Pharos

Most Georgian Bay kitchens put whitefish on the menu once. Pharos lists it twice — Georgian Bay Whitefish, lightly breaded and grilled under lemon-garlic butter, and Lighthouse Whitefish, the same local catch pulled in a Greek-house direction with Mediterranean seasoning. The doubling is the tell. This is the full-service dining room at the Tobermory Princess Hotel, on Bay Street at the north end of town where the road runs out at Little Tub Harbour, and its kitchen treats the local fish the way a Greek family treats a staple: as something worth cooking more than one way.

The whitefish is the clearest first order, but the Greek thread runs just as deep. Shish-kabob comes as marinated pork tenderloin with Greek salad, lemon-butter rice and tzatziki; spanakopita arrives in feta-and-spinach phyllo; tirokafteri, the spicy whipped feta, comes with homemade bread. The Greek Pizza carries feta and green olives over tomato and mozzarella, a house version of the form rather than a nod to it, and a horiatiki salad rounds out the Greek side. Plant-forward diners are not left with a single workaround either — hummus, a falafel plate, and the Greek Goddess bowl of rice, braised black-eyed peas and vegetables give a table real meatless choices.

The setting does real work. Pharos sits right on Little Tub Harbour, and the dining room and its shaded waterfront patio both face the water, which turns an ordinary dinner into a sunset over Georgian Bay when the timing lands. Inside it runs low-key and unhurried rather than polished — the kind of harbour dining room where a table lingers over coffee and nobody rushes the check. That easy pace is part of why Pharos reads as part of a Tobermory visit rather than a stop to check off: breakfast before the trails, a patio lunch off the water, a slow dinner once the boats are in.

What the menu really says is that Pharos is built to be used, not saved for an occasion. Breakfast runs alongside dinner — The Princess Eggs Benny anchors a morning list meant for the hour before a hike or a boat departure, backed by a breakfast special and a Princess breakfast hash — and the span from whitefish plates to pizzas, Jim's eight-ounce homeburger, dips and bowls keeps a mixed group at one table instead of scattering it across town. There is an online ordering menu for food carried out, though a table still gets booked the old way, by phone or email rather than a reservation app. In a town that empties out when the season turns, the kitchen stays open through the year.

The family story is older than the hotel. By the family's own account, Jim and Bessie Kritikos bought The Lighthouse Gas Bar & Take-Out in 1977, turned it into a proper dining room in 1987, and ran it with their four daughters for the next twenty-five years — long enough that souvlaki and Georgian Bay whitefish, both Jim's dishes, became things a tourist town learned to order. Pharos is Greek for lighthouse, and the name reaches back through all of it. When the Tobermory Princess Hotel opened its dining room in 1999, that cooking came along, which is why Greek plates and local fish still share a menu that could easily have drifted into generic hotel fare.

Somewhere else, a lighthouse name over a harbour restaurant would be a gimmick. Here it is the through-line instead — the Greek word, the family's old Lighthouse Restaurant, and the beacons out the window all pulling one way. Order the whitefish and you are eating the dish Jim built his name on. Order the shish-kabob and Greek pizza beside it, and you are eating the reason a Greek word ended up over a Georgian Bay fish house.