Queen's Café

A café-sized room on Guelph's east end has no business serving rack of lamb. Queen's Café seats somewhere between thirty-two and thirty-six people in a renovated storefront at the corner of Victoria Road and Elizabeth Street, the address that gave the place its name — two streets named for queens, one restaurant that took the cue. The kitchen runs only four nights a week, Wednesday through Saturday, and only for dinner. Inside those hours it cooks like a much more formal establishment than the storefront suggests.

The dinner menu is compact and built around composed plates. Beef short ribs are braised for eight hours and finished with red wine jus over mashed potatoes; the beef tenderloin arrives with mushroom sauce; Atlantic salmon comes on scallion risotto under a balsamic glaze. A roasted rack of lamb is offered in half and full portions with a rosemary demi-glace, and the schnitzel is panko-breaded pork under apple-butter barbecue sauce, bacon, and cheddar. Around those entrees sit the looser classics — a beef dip of thinly sliced prime rib on ciabatta with au jus, halibut and chips with house-made tartar, the Queen's Chicken Club layered with smoked bacon, avocado, and chipotle mayo. Even the burgers carry house relish and a secret sauce, and the fries are always fresh cut.

The rest of the menu spreads wider than the storefront would lead you to expect. There is a full run of pastas — short rib ragu over pappardelle with house-made focaccia, tiger shrimp in a sambuca cream over fettuccine, a sausage penne built on spicy Italian sausage and tomato cream. The salads are their own small project: the King's Super Salad piles candied pecans, goat cheese, and cranberries over mixed greens with a choice of grilled chicken or tiger shrimp, dressed in a house apple cider vinaigrette. The dinner is fully licensed, with beer, cider, and wine to sit alongside it, and for the nights the dining room is dark the kitchen keeps a takeout and delivery menu running through the usual apps.

The reach of all that is the tell. A neighbourhood dinner room could coast on burgers and pasta; this one runs from chicken avocado eggrolls with sweet Thai chili and a Thai stir-fry over miki noodle to that braised short rib without ever losing the feel of a small local restaurant. The cheese-and-bacon antojitos sit a few lines above the eight-ounce tenderloin. It is comfort food treated as though it deserves the care of a tasting menu, plated for diners who want a dressed-up dinner without the stiffness that usually comes with it.

Ron Hill and Tammy Hsieh own the room, and Hill runs the kitchen as chef. The couple had already built a restaurant in Waterloo before they came back to the Guelph market and opened here in September of 2018, and the cooking carries that résumé without announcing it. Their description of the place is plain — casual, reasonably priced, made in-house, fresh and local where the season allows. The personal hospitality is the point as much as the food; this is owner-run service, not a concept staffed from a binder.

That hospitality has shown up off the menu, too. The kitchen cooked Thanksgiving dinner for neighbours in 2019 and Christmas meals for seniors and food-insecure families the following year, the kind of gesture a small owner-operated dinner room makes when it decides the neighbourhood is the actual business. The hours stay short and the dining room stays small. Four nights a week, a storefront that looks like it should be pouring coffee turns out short ribs and rack of lamb instead, and the corner of Victoria and Elizabeth keeps its two queens fed.