Kettles Back Home Cookin'

Breakfast at Kettles Back Home Cookin' does not stop when the morning does. Eggs Benny, the Hearty Back Home Breakfast, and the homefries-and-cheese Kettle Melt come off the grill from the moment the doors open until the moment they close, which is the first thing to know about a kitchen that calls itself the home of the all-day breakfast. It sits on Highway 6&10 between Owen Sound and Chatsworth, the kind of roadside stop a Grey-Bruce traveller pulls into at any hour and a local keeps as a standing answer to the question of where to eat. What lands on the table is cooked from scratch and priced to bring a whole family without a second thought.

The menu's signature is a study in portion. The Big Papa Burger stacks four six-ounce patties into a twenty-four-ounce build, the Ma Kettles comes piled with mushrooms, ham, bacon and double cheese, and the smaller Pa Kettles still runs a twelve-ounce single. Around the burgers sits a deep bench of comfort dinners — open-face hot turkey, slow-cooked and Canadian-raised, under cranberry sauce; Salisbury steak smothered in mushrooms, onions and homemade gravy; lasagna with Caesar salad and garlic bread; lightly battered haddock for the fish and chips. The starters and sandwiches carry the same house hand: a four-cheese spinach and artichoke dip with crispy pita, corned beef and homemade sauerkraut on freshly baked rye for the Reuben, fresh-cut fries under curds and homemade gravy for the poutine. Even the soup is built from family recipes, cream or broth, made in the back kitchen rather than opened from a can.

What the menu does, again and again, is take an ordinary diner category and put a house name on it. A grilled chicken breast becomes Kettles Country Chicken under fried mushrooms and mozzarella, or Cowgirl Chicken once the barbecue sauce goes on; ordinary homefries become the Kettle Melt, loaded with peppers, onions, bacon and cheese. Breakfast gets the same treatment — the Hearty Back Home Breakfast, a loaded omelette, banana bread folded into French toast — each one a familiar plate the kitchen has made its own. The move says the cooks trust their own food enough to claim it, and the homemade label is meant literally, from the sauerkraut and the gravy to the soup and the pies. Layered on top is a rotation of weekly features that keeps giving regulars a fresh reason to return: fish and chips on Friday, Haddock Supreme on Saturday, meatloaf with scalloped potatoes on Sunday.

The cooking has a lineage. Kettles opened on the first of May in 2007 and has worked the same stretch of Highway 6&10 since, but the recipes reach back further than the building — to a multi-generational restaurant family and, by the kitchen's own account, to dishes once served at the grandparents' Redwood Restaurant in Clifford. That inheritance is the thread the place pulls on hardest. It is why the soup tastes like someone's home kitchen, the pies are baked rather than bought, and the bread pudding arrives under warm vanilla sauce the way a family recipe would have it.

What Kettles sends out the door matters as much as what it serves at the table. The dessert list runs long and entirely in-house — homemade pies by the slice or the whole, pecan and raisin tarts, the Carrot Cake Special served warm with butterscotch ice cream, a coconut cream pie by the whole or the mini — and the baked goods, soups, and frozen meals send the same kitchen home with the customer. For families on the Sunset Strip and travellers breaking a drive on Highway 6&10, that is the practical shape of it: a counter where breakfast runs all day, the portions run large, and a slice of pie or a tray of frozen dinner can follow you out to the car.