Stoke Deli Bar

Every sandwich at Stoke Deli Bar begins with the same thing: focaccia baked that morning, brushed with olive oil and the restaurant's own Focaccia Salt, and often pulled from the oven a second time before the afternoon is out. That bread is the spine of a modern, woman-owned deli bar on Pelham Street in Fonthill, where Cait Bermuhler and Jess Marshall run a daytime kitchen built around specialty coffee, sandwiches, salads, and small plates. The menu is compact and current rather than sprawling, and every order on the sandwich side starts from that same morning bake.

The sandwich board is where that bread does its clearest work. Chicken shawarma is the order local diners reach for most — house seasoning and focaccia in a single hand-held — while the mortadella runs a more classic deli line, cured meat layered with house pickles, provolone, and organic greens. Around them sit halloumi, salmon, roasted sweet potato, and a Montreal smoked meat sandwich, enough range that a vegetarian and a deli traditionalist can share a table without either one settling for less. For groups, a sandwich party box scales the same board without turning lunch into a per-order negotiation. Mornings carry weight of their own: a brunch bowl, a loaded breakfast plate, house granola, and breakfast sandwiches that open the day rather than wait for noon. Small plates fill in around a pickle plate, hummus, roast potatoes, a broccoli shawarma plate, and a cheesey garlic pull-apart bread that lets the focaccia stand entirely on its own, and a full coffee program of cortados, flat whites, and cold brew runs alongside all of it.

What sets the kitchen apart is how much of it is made from scratch. The pickles, condiments, spices, and hot sauces are Stoke's own rather than bought in, and that preservation work is treated as part of the restaurant's identity, not back-of-house housekeeping. The sourcing leans local and specific: chili peppers from Chez Nous Farm, greens from Grumpy's, produce from McDermott's — the kind of relationships that let the board shift several times a week around whatever is in season, so the printed menu is rarely the same two weeks running.

The all-from-scratch instinct traces back to how the two owners learned to cook. Bermuhler grew up in Pelham; she met Marshall in the United Kingdom, where they first worked together at Soho House in Bath, and the pair spent the better part of ten years travelling and cooking together before settling in Niagara. Stoke started in 2018 as a live-fire pop-up — the name is a nod to those early fires — then found footing inside Bushel and Peck on Lake Street in St. Catharines, moved on to De la Terre on Geneva Street, and finally landed in Fonthill. Marshall is the chef, credited in the family's account with the menus, the recipes, the fires, and the bread; Bermuhler heads product, turning the kitchen's flavours into the Stoke at Home retail line. By that same account, Bermuhler had long wanted to come home to Pelham, and the corner of Highway 20 and Pelham Street is where it finally happened.

That homecoming now extends past the counter. Stoke at Home grew out of customers asking to buy what they had tasted — pickled onions, honey-roasted nuts, a Boujee Ballpark Mustard — and it carries the same scratch pantry work onto shelves people take home. The catering side runs in two directions: sandwich party boxes for office lunches and casual gatherings, and private live-fire dinners that circle straight back to the pop-up where the whole thing began. Open seven days a week from nine to four, Stoke keeps its ambitions inside daylight hours — a deli that treats a morning coffee, a shawarma sandwich, and a jar of house pickles as parts of one idea rather than three.