Ontario is known for butter tarts, peameal bacon, maple syrup, icewine, and freshwater fish like walleye and perch. The province’s food identity draws from Indigenous agricultural traditions, immigrant communities, and a geography that ranges from the fertile Niagara fruit belt to thousands of freshwater lakes. Some of these foods are uniquely Ontarian, while others are Canadian staples that the province produces in enormous quantities.
Butter Tarts
If Ontario has a single signature food, it’s the butter tart. These small pastry shells filled with a gooey mixture of butter, sugar, syrup, and egg are treated with near-religious devotion across the province. The roots of the recipe trace back to the 1600s, when young French women sent to Quebec by King Louis XIV improvised with available ingredients like maple sugar and dried fruit, creating an ancestral tart that eventually evolved into the butter tart as it’s known today.
The first printed butter tart recipe appeared in a fundraiser cookbook for Barrie’s Royal Victoria Hospital in Ontario, and by the early 1900s, variations were showing up in Toronto newspapers and national cookbooks. Today, entire driving trails are organized around butter tart bakeries. The great debate among Ontarians is whether the filling should be runny or firm, and whether raisins belong inside. Opinions run strong on both counts.
Peameal Bacon
What the rest of the world calls “Canadian bacon” is known locally as peameal bacon, and it was born in Toronto. William Davies, a pork packer operating near St. Lawrence Market, developed the technique of rolling brined pork loin in ground dried peas to preserve it. The coating is now cornmeal rather than pea meal, but the name stuck. A peameal bacon sandwich on a soft kaiser roll remains one of the most iconic things you can eat at St. Lawrence Market, which has been a culinary landmark in the city for over 220 years.
Maple Syrup
Quebec dominates Canadian maple syrup production at over 90%, but Ontario holds its own as the third-largest producer in the country. In 2024, Ontario producers harvested about 3.6 million kilograms (roughly 607,000 gallons), a 20.9% increase over the previous year, helped by warmer weather in some areas. Indigenous peoples were tapping maple trees in the region long before European contact, and the tradition runs deep in rural Ontario, where sugar bushes open to visitors every spring.
Maple syrup goes well beyond pancakes here. You’ll find it flavoring beer, wine, bacon, doughnuts, and baked beans. The Elmira Maple Syrup Festival in southwestern Ontario draws tens of thousands of visitors each year and is one of the province’s best-known food events.
Icewine
Ontario is one of the world’s leading producers of icewine, a concentrated dessert wine made from grapes that freeze naturally on the vine. The process is intensely inefficient: pressing frozen grapes yields only 15 to 20% of the juice you’d get from regular table wine, which is why a small bottle costs what it does. The result is extraordinary sweetness, with residual sugar concentrations averaging 215 grams per liter and sometimes exceeding 300.
The Niagara Peninsula is the heartbeat of Ontario’s wine industry. Producers there often conduct several icewine harvests between mid-December and late January to balance flavor and yield. Icewine was the product that first put Canadian wine on the international map, and it still represents a significant share of the industry’s revenue. Ontario’s total wine grape crop in 2024 was around 68,000 metric tons, the largest share of any province in Canada.
Freshwater Fish
Ontario has more than 250,000 freshwater lakes, and that geography shapes the food culture. Walleye (locally called pickerel) and yellow perch are the province’s most prized eating fish, both lean and mild-flavored. A plate of fried perch at a lakeside restaurant in cottage country is as quintessentially Ontarian as anything on this list. Bass, pike, whitefish, and lake trout are also widely caught and eaten.
The government publishes a detailed guide to eating Ontario fish, since species vary in contaminant levels. Walleye and northern pike tend to carry higher mercury levels than whitefish of similar size, while bass, perch, and smaller panfish generally have lower contaminant loads.
Niagara Fruit and Cheese
Southern Ontario enjoys roughly 180 frost-free days per year, making it one of only two regions in Canada (alongside southwestern British Columbia) capable of growing tender fruits. Ontario is the country’s largest apple-producing province, and the McIntosh apple, one of Canada’s most recognizable varieties, was discovered on a farm in Dundela, Ontario, in 1811. As recently as 2017, McIntosh still accounted for 21% of Ontario’s apple crop, followed by Gala at 15% and Empire at 13%.
The Niagara Peninsula produces peaches, cherries, pears, plums, and grapes. Ontario’s total fruit production reached about 277,000 metric tons in 2024. The province also grows most of Canada’s tender fruits, though production of sour cherries, peaches, and nectarines declined that year due to weather challenges.
Cheese is another point of pride. Ontario produces everything from aged cheddar to artisanal goat cheese, and cheese trails through regions like Prince Edward County and Oxford County have become popular food tourism routes.
The Three Sisters and Indigenous Foods
Ontario’s food story starts long before European settlement. For centuries, Indigenous communities in southern Ontario practiced Three Sisters agriculture, growing corn, beans, and squash together in an intercropping system. This trio was the dominant food plant association for every agricultural nation in the region, and the three crops featured prominently in daily diets. Wild rice, harvested from shallow lakes and rivers in northern Ontario, is another traditional food that remains culturally and culinarily important.
Mennonite Summer Sausage
In southwestern Ontario, Mennonite communities have been perfecting summer sausage for generations. These smoked, cured sausages are a staple at local farmers’ markets in towns like St. Jacobs and Kitchener, where you’ll also find other Mennonite specialties like apple butter, preserves, and fresh-baked bread. The summer sausage tradition reflects the broader influence of German-speaking settlers on Ontario’s food culture, visible in everything from the region’s Oktoberfest celebrations to its sauerkraut.
BeaverTails and Street Food
BeaverTails are fried dough pastries stretched into the flat, elongated shape of a beaver’s tail, then loaded with sweet or savory toppings. The chain originated in Ottawa and has become one of Ontario’s most recognizable street foods, especially during winter festivals along the Rideau Canal. Toppings range from cinnamon sugar and Nutella to apple cinnamon and maple butter.
Ontario’s food festival calendar reflects its agricultural diversity. The Stratford Garlic Festival, approaching its 20th year, pairs Ontario-grown garlic with wine, beer, and cooking demonstrations. Similar festivals celebrate everything from apples in Norfolk County to chocolate in various towns across the province.
What Ties It All Together
Ontario’s food identity makes more sense when you consider the province’s scale. It stretches from the Great Lakes to Hudson Bay, covering farmland, orchards, vineyards, forests, and lake country. The province leads Canada in soybean and corn production, accounts for over 54% of the country’s soybean acreage, and has the largest share of farms classified as poultry and egg production (38.9%), vegetable and melon farming (30.8%), and greenhouse growing (31.8%). That agricultural base feeds a food culture that ranges from peameal bacon sandwiches in downtown Toronto to wild-caught walleye at a northern Ontario fishing lodge.