Wildcraft Grill + Long Bar

Order the Tiny Duck Tacos and the Thurston Howell Tenderloin in the same sitting and you have already read most of what Wildcraft Grill + Long Bar is about. This is a Waterloo kitchen that names its plates like inside jokes and then cooks them with a straight face — a steak-and-seafood grill wrapped in comfort-food warmth and a little pop-culture wordplay. The menu runs wide enough to seat a table that cannot agree on anything: premium beef for one diner, salmon for another, a stuffed short-rib burger for the person who came to eat with both hands. What holds it together is the sense that dinner here is meant to be an occasion rather than an errand.

The kitchen leads with its signatures. Tiny Duck Tacos are the clearest calling card, a shareable opener built to start a meal before the beef arrives. From there the grill takes over: the Thurston Howell Tenderloin and the Beef & Blue Tenderloin give steak-minded diners two distinct directions, while a fourteen-ounce hand-cut ribeye waits for anyone who wants the plainer, larger cut. Braised Boneless Short Rib is the comfort-food anchor, rich enough to balance a Roasted Beet Salad or a plate of Baked Atlantic Salmon. Around those centres the menu keeps filling in — Maple Garlic Chicken Wings, Crispy Fried Calamari, Prosciutto-Wrapped Burrata, a Stuffed Short Rib & Brie Burger, a Gluten-Friendly Prawn Penne, and a Crème Brûlée to finish. It is a long menu that still reads like it was written by one kitchen.

The playful naming is not decoration. A restaurant that files a tenderloin under a Gilligan's Island castaway and a chicken sandwich under a Beatles record is telling you it does not take itself too seriously, even as the plates arrive with real polish. That balance — loose on tone, precise on execution — is the through-line. It turns up in a burrata starter set beside an order of wings, in a menu that stretches across lunch, brunch, and dinner without thinning out, and in a bar program treated as part of the meal rather than a holding pen before the table is ready.

The setting backs the ambition. A long bar anchors the dining room, a two-storey glass wine cellar makes the drinks list feel like part of the architecture, and a heated patio keeps an outdoor table in play through a Waterloo winter. Wildcraft has worked this uptown stretch of King Street North since 2007, and the years show in how settled the format feels — contemporary without being cold, priced at the upper end, and clearly built for the meal you plan for rather than the one you stumble into. It is the kind of grill you book, not the one you happen upon.

How you use the place depends on the hour. It opens for lunch and carries a midday business crowd, shifts into brunch on weekends, and turns the lights down for a dinner service that runs late Thursday through Saturday. The reservation system does real work here — for a date, a client meal, or a birthday, booking ahead is the difference between the table you wanted and the one you settled for. Groups get the most from the breadth: with steaks, seafood, salads, sandwiches, and pasta on a single menu, nobody has to eat around a list of things they didn't come for. Takeout is available for a night in, though the long bar, the wine cellar, and the patio make dining in the fuller version of the visit.

The signatures give first-timers an easy way in, and the breadth lets everyone else order their own way. On a Friday the long bar fills, the kitchen stays on past eleven, and a table that came for a birthday is still working out whether to point at the tenderloin named for a sitcom millionaire or the one stacked with blue cheese — which is exactly the kind of decision the menu is designed to draw out.