Waldo's On King Bistro & Wine Bar

Covent Garden Market is built for transactions you carry home — produce stacked on tables, a cheese counter, a coffee grabbed on the way through downtown London. Waldo's On King Bistro and Wine Bar sits inside that building and asks for something slower: a table, a wine list, and a plate of roast duck. Mark Kitching is the chef-owner, and the menu reads like one person decided what mattered, a bistro built on French and Canadian leanings and meant to be lingered over rather than grabbed between errands. Lunch and dinner run six days a week into the evening, with a shorter Sunday, and the wine is poured the whole time.

The Roast Duck Breast anchors the dinner menu, plated with maple jus and candied walnuts — the clearest statement of what the kitchen is after. Around it runs a seafood section that takes itself seriously: a Lobster, Shrimp and Scallop Bisque finished with cognac, Grilled Calamari with garlic aioli, a Seafood Stack under sundried tomato cream, and Deep-Fried Lake Erie Perch pulled from closer to home. There is an eight-ounce Beef Tenderloin Surf and Turf for a splurge and Baked Salmon with mango salsa for something lighter, with Escargot, Chicken Satay, or Mark's Style Bruschetta on toasted focaccia to open. Wine comes by the glass, the half-litre, or the bottle, so the pairing scales to whatever the table is doing.

Two things keep the menu from reading like a standard downtown list. The first is Waldo's Famous Pasta Bar, a build-your-own order where the table chooses pasta, sauce, vegetables, and protein extras — an unusually loose move for a chef-led kitchen, and a practical one when no two people want the same dinner. The second is the vegetarian cooking, which is real rather than decorative: Butternut Squash Ravioli, Wild Mushroom Crepes, vegetable-forward starters, and a meat-free path through the pasta bar all let a vegetarian diner assemble a full meal instead of negotiating for one. A table that cannot agree on a single thing can still order well here. Waldo's bills itself as fun, casual, and relaxed, and the cooking is more ambitious than that easygoing billing suggests.

Mark Kitching cooks with a hand-picked team and signs the welcome note himself, and his name carries past the front door. The signed note is a small tell that the place is run by someone in the building, not a distant owner. Local reporting has turned to him as an owner's voice on the business of restaurants — through the downtown construction and pandemic conditions that hit the market's tenants in the early 2020s, and through the staffing squeeze that followed across hospitality. That stretch tested every operator tied to the market, and Waldo's came out the other side cooking the same menu it went in with. The Braised Beef Short-Rib Poutine, with house demi-glace and goat cheese, is the kind of richer comfort dish regulars keep ordering through a hard few years.

Waldo's has worked this corner of the market since 2004, long enough to settle into the rhythm of its neighbourhood. Brunch, lunch, and dinner all come out of one kitchen, which gives the place a daytime life well beyond the dinner crowd, and reservations plus underground parking access make it simple to fold a meal around a downtown stop or to build a whole evening around the table instead. The combination at the centre of the menu — a serious wine list sharing a menu with a customizable pasta bar — should feel like two restaurants pulling against each other. Instead it works as one chef-owner's answer to a building full of quick errands: a place where the city is invited to sit down and stay a while.