The Squire Pub & Grill

The half-price feature appetizers at The Squire Pub & Grill run every afternoon from four o'clock to close, with one carve-out that explains the whole place: they stop on nights Canada Life Place has an event. The arena sits directly across the street, and when downtown London fills for a game or a concert, a sports pub at that address does not need to discount its nachos to fill a table. The Squire is built around that rhythm — screens, reservations, drinks, and pub food timed for the after-work cocktail and the pre-concert dinner, for the hours before a show and the crowd that spills out after it.

The menu works to avoid the generic sports-bar blur. Nacho Libre arrives on hand-cut corn tortillas under a four-cheese blend, black beans, pickled jalapenos, and house salsa, a shareable with enough structure to anchor the middle of an order rather than disappear into it. The Squire Burger, the house-named handheld, is a half-pound ground-chuck patty on a COBS bun with cheddar, thick-cut bacon, an onion ring, and the kitchen's own burger sauce. Fresh Wings come locally sourced and run through house-made sauces and dry rubs — Real Buffalo, Nashville Hot, Jack Daniel's BBQ, dill pickle, chipotle mango. The Clubber Lang triple-stacks oven-roasted turkey with bacon and cheddar; Beer Cheese Dip leans on warm soft pretzels; Buttermilk Fried Chicken comes with house slaw and pickles. A marinated AAA sirloin turns up as both a sandwich and a bowl, for the table that wants something past a burger. The marinara is made in-house and the bread comes from COBS — the kind of small specifics that separate a kitchen from a freezer.

That breadth is the tell. Alongside the burgers and wings, the kitchen runs tacos, flatbreads, grain-and-protein bowls, loaded pierogis, potstickers, and bao buns — a range wide enough that a table rarely has to negotiate over where to eat. A local streak runs through it: the Western Fair Dogs are the fairground hot dog done one better by the menu's own account, and the drinks list favours local craft beer alongside fresh classic cocktails and signature pours. The homepage headline reads LOCAL LIVES HERE, which pairs with the other phrase the restaurant uses for itself, an upscale sports pub. Both phrases mean something here: premium sports on the screens, matched by food made in-house and beer poured from nearby taps.

The corner has a history. It reopened in 2017 as The Squire, taking over a storefront that had spent years as a French restaurant called Le Rendez-Vous; local reporting at the time described new owners with experience in London's restaurant scene, a chef who had cooked in both London and Vancouver, and a dining room renovated toward something more casual. The current kitchen runs under a chef named Connor. The arena it faces has taken a new name since then, but The Squire's role on the block has only sharpened into the downtown pub a group can actually book ahead.

What 2017 started has hardened into infrastructure. The Squire books private events and runs a catering menu priced at thirty-seven dollars a head for groups of twenty or more — any four items, with extras at nine dollars a person — delivered and set up across London, and built from the same shareables that anchor a normal night: Nacho Libre, pretzel bites and beer cheese, wings, flatbreads, a build-your-own taco bar. Reservations run through the website, online ordering handles takeout, and the weekend stretches to midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. Here the meal rides along with the night rather than interrupting it — a first round before the arena fills, a last one after the final whistle.