I’ll just start off my saying that this is now one of my top 5 favourite restaurants!
Castlegarth is a family owned business by a married chef duo, Matt and Jen Brearley. They opened up this restaurant seven years ago in the beautiful little town of White Lake, Ontario, just west of Ottawa. Since then they have been very successful, which you can tell because their front entranceway is filled with all of their awards. The restaurant is located in a cute older house where you feel at home the minute you walk in the door.
Now this is my favourite part…..
Castlegarth gets all of their food from local farmers. And I mean local. They have a family owned organic farm which produces most of the fruits, vegetables, and grass-fed beef used in the restaurant. What they don’t have on the farm, they purchase from other local farmers.
And the food…..
One word: Amazing! The menu changes every day based on what is in season at that particular time. When we first sat down at the table our waitress (Jenn, one of the owners) brought us a basket of freshly baked bread. They bake bread every day before the guests arrive. It was still warm!
Next was the salad made with organic mixed greens that were picked that afternoon. You can’t get any fresher than that!
For my entrée I chose the lamb (from a local farmer of course). It was delicious. You can’t tell from the picture but underneath the lamb was a bed of steamed vegetables which were also picked that day. The weird looking thing beside it was a fried zucchini stick. Now I’m not usually a fan of anything fried, but the zucchini was just picked that day, so I couldn’t let it go to waste 😉
Now onto dessert. The chef brought us a platter of different delicious options. I have two favs (I can’t just pick one). The ice cream in the sundae in the middle was homemade mint chocolate. Now this isn’t your usual mint chocolate chip ice cream. It was made with the herb “chocolate mint” so it tasted exactly like (well actually better than) mint chocolate chip ice cream and there was no chocolate actually in it.
My other favourite dessert is the little purple dish on the left. I bet you can’t guess what it is (I sure wouldn’t have been able to). Drum roll………It’s a black pansy sorbet! Made with freshly picked black pansies, yes, the flower! I can’t even describe how amazing this was!
Other features on this platter were fresh peach cake with homemade strawberry ice cream (top), white chocolate ice cream (right), meringue cookies, and lemon pie with fresh raspberries (bottom). Needless to say, we finished it off! Hey, there were four of us!
With some local Equator decaf coffee.
Summary:
Atmosphere: Great!
Service: Great!
Food: Amazing!
Location: Definitely worth the drive.
Parking: Yes
Price: Reasonable, especially when you take into account the quality of the food.
Recommend to others: Absolutely!
Now go tell your significant other that this is where you want to go out to eat for your anniversary/birthday/date night/any reason to eat delicious food!
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