Fork It

House-cut home fries turn up under nearly everything at Fork It. They anchor the breakfast bowls, sit beneath the Breakfast Poutine, carry the corned-beef hash, and round out the bigger plates — the kind of from-scratch base a kitchen builds around only when it cuts its own. The cooking they hold up is hearty, unmistakably Canadian, and served from morning straight through lunch. This is an all-day breakfast and lunch restaurant on Charlotte Street in downtown Peterborough.

The breakfast bowls are where the kitchen piles on: the Meat Lovers under bacon, ham, sausage, and cheddar; the Vegetarian under grilled peppers, mushrooms, onions, tomatoes, and two eggs; the loaded Fork It Deluxe under all of it plus hollandaise. The benedicts run several ways, from a House Benny with spinach and ham to a Smoked Meat Benny to a Signature Benny laid over bacon, grilled tomato, sautéed onion, and cheddar. Beyond the bowls there are peameal plates and a peameal-and-egg bun, a six-ounce strip loin with the Steak and Eggs, and the Breakfast Feast, which lands with three eggs, three rashers of bacon, three slices of ham, three sausages, beans, home fries, and toast.

Lunch holds its own against all that. The Montreal smoked meat comes piled on rye with a dill pickle and mustard; the Classic Reuben stacks corned beef, Swiss, and sauerkraut under Thousand Island; the Greek and Cobb salads give the board a lighter corner. The burgers run hearty too — the Signature Burger Platter arrives under peameal bacon, cheddar, and a fried egg. Tyler's Deluxe Breakfast Sandwiches go tall — a triple-decker breakfast club layered with fried egg, peameal, bacon, lettuce, and tomato, or the same fillings rolled into a warm wrap. For anyone who came for the sweet end of the morning, Stephanie's Sweeter Side keeps fluffy pancakes and French toast on hand. The dish that splits the difference is the Crispy Supreme Chicken Waffle Sandwich, which folds breaded chicken, bacon, lettuce, tomato, and spicy mayo between two fresh-made waffles.

None of this is built for a single special-occasion visit; the breadth is the point. It shows in the menu's own language, too. The sections are named for people — a benny lineup under one name, the sweet plates under another, the lunch platters under a third — and the kitchen signs its flagships itself: the Fork It Breakfast, the Fork It Poutine, a Deluxe bowl built like a full meal. The plates come big and the prices stay moderate. It is the in-house shorthand of a wide menu that feels run by people rather than assembled, the kind of place that expects to see the same faces on a Tuesday and again on a Saturday.

Fork It is Stephanie Patterson's restaurant. By her own account, she came up through other Peterborough restaurants — tending bar, managing floors — before opening her own. The premise was simple: all-day breakfast, available any hour the kitchen is on. The timing was not: the doors were set to open in March of 2020, just as the city shut down. It opened anyway, and the neighbourhood has rallied around it more than once since, the sort of local support that turns a breakfast counter into something people feel a stake in. It frames itself as a community-oriented restaurant first and a breakfast menu second, and Patterson still runs it herself.

The hours tell the rest. Fork It runs from eight in the morning until two in the afternoon, seven days a week — a daytime kitchen that never reaches dinner and is back on by breakfast. It is where downtown comes for a benedict before a shift, a full plate on a slow Sunday, a lunch platter with no interest in being small. The name is a wink; the house-cut fries are not.