The Hog & Penny

The Hog & Penny makes its own bread, cures its own salmon, and honey-roasts the nuts that land on the bar — a downtown Orillia pub that treats comfort food with the discipline of a full kitchen. It calls itself Orillia's Pub, and the claim rests on doing British classics right rather than casually: high-quality ingredients, scratch preparation, and a menu that reads like a proper pub's instead of a generic tavern's. The patio is seasonal, the welcome is built for regulars as much as for visitors, and the cooking is the part that refuses to coast.

The anchors stay in plain sight. The Scotch Egg arrives wrapped in Cumberland pork sausage with piccalilli chutney; the Fish & Chips comes with tartare, coleslaw, and double-cooked British chips set beside house-made ketchup; the Steak & Guinness Pie is the slower order, mash and gravy under a proper crust; and Bangers & Mash holds down the homesick end of the menu. Around those sit small plates that show the kitchen's hand — the Hog's Caesar built with wild boar bacon, Parmesan, and crispy capers; fried Brussels sprouts with tahini, pickled onions, and sumac; salmon gravlax cured in salt, sugar, and dill; honey-roasted Pub Nuts. The Chicken Wings come breaded with blue cheese and a choice of Buffalo, honey, or lemon pepper, the Fried Chicken Sandwich with Sriracha and honey slaw, and the burger leans on red wine onions and more of that wild boar bacon. Beyond the headliners, the kitchen runs a Ploughman's Platter, a chicken liver parfait, a shrimp cocktail with maple dressing, a chilled lobster roll, and pub nachos. Dessert holds the line with Eton Mess and a chocolate pie.

What ties it together is a kitchen that would rather over-prepare than cut corners. The pub makes the majority of what it serves in house — the bread, the cures, the honey-roasted nuts — the way the owners' other kitchens do, and frames the whole project around doing the classics right rather than fast. The result is a pub that takes its smallest plates as seriously as its largest.

The owners are Simon MacRae and Darcy MacDonell, who run The Hog & Penny as part of the Common Hospitality group alongside The Common Stove, Picnic, and LUCA. Both arrived with city resumes — MacDonell through FARMHOUSE Tavern, La Societe, and Oliver & Bonacini; MacRae through London kitchens and the Hawksmoor group, then The Chase and BlueBlood Steakhouse at Casa Loma before he and MacDonell opened The Common Stove in 2020. They took over a long-standing downtown pub and reopened it in 2023 as The Hog & Penny, refreshed and recommitted to British cooking — a pub the partners had wanted to run for years, given their British roots. The idea at reopening was a community pub, not a fine-dining import — British classics, made well, for a downtown that already knew the address. Local coverage of the reopening named chef Ben Kersley, who had cooked at The Common Stove, as a partner in the new venture.

The week has a rhythm built into it. There is trivia on Thursday, a Friday sing-along, live traditional music on Saturday, and a Sunday-afternoon session, and Wednesdays belong to scotch — ten-dollar pours from Simon's picks, plus a first-Wednesday social that lines up three full-ounce drams. The kitchen runs lunch and dinner every day of the week, so the pub works as a downtown stop at midday and shifts toward music and a later close as the weekend arrives. A few minutes from the Port of Orillia and Couchiching Beach Park, with a patio that opens when the weather turns, it sits where visitors to the waterfront and locals after work cross paths. The food gives a table its reason to sit down; the calendar gives it a reason to pick a night.