The Usual Suspects Cocktails and Grill

The menu at The Usual Suspects Cocktails and Grill reads like a rap sheet. The Boss, The Gangster Colossal, Gotti's Buffalo Chicken, The Soprano Steak Sandwich, The Mobster's Great Canadian Club — the kitchen has dressed a Niagara Falls pub-and-grill in prohibition-era costume and named half the burgers after men who would never have eaten this well. The joke holds because the food underneath it is honest. This is wings, pizza, burgers, fish and chips, and poutine on Drummond Road, priced for a weeknight table rather than a tourist one, and open since 2023 in a casual storefront that used to trade under a different name.

Start with the Jumbo Wings, which is the cleanest read on the kitchen. They come by the pound and run through a sauce list deep enough to argue over: usual suspect spice, lemon pepper, buffalo, honey garlic, honey hot, garlic butter, and sweet chili Thai. From there the menu wants you to commit. The Boss is the burger that captures the place — cheddar, bacon, a buffalo chicken finger, onion rings, and a 40 Creek BBQ drizzle stacked on the patty until it stops being a sandwich and starts being a dare. The Usual Suspects Pie turns the theme into a pizza, loading pepperoni, bacon, peameal, mushrooms, red onions, hot peppers, a three-cheese blend, and the same 40 Creek drizzle. Around those sit the steadier orders: Fish and Chips in beer-battered haddock, Classic Poutine under curds and gravy, a French Onion Soup capped with bread and Swiss, and Tacos Grande built on beef, chicken, or haddock. The appetizer page is its own argument for showing up hungry — Nachos Supreme stacked to a party size, Homemade Mozza Sticks, Coconut Shrimp, Sweet Potato Fries, and a Spinach Artichoke Dip that arrives with both nachos and pita.

What the menu keeps signalling, under the gangster names and the one-pound burgers, is how Canadian it actually is. The 40 Creek BBQ drizzle is Ontario whisky country on a bun. The club arrives with cheddar peameal and a maple Dijon mayo; the house burger does the same. Even the theatre — a speakeasy theme, a wall of mob aliases — is doing a recognizable job, giving a casual bar enough personality to feel like a night out rather than a refuel. The breadth is the point. Wings, pizza, burgers, sandwiches, soups, salads, and a Beyond Meat patty for the table that brought one of those, all sitting at the same accessible price, mean a group rarely has to negotiate. There are real vegetarian routes too — the Greek Pizza, the Veggie Supreme, a Greek Salad heavy with feta and olives — so the one person who doesn't eat wings isn't stuck with a side.

That group is who the place is built for. The dining room is set up for a shared spread — Nachos Supreme and Homemade Mozza Sticks down the middle, a couple of pizzas, a poutine, and everyone reaching. The patio extends the visit when the weather holds, and the bar runs late, past one most nights and past two on weekends, which makes The Usual Suspects useful long after the dinner rush has cleared the tourist strip a few minutes east. The Drummond Road address keeps it on the local side of Niagara Falls, the kind of bar-and-grill people drive to rather than stumble into.

None of it asks to be taken too seriously, which is the most serious thing about it. A restaurant that names a burger The Gangster Colossal and means a one-pound, two-patty, two-grilled-cheese-bun monument has already told you what kind of evening it intends to throw. Order the wings, split the pie, let the burgers do their damage, and stay for one more round while the bar is still open. The costume is a bit, but the kitchen behind it is not kidding around.