Golf's Steak House & Seafood

At Golf's, the prime rib is well-aged Canadian beef, slow-roasted in limited quantities and carved to order, sent out au jus with a side of horseradish and offered in eight-ounce and twelve-ounce cuts. It is the dish the kitchen built its name on, and the one a first visit should be planned around, because the day's roast is finite — when it is gone, it is gone, which is reason enough to book the earlier seating. Everything else radiates from that centre. This is a formal steak and seafood house on the bank of the Grand River, a Kitchener dining room of white tablecloths and wood trim with a four-seasons atrium that looks out over the water.

The steaks carry the old-school weight. The T-Bone Porterhouse is the largest cut on the menu, twenty-two ounces of bone-in beef for the diner who wants the full steakhouse commitment rather than a lighter order; the eight-ounce filet mignon is the most tender of them, and a bone-in rib steak, a New York striploin in eight- and twelve-ounce cuts, and a rack of New Zealand lamb finished in four-peppercorn madeira round out the list. There are narrow back ribs, too — a full pound, char-broiled in the house barbecue sauce — and a chicken-and-ribs plate for the table that wants something to pull apart between the carving knives.

The seafood is no side note. Golf's runs a one-pound order of Alaskan king crab legs, two eight-ounce jumbo rock lobster tails, pan-seared halibut, fresh Atlantic salmon, and orange roughy from New Zealand prepared baked, steamed, or pan-seared. The seafood platter sets an eight-ounce lobster tail beside garlic shrimp and scallops, and surf and turf pairs a lobster tail with a char-broiled filet for the diner caught between the two halves of the menu. Even the openers lean to the water — bacon-wrapped jumbo scallops, baked garlic shrimp, a shrimp cocktail, and lightly breaded calamari fried golden. Order broadly and the kitchen will land a porterhouse and a lobster tail on the same table without blinking.

The breadth is the tell. Chicken cordon bleu, chicken parmesan, a vegetable lasagna and a vegan penne marinara are not concessions to fashion; they are the practical reach that lets a large party — the anniversary dinner, the table that spans three generations — settle on one restaurant without anyone giving something up. There is a children's menu, a bacon-wrapped petit filet, a bruschetta bread to start. Golf's reads a booking as an occasion rather than a transaction, and almost everything on the menu, from the platters to the sharing-sized cuts, is arranged to keep a full table comfortable for the length of a real dinner.

Golf's opened in 1975 and has stayed family-run and steakhouse-formal ever since; local reporting traces the founding to the Kanellis family. The service keeps to that register — orders taken without a rush, plates carried with a little ceremony, the kind of formality that has gone scarce in mid-sized cities. The decision that defines the place is the one it keeps declining to make: it has not modernized for the sake of looking modern, holding onto the white tablecloths, the slow roast, and the river views while the city around it rebuilt itself. People come back because it is still recognizably the place they marked the last milestone at.

Sundays are the restaurant's second act. The weekly brunch buffet runs on a set schedule — a carvery, hot breakfast dishes, salad and bread tables, desserts and beverages, with fixed pricing for adults and for children — and gives Golf's an identity with nothing to do with the dinner steaks. The atrium and the private banquet rooms point the same direction: a kitchen organized around gatherings, the carving station working through a Sunday morning, the banquet rooms booked for the occasions a family intends to remember.