Love You, Mean It

Order the dish the menu calls, simply, Chicken, and it arrives as masala-cured breast over potato pave, with curried sweet-potato puree, pickled mango chutney, and broccolini. That gap — between the plain word on the page and the composed plate that reaches the table — is the idea behind Love You, Mean It, the downtown Peterborough dining room Sam Sayer and Owen Walsh opened on Hunter Street West in 2024. It reads as casual and eats as something more considered: a contemporary Canadian menu built around share plates, poured alongside craft cocktails and local wine, in mid-century surroundings lit for a table that wants to stay a while. Share plates lead, and the menu shifts with what local producers are growing.

Those share plates carry the first read of the kitchen, and they do not all point in one direction. Tuna Tartare comes with sesame seeds, avocado, peppers, onions, sesame aioli, and eggroll chips — snackable and precise at once. Bone Marrow arrives as roasted bones with microgreens, house pickles, sourdough, and aioli, the plate for a table that wants to work slowly through the opening round. Around them sit Croquettes bound with smoked-gouda espuma, Jerk Chicken Eggrolls with pickled mango chutney, fried Brussels with roasted squash, goat cheese, and apple, and Pork Rillettes whipped from twelve-hour braised pork over pickled fennel. Marinated peppers land on feta mousse with warm sourdough. The entrees hold their own — Corn Risotto in corn cream with leeks and feta mousse, Steak Frites built on a ten-ounce striploin under blue cheese butter, salmon in a tomato-fennel broth — but the opening section is where the menu shows its hand.

What that menu says is that comfort and technique are not treated as opposites here. A house burger and steak frites share the page with bone marrow and tuna tartare, and none of it reads as compromise. Chef Mack Found runs the share-plate format as a way to keep a night out social without letting the details slide. The proof is in the small decisions — the compound butter that rotates on the warm sourdough, the honey-dijon vinaigrette cutting the arugula and shaved fennel, the curried sweet-potato puree under the chicken, the smoked-gouda espuma that turns a potato croquette into something worth ordering twice.

The name carries the origin. Love You, Mean It comes out of a Peterborough hospitality thread that runs back to Sam's Place — the sign-off phrase that became the restaurant's identity. Sayer and Walsh brought that lineage downtown, into a storefront on Hunter Street West that used to hold Food Forest, and local reporting greeted the opening as a love letter to the city. The framing fits. The ownership, the name, and the local-producer language on the menu all locate the restaurant inside Peterborough rather than in a placeless downtown-dinner concept, a few doors into the Hunter Street café district and the weekend crowd that fills it.

Drinks are not an afterthought beside the food. Cocktails sit at the front of the identity, alongside beer and local wine, which makes the first hour as much about what is in the glass as what lands on the plate. The format rewards it: a compact, candlelit dining room with mid-century lines, dinner-only hours, and a menu whose best plates arrive built to share. It works for a date without turning formal, and it works just as well for a small group that wants to graze across the opening section — tuna tartare, croquettes, jerk chicken eggrolls, pork rillettes — before anyone has to commit to a single entree.

Love You, Mean It runs on a dinner rhythm — Wednesday through Sunday, four o'clock until late on the weekend — with an online reservation the busier nights reward and a feature dessert or rotating cheesecake to close on. It is the place a table books when nobody can agree on one cuisine and everybody wants to keep ordering. Start with the tuna tartare, build around the bone marrow, and let the Chicken settle any argument about whether the kitchen is serious. It is, and it would rather show you than say so.