Station 87 Kitchen and Bar

For most of its life, the building at the corner of Nelson Street held fire trucks. Meaford raised it as a fire hall in 1887, and the town kept it in civic service long enough to grant the structure heritage designation more than a century later. Station 87 carries the date in its name and the history in its bones, then does something the original masons never planned for: it feeds people all day, across a pub, an upper dining room, a rooftop patio, a market counter where the truck bay used to be, and a wine cellar on the lower floor.

The kitchen makes its own 00 dough and bakes its bread fresh, and the pizzas are where that work shows first. The Ezzo Pepperoni is the clean opening order — cup-and-char pepperoni that curls and crisps at the edges, mozzarella, tomato sauce, and a finish of hot honey over the house crust. From there the menu widens. The Tableside Grilled Caesar comes with a little ceremony: grilled romaine, bacon, parmigiano, lemon, and the restaurant's own dressing, built at the table rather than plated in the back. The Funghi Wellington is the kitchen's clearest argument that a plant-forward plate can be a proper entree and not a concession, with field mushroom duxelles in golden puff pastry, peppercorn reduction, arugula, and sorrel. Breakfast has its own specific dish in the Lox, Stock & Bagel — cured salmon with cream cheese, fried capers, dill, red onion, and cucumber.

That range is deliberate, not the accident of a long menu. Station 87 opens at eight in the morning and runs to midnight every day, so the same address can carry a coffee and a bagel, a lunch, a full dinner upstairs, a rooftop drink, and a late plate without a diner ever changing plans. The After 8 menu formalizes the last of those. Sunday through Thursday, once the dinner rush thins, the Pub and Market side shifts to smaller food — wings, nachos, the Station 87 Potato Skinnys, perogies, and the Mega Meatball — so the late hours arrive with a kitchen still working, not just a bar still pouring. An elevator reaches every floor, which means the rooftop and the cellar belong to the whole dining room, not only the guests who can take the stairs.

Drink and retail run alongside the kitchen rather than behind it. The menu carries a full wine and cocktail list — the Backdraft cocktail nods again to the building's first job — and the private cellar downstairs gives wine a place to live beyond a printed page. The market counter lets Station 87 sell as well as serve, so a visit can end with something carried out the door alongside the meal.

The revival began with the building, not the menu. Lino Toncic bought the old fire hall and set out to restore it, then looked for a local restaurateur to bring it back into daily use. John Garbe and Aragon Restaurants took it on, opening Station 87 in November 2024 with Robert Saunders as executive chef. Local reporting places the project inside a wider downtown Meaford revival, tied to the town's heritage and its 150th-anniversary year — a civic building returned to civic use, this time with a kitchen in it.

What the restoration kept is legible in how the place now gets used. The market sits in the bay where the trucks once idled, the rooftop looks over the same downtown the hall was built to protect, and the cellar holds wine beneath a floor that once stored hose. Station 87 asks a landmark to do ordinary work — a breakfast bagel, a pizza, a Tuesday plate after eight — and the ordinariness is what makes the restoration hold. A building that only gets admired eventually empties out. This one keeps the lights on until midnight.