Waggs Steak & Seafood Restaurant

Waggs is a steakhouse you can eat through without ordering a steak. The seafood side runs deep enough to carry a whole dinner on its own, which is the first thing that separates it from the standard chophouse — but the steak list is where the kitchen plants its flag. Prime rib is the house specialty, a slow roast carved to order in an English cut, a regular cut, or a super cut for the table that came hungry, and the charbroiled cuts beside it are seasoned with the house spice that carries the family name, then finished with crispy fried onions.

Beyond the prime rib, the steak section reads like a list someone actually cooks: a centre-cut New York striploin, pepper-crusted tenderloin medallions under a mushroom and wine peppercorn sauce, a twelve-ounce ribeye, a filet mignon cut from aged tenderloin. The seafood is where the menu opens up. A jumbo lobster tail comes buttered, slowly baked, and served with drawn butter; a pound of snow crab clusters arrives the same way; the seafood linguini folds scallops, clams, jumbo shrimp, and mussels into a blush sauce. The pickerel is a ten-ounce filet, lightly seasoned and pan-fried — the inland fish that marks a kitchen cooking for its own corner of Ontario — and an eight-ounce Atlantic salmon takes a grainy Dijon maple glaze. Starters and soups hold their own too: jalapeno mussels in a white-wine cream broth, in-house crab cakes with lemon remoulade, lightly breaded calamari with a chipotle dip, garlic shrimp sautéed in house-made garlic butter, and a French onion soup finished with house-made croutons under a blend of melted cheeses.

The breadth describes a kitchen organized around occasions rather than trends. Lunch carries its own logic — haddock battered in house for fish and chips, prime rib sliders with horseradish aioli and au jus, a Reuben built on Montreal smoked meat and marble rye — while dinner widens into the full steak-and-seafood order. A seniors menu runs the early evening for guests sixty and over, and reservations, not a queue, set the pace. A kids' menu sits at the other end of the same table, which is the tell: this is built for three generations at once, not a single demographic. This is casual fine dining in the older Ontario sense, the kind of place booked ahead for an anniversary or a graduation, where the meal is meant to last and the kitchen is built to let it.

Waggs has done that from downtown Sarnia, a few minutes from the Bluewater Bridge, since 1990 — locally owned across more than thirty years of weeknight regulars and Saturday-night tables. The longevity is not dressed up as heritage on the menu; it shows up instead in the confidence of the cooking — the in-house battering, the crab cakes folded by hand, the garlic butter made on site — and in a willingness to keep an eggplant parmesan and a full rack of BBQ ribs on the same list as a jumbo lobster tail.

There is one dish that resolves the question the menu keeps asking, and it sits right in the middle of the order. Sarnia is a border city; its diners can cross the river for dinner whenever they want, and a steakhouse holds onto them by being worth staying in town for. Waggs has lasted by refusing the usual either/or, and surf-and-turf is where that refusal lands on a single plate. A filet or a cut of prime rib set beside a lobster tail or snow crab, the order for the couple split between the roast and the catch, with no part of the menu left on the table.