Pharmacii

Pharmacii borrows the look and language of a corner pharmacy and turns it toward Korean fried chicken and cocktails. On King Street in downtown St. Catharines, the apothecary framing sets up an evening built on compact share plates and drinks rather than a conventional appetizer-and-entrée progression. A table orders in whatever sequence it likes, keeps adding as the night goes on, and treats the meal as a run of snacks rather than a single sit-down course. The name does real work — it announces, before the menu arrives, that this is a place with a point of view — but the pharmacy styling is the frame, not the substance. The substance is a short, deliberate list of Korean-leaning plates made to be passed around.

That list rewards a first-timer who starts wide. Shaker’s Fries come seasoned and served with wasabi aioli, the sharpest, saltiest way into the menu and the plate most tables reach for first. Jumbo KFC is the Korean fried chicken anchor, sized for the middle of a shared order. Kimchi Chahan is the heavyweight — kimchi, chorizo, bacon, rice, cheese, a sous-vide egg, and crisp Brussels sprouts folded into one plate substantial enough to divide among several diners. Around those sit Bulgoghi Jeon, Goun-Mandu dumplings, a Bao Slider, a Shrimp Tempura Bun, and Charred Bokchoy, while Steak Tataki, Salmon Tartare, and Beef Tartare work the raw-and-seared end of the menu and lighter plates like the Autumn Roll and Rolled Mac fill out the edges. Almost everything is built to be shared, and the plates stay compact enough that a table can cover a lot of ground in one sitting.

Read across the menu and a second cuisine surfaces beneath the Korean one. Tataki, tartare, tempura, korokke — the techniques lean Japanese, and the plates follow an izakaya’s logic of many small orders paced over drinks. Kimchi Chahan makes that fusion explicit rather than incidental: a Korean fried-rice base carrying chorizo, bacon, and cheese is comfort food built on a Korean spine, not a regional dish reproduced for accuracy. The tartares and tataki show a kitchen comfortable handling raw and seared fish with the same ease it brings to fried chicken. That range is the tell: Pharmacii isn’t staging authenticity or asking its menu to stand in for a survey of Korean cooking, it is making bar food with a specific accent, and it keeps the list short enough that the accent stays legible from the first plate to the last.

The room commits to the concept. Pharmacy-themed decor gives the evening a visual identity before the first plate lands, and the cocktail program is treated as part of the meal rather than a preamble to it — inventive drinks meant to move alongside the food, course for course. Pharmacii has worked this way since opening in 2022, seating guests on a walk-in basis with no reservations, which makes arrival the one thing worth planning ahead. The kitchen keeps evening hours rather than late-night ones, running to eleven from Wednesday through Saturday, to ten on Sunday and Monday, and closing on Tuesdays. For a group the format is forgiving: order a few anchors, add one plate that stretches the usual order, and let the compact menu spread easily across the table.

What Pharmacii gives downtown St. Catharines is something the city has little of — an evening where dinner and drinks arrive at the same table, in the same hour, with no set progression to march through. The pharmacy conceit gets a diner in the door, but the short, Korean-leaning menu and the cocktails built to run beside it are what bring people back. Start with the fries as the first cocktails land, build toward the Kimchi Chahan, and let the rest of the order fill in around it.