The Prune

At The Prune, the menu is a moving document. It tracks the Ontario growing season rather than a fixed list of greatest hits, and what a table finds on the card in high summer — heirloom carrot terrine, local tomato caprese, a bowl of Ontario corn soup — will have turned over by the time the first frost reaches the fields around Stratford. This is seasonal Canadian cooking taken at its word: a dinner room on Ontario Street that rebuilds itself around whatever the nearby producers are pulling from the ground that week, and rewrites the plates to match.

The result reads as fine dining without a single signature plate to lean on. A recent dinner menu opens with grass-fed beef tartare dressed Crying Tiger — the Northeastern Thai preparation of chili, lime and fish sauce — then moves through duck confit, salt cod croquettes, and a rillette of foie gras and duck. Lighter plates share the card with the composed courses: grilled halloumi fattoush, a Newfoundland shrimp and lobster roll, the Superior Burger. Dessert runs to crème caramel and roasted peaches with caramel corn. A dedicated plant-based menu runs in parallel, so a table arriving with different appetites is not working around a single kitchen's blind spot.

That range is the tell. A kitchen confident enough to plate a foie gras rillette next to a burger, and to keep a full plant-based menu current alongside its tasting, is cooking for a real cross-section of its guests rather than a narrow idea of who belongs at a special-occasion table. The seasonal turnover is not a marketing habit either; it follows directly from sourcing close to home, where the corn, tomatoes and carrots that anchor a summer card are simply not the ingredients on hand come late autumn. The menu moves because the fields do.

That flexibility is what makes The Prune workable in a theatre town. Stratford's evenings run on curtain times, and a table here can be sized to the night: a six-course tasting that opens up after seven for a full sit-down occasion, or a lighter à la carte visit built around a course or two before a show. A midday service widens the options earlier on, and a fixed-price menu sits alongside the main card for tables that want the evening shaped for them. The parallel plant-based menu means a mixed group rarely has to choose the restaurant around its most restricted eater. Reservations, booked ahead through the restaurant's own system, make an evening here a planned Stratford meal rather than a drop-in.

Behind the pass, Randi Rudner and Mike Booth have run the kitchen as co-head chefs since 2021. Both came up through the Stratford Chefs School and the kitchen at Rundles, the town's long-standing fine-dining benchmark, and that shared lineage shows in the plating discipline and the close relationship with local growers. The pairing of two chefs at the pass, rather than a single name over the door, suits a restaurant that has always defined itself by its cooking more than by any one personality. The school sits a short walk down the same Ontario Street, and The Prune has long worked as part of that culinary-school culture — a professional kitchen in a town that treats cooking as a civic craft.

The through-line across all of it is renewal. The Prune has been part of Stratford's dining life since 1977, but it has never settled into a museum piece; the room changes with its chefs, its producers, and the season, and the menu a guest reads in July is not the one waiting in October. In a theatre town where most visits are planned around a curtain, that turnover is the appeal — a meal assembled the same way the season is, from what is good right now, plated by whoever happens to be running the pass this year.