The Lake House, Vineland

Thursday June 26

Fanny, one of our new Brock colleagues, mentioned The Lake House as a nice place for an evening meal, and boy, was she right. It's only a few miles out of St. Catharines, and its cool and comfortable patio looks right out onto the lake. The service is quick and obliging, too.

We were happy we went with Fanny's recommendations for food as well. The semolina-coated calamari appetizer turned out to be an enormous heap of tender, succulent squid rings, with three dipping sauces: pepper-jelly, green curry mayonnaise, and remoulade, all excellent.

Our main courses were: a fine thin-crust white pizza topped with smoked salmon, thin-sliced redskin potatoes, and squirts of tomato pulp; and a thin slab of swordfish topped with a "salsa" of cored cherry tomatoes and maple syrup (which, ghastly as it may sound, brought out the sweetness of the tomatoes perfectly), with asparagus, puffed potatoes, and mandolined carrots on the side. Swimming along on the plate of swordfish was a cute little angel-fish made of puff pastry, providing the perfect whiff of whimsey.

The wine was unexceptionably local: a Vineland 2006 Sauvignon Blanc, which Holt categorized as green-appley. And we enjoyed watching the clouds burgeon over the lake as we sipped.