Days on Front

The short rib is braised in red wine for hours and finished with a deeply reduced bordelaise that takes the kitchen two days to build. It arrives on roasted garlic mash with green beans, the dish that has carried the restaurant's name in Kingston's west end. Owner Matt Day is a Kingston restaurant kid — son of AquaTerra restaurateur Clark Day — who returned home after working out west and abroad and opened the place in 2012 with a chef partner he'd known through downtown kitchens. The name folds his own surname into the storefront's address, where Days Road runs into Front Road on the Bayridge edge of the city.

The current April 2026 menus run lunch on Thursdays and Fridays and dinner Wednesday through Saturday, with a three-course option layered over the à la carte. The short rib still anchors the large plates, sitting beside a beef tenderloin with fondant potatoes, asparagus, peppercorn sauce, potato crisps and tallow mayo. Seared scallops come over a leek and brown butter purée with bacon jam and pine nuts — the small-plate format the kitchen has been holding since opening. The duck confit lands on house-made gnocchi with leeks, mushrooms, and a sage brown butter cream sauce. Lunches keep the same hand: a steak frites built on picanha with chimichurri and rosemary mayo, a mushroom pasta on house-made pappardelle with gorgonzola cream and sun-dried tomato pesto, a mac and cheese rebuilt around orzo, smoked cheddar cream, and a brown butter crumb. The beet salad runs raspberry-and-peach vinaigrette under the goat feta, dried cranberries, and pumpkin seeds. None of the plates ask the kitchen to perform; they ask it to cook.

What the menu does, in shape and order, is treat the comfort end of contemporary Canadian as a discipline rather than a default. The braises run long. The sauces are reduced rather than emulsified into the wrong texture. Ingredients show their provenance — Enright beef on the burger and the steak sandwich, local mushrooms folded through three plates, Ontario produce sitting under the meat in plain language. The plates land polished rather than ornate; the short rib on its mash, the scallops on their leek puree, the duck confit on its gnocchi — the same three anchors that ran the room in opening year are still doing it now.

The chef partner is Jay Legere — trained under Kingston chef Jack Francis, Red Seal credentialed, and the former head chef at AquaTerra before he joined Day at the new restaurant. Earlier Kingston kitchens including Le Caveau and Le Chien Noir are also on the résumé. Legere has described his cooking as global-local, and the current menus read that way: a Brazilian cut on the lunch steak frites, an Italian gnocchi format under the duck leg, a French braise running under the short rib, all of it built on regional sourcing without naming the farms in the dish title. Day described his goal in an early interview with local press as taking a high-quality product and applying it in an approachable atmosphere, and the three-course dinner option, the wine-pairing suggestions, and the dining-room formality without ceremony hold to it.

The storefront sits in a Bayridge plaza, a short drive west of downtown Kingston, with a front door that doesn't promise much from the parking lot. What sits inside is a dining room running a Wednesday-through-Saturday dinner shift plus Thursday and Friday lunches, a kitchen that has held its short rib for fourteen years and refreshes the rest of the menu with seasonal features inside a steady prix-fixe structure, and a partnership that grew up in Kingston restaurants and decided to keep going there. Anniversaries, parent visits, and the dinners a household books rather than improvises land on Front Road. The short rib still sits where it has sat since the opening year, and the rest of the menu turns around it.