Big Fish Steak & Lounge

Big Fish is where Sarnia goes to mark something. Anniversaries, birthdays, the client dinner that needs to land — the dining room on the Exmouth Street corridor is built for the planned night out rather than the casual drop-in, and the menu is wide enough that a table rarely has to compromise. Certified Angus steaks share the page with Lobster Spoons and a seafood linguine called Gamberoni, and a Greek thread — saganaki, souvlaki, a lamb burger built on house tzatziki — runs underneath both. It reads as a steakhouse, a seafood house, and a family kitchen at one address, priced for the occasions that justify all three.

The order tends to build the same way. Lobster Spoons open it — six spoons of lobster meat in garlic butter, rich and shareable and specific enough to set the table apart from a generic steakhouse start. From there the menu splits cleanly. Seafood Gamberoni carries the seafood side in a single plate: linguine with shrimp, scallops, salmon, and mussels in a roasted-garlic Parmesan cream. The steaks hold the other side — the New York strip finished with basil butter, the Angus tenderloin with a peppercorn-merlot demi. Rack of lamb sits between the two camps, panko-encrusted and glazed with maple-bourbon mint, the splurge for a diner who wants steakhouse weight without ordering steak. Atlantic salmon, pan-seared under a roasted-garlic dill cream, rounds out a seafood-forward end that runs as deep as the steak list.

The starters carry the same reach as the mains. Baked brie arrives wrapped in puff pastry under a fig-and-pancetta jam; a poached-pear salad sets port-and-Shiraz pears against blue cheese and candied pecans; crab cakes come under a roasted-corn relish, and oysters Rockefeller deepen the seafood bench. Seared scallops land four to a plate over mango curry, and lobster and crab turn up again inside stuffed mushrooms. It is a menu built for pacing rather than speed — plates to share, a wine-friendly run of courses, a stuffed pork tenderloin wrapped in smoked bacon over a blueberry reduction for the diner who wants something past the obvious cuts.

What that range reveals is a kitchen comfortable being three things at once without thinning any of them. The seafood is no courtesy section bolted onto a steakhouse; halibut, clam chowder, and a linguine full of shellfish argue otherwise. The Greek material is heritage rather than theatre — saganaki does arrive flamed at the table, but it sits beside chicken souvlaki, a gyro, and Momma's tzatziki as the family's own cooking, not a themed flourish. The steaks are Certified Angus, the line a kitchen draws when it wants the centre of the plate to carry a celebration. Weekend evenings add a piano bar, the sound of a place that expects its dinners to run long.

The family signature is everywhere in the writing without a single owner needing to be named. Gus's Cheeseburger, Alex's Lamb Burger, Anita's Ahi Tuna — the dishes are signed the way a family kitchen signs its work, and the welcome on the storefront is signed the same way. Big Fish has cooked for Sarnia since 1994, and the menu reads as something accumulated over more than two decades of birthdays and quiet anniversaries rather than drawn up in one sitting.

The breadth is also what makes Big Fish more a reservation than a drop-in. The starters are built to share, the mains to linger over, and a private-event inquiry handles the larger tables. Lunch is no afterthought either: the open-face steak sandwich on garlic toast, the seafood melt baked into a bun bowl, and one- or two-piece halibut fish and chips carry the same kitchen into the middle of the day. It runs seven days, from a weekday lunch through to a weekend dinner that holds the table until ten.