HEIST Restaurant + Wine Club

Spaghetti Alla Chitarra is the plate that ties HEIST together. Square-cut strands arrive tangled with snow crab claw and picked blue crab, brandy, a cherry-tomato cream, and a scatter of pangrattato — an Italian pasta built around shellfish, which is the whole restaurant in a single bowl. HEIST Restaurant + Wine Club sits in downtown Kingston, on Wellington Street in the Old Sydenham blocks, running an Italian-leaning kitchen with its centre of gravity in the water. Dinner can be pasta or steak or pizza, but the menu keeps turning back toward oysters, octopus, crab, and fish.

The seafood thread is the one worth following. East Coast oysters open on crushed ice with a red wine mignonette, lemon, and shaved horseradish. Octopus arrives pan-seared over piquillo peppers, crispy potatoes, and a braised tomato stew slicked with hot oil — a sharper first plate than the calamari most kitchens default to. Grilled butterflied branzino comes with chimichurri and grilled lemon, Scottish organic salmon takes a dijon cream, and a daily line-caught fish rounds out the list. Before the mains, the shareables run long: gruyère-stuffed arancini, polenta fries under a braised ragout, crispy pork belly with honey dijon, burrata with roasted beets and pistachio gremolata, peppered beef carpaccio with cognac dijonnaise. The Italian side holds its own — rigatoni alla vodka with guanciale and chili, pan-roasted gnocchi with grilled corn and grana padano — and the pizzas carry real personality, from a hot-honey pie with soppressata to a French onion version under taleggio and a mushroom Fun-Ghi finished with truffle oil. For the table that wants red meat, there is an eight-ounce tenderloin and a twelve-ounce striploin, both with red wine jus. Vegetarians are not an afterthought here — the pan-roasted gnocchi, a margherita or Fun-Ghi pizza, an artisanal green salad, and a maple-cashew vegan cheesecake all hold the plant-based end.

The naming is where the personality shows. The menu is organized as a heist: pastas live under The Italian Job, seafood under Oceans 168 — a wink at both the caper film and the restaurant's own street number — steaks under The Steak Out, dessert under The Getaway. The daily catch is listed as Caught Red Handed. It would be easy to take all of this as novelty, except the cooking underneath is straight and specific, and the breadth is doing real work. A menu that runs from a single oyster through pasta, pizza, steak, and branzino is built for the table that cannot agree — one person set on shellfish, another on a pie, a third on a proper steak, all seated together.

The wine club is the other half of the name, and it sets the rhythm. Wine pours by the glass through an early Happy Hour, and the later Friday and Saturday seatings come with a bottle offer that rewards booking the back half of the evening; Thursday is an oyster night. The bar is not a holding pen before pasta, either — Happy Hour names signature cocktails, wine by the glass, and the house Bankroll pour. Private dining and a reservation-led floor make HEIST a place to plan around rather than wander into, a downtown dinner booked for an occasion and ordered in rounds. The kitchen keeps dinner hours only, Tuesday through Sunday, opening in the late afternoon and dark on Mondays.

What ties the place together is the through-line beneath the theme: an Italian kitchen that keeps reaching for the water, a wine list treated as part of the plan, and a menu wide enough that a table rarely leaves having eaten the same dinner as the one beside it. HEIST occupies a historic building on Wellington, a few doors into the part of downtown that fills up at night. The address does double duty — where the restaurant sits, and the number folded into its seafood section. The pull is the same most nights: a first round of oysters, crab worked into the pasta, and a bottle to keep the table there past the second hour.