atlantic lobster that fills the roll and the AAA beef that meets the grill are also sold by the cut, packed cold from a deli counter a few steps inside the door. The Gravenhurst kitchen works as a sit-down restaurant and a seafood-and-steak shop at the same time, and neither half feels bolted on. One table orders a whole lobster dinner and a build-your-own surf-and-turf plate while a regular on the way home leaves with snow crab and a ribeye for Saturday.

The menu reads like the counter it grew out of. Seafood is the main event: lobster rolls and scallop rolls, a shrimp trio, seared scallops, garlic-butter mussels, a spicy calamari fritti, fish and chips, and a seafood platter that pulls the case together on one tray. Steak holds its own beside it — ribeye, a prime rib roast, striploin, and surf-and-turf plates a diner assembles by pairing a cut with lobster, crab, or shrimp. Seafood garlic pasta folds shrimp, scallops, mussels, and lobster into a single bowl. At the top end sit a whole lobster dinner and a snow crab cluster, the plates worth splurging on when the drive up called for it. Even the peameal bacon burger, a plain Ontario staple, sits on the same list without apology.

What the list says about the kitchen is that it wants seafood taken seriously without the ceremony that usually comes with it. Lobster, snow crab, and scallops normally arrive on white tablecloths and a bill to match; here they land in a room where the dress code is whatever you drove up in, priced closer to a Tuesday dinner than an occasion. The deli case does quiet work in the background — the beef and seafood turned over fast enough to sell raw are the same beef and seafood the kitchen cooks, a freshness argument the menu never has to make. It is a maritime restaurant built on the logic of a butcher shop.

The path to the storefront ran through several smaller ones. Alyssa Paugh started the business in August 2020 as a tent-and-trailer operation selling steak and seafood, then moved it through the Blue Barn and a Bethune Drive address as the following grew. The sit-down restaurant opened on November 1, 2024, in the former Rombo's Family Restaurant space on Muskoka Road South — a building, by local reporting, Paugh had wanted for years before it came free. The opening weeks ran hectic, which is what happens when an audience that has been buying from your trailer finally has somewhere to sit down.

Going licensed was the real leap. The trailer and the takeout counter had sold food; the restaurant had to become a place people linger in, with beer and wine and cocktails, a patio, and dinner service that runs to eight most nights. Monday stays dark. The rest of the week keeps a single long shift from late morning through dinner, which lets lunch and a full seafood dinner come out of the same kitchen without a break in between. The dining room fills with the mix a casual Muskoka dinner draws — families, couples in off the lake, a table of tradespeople straight off a Highway 11 job.

Surf-and-turf is the name, but the appeal is practical. A Gravenhurst table that can't agree — one person set on lobster, another on a ribeye, a kid holding out for the burger — gets fed well in a single stop. The patio runs through the warm months, the same food packs up for takeout, and the day's features go up on Facebook rather than a printed insert. The counter stays stocked past the dinner rush, so a good meal and next week's snow crab can leave by the same door.