Avo and Co.

At Avo & Co., the avocado is not a topping; it is the premise. The name promises one ingredient, and the kitchen makes good on it — avocado anchors all six toasties, rides in every poke bowl, and turns up through the salads and the green smoothie bowl, less a garnish than the through-line the short menu is built around. On Queen Street in Niagara-on-the-Lake's Old Town, the focus does plain work: it hands a town built on wine, pub plates, and pastry a genuinely lighter lunch, a few minutes from most of it.

The toasties are where the focus gets specific. Past the plain Avo Toasty — avocado, micro greens, salt and pepper, nine dollars — the format picks up smoked salmon with capers, pickled onion and dill; prosciutto with fresh mozzarella and arugula; sautéed mushroom with hummus; and brie with roasted peppers, honey and chili flakes. The poke bowls run on the same logic, each a fixed build of rice, mango, edamame, cucumber, seaweed salad and avocado under a chosen protein — soy ahi tuna, sriracha-mayo salmon or shrimp, teriyaki chicken, or teriyaki tofu for the table that wants the bowl without the fish. The salads lean on quinoa, kale, or cabbage rather than lettuce, the smoothie bowls arrive colour-coded green, pink, purple and yellow, and the drinks are anchored by a matcha latte and orange juice squeezed to order. Light, but not a single leaf of it generic.

The narrowness is the point. Everything is made to order, which is why the bowls and toasties read as assembled rather than cooked — the craft sits in the sourcing and the combinations more than the stove. It also keeps the pricing legible in a postcode where that is rare: toasties in the mid-teens, salads at sixteen, the loaded poke bowls topping out at twenty-one. On a stretch of Old Town where lunch can run well past that before anyone orders a glass of wine, this is the lighter midday meal that still eats like a full one.

It is open daytime only, and built for it. Early on it reads as light brunch without claiming the title — a smoothie bowl, an orange juice pressed to order, a matcha latte, a salmon toasty with enough salt and fat to hold a morning. By lunch it becomes the practical pick for a mixed table: toasties, salads, and poke bowls priced and portioned to mix and match without anyone settling. A colour-coded smoothie bowl and a plain Avo Toasty cover the in-between visit, the snack that isn't quite a meal. And because most of it packs down cleanly, it doubles as the order for a day spent mostly on foot, between tastings and shopfronts.

Avo & Co. is the work of three partners — Craig Dykstra, Von Fernandez, and Nissa Fernandez — who opened it on Queen Street in 2024 and divided the running of it cleanly: Nissa in the kitchen, Craig on operations, Von on marketing and the social feeds. According to local reporting, the shop was barely eleven weeks old when it appeared at that summer's Peach Festival, already working the town's signature fruit into its lighter register. The idea has since travelled. The same trio went on to open Whisk by Avo & Co., a matcha-focused café, carrying the health-forward premise to a second address.

None of it asks much of a visitor. A salmon poke bowl or a salmon toasty at the counter, a matcha or an orange juice pressed to order, and lunch is done in the time it takes to read a tasting menu two doors down. That is the niche Avo & Co. has claimed on Queen Street: not the destination dinner or the winery flight, but the bright, fast, avocado-forward middle of the day — the meal Old Town didn't quite have until it showed up.