In a profile by the Haliburton Echo, Steven Rowell had a laugh ready when a visitor mentioned how far the drive to Fort Irwin Cove felt.
"I'm actually closer to Haliburton from here than I was when I worked in Eagle Lake."
— Steven Rowell, as quoted by the Haliburton Echo
He would know. Rowell spent years at Sir Sam's Inn in Eagle Lake before opening a restaurant of his own, and the building he landed on had been sitting empty in Fort Irwin Cove since Till Death BBQ packed up and moved elsewhere. He and co-owner Alex McCracken opened Features Brasserie there on July 15, quietly enough that they barely told anyone for the first few weeks. Together, these openings place new restaurants both on Highland Street and outside downtown.
A Building That Had Been Waiting
Fort Irwin Cove isn't a place most people think of as a dining destination. It's a stretch along Haliburton Lake Road, twenty minutes from the village, better known for cottages than restaurants. Rowell and McCracken each bring more than three decades of restaurant and hospitality experience, from fine sushi kitchens in Toronto to high-end French and Italian dining rooms around the province, and Rowell got his start as a teenager working at Pinestone. The vacant Fort Irwin building became the site of Features Brasserie.
The original plan was lunch and dinner only. Within weeks of opening, the demand for breakfast was loud enough that the owners changed course and added it to the menu. That's a small detail, but it tells you the cove had been hungry for a sit-down option in a way that hadn't been obvious until someone actually opened one. Features Brasserie now offers what's been described as some of the more ambitious bar programs in the county, built into a space that had spent a year sitting empty before Features Brasserie opened.
Downtown's Two Wins in Early 2025
Before any of that, downtown Haliburton had a good run. A&W opened at 10 Hops Drive on January 18, 2025, drawing hundreds of locals through the doors on opening weekend under manager Sohail Khoja, running early mornings through late evenings and proving there was appetite in the village for another quick-service option. Weeks later, Juna opened at 210 Highland Street on March 7, 2025, the upscale Italian restaurant owners Terri Mathews-Carl and her longtime partner Christoph Carl had originally hoped to launch by December 2024 in a retrofitted space that used to house Cindy's clothing store. A string of delays pushed that opening back several months. When the doors finally opened, the restaurant sold out its first weekend of service, and reservations have been recommended ever since given how small the space is, just 26 seats inside with a secret garden patio out back for another 30.
Mathews-Carl and Carl weren't first-time operators. They already ran Rhubarb Restaurant in Carnarvon, on the shores of Mirror Lake, the only Feast On certified kitchen in the area, with an onsite microbrewery in Boshkung Brewing Company and a cocktail and tapas offshoot called Rhubies. Juna's executive chef, Amber Husband, was well known locally for her earlier work at the Post House, and Nico Haedicke, who served as head contractor on the build, stayed on to run the front of house once it opened. By spring of 2025, Haliburton had two new restaurant openings within two months of each other.
Then Construction Arrived
During the following year, Highland Street underwent curb and sidewalk reconstruction. The municipality said shop owners could keep their doors open during the work. On-street parking got tighter through the spring and into the summer of 2026, and at least one longtime breakfast spot reported a noticeably slower rush than usual, the kind of dip owners chalk up to customers deciding it wasn't worth fighting for a parking spot that week.
Restaurants in Different Locations
Downtown had two restaurant openings in early 2025, followed by curb and sidewalk reconstruction the next year. Features Brasserie opened at Fort Irwin Cove in July 2026.
Mathews-Carl and Carl operated Rhubarb and Rhubies in Carnarvon before opening Juna. Rowell had decades of kitchen experience, from Pinestone to downtown Toronto, before opening Features Brasserie with McCracken in Fort Irwin Cove. These openings add restaurants in different parts of the county.
What's Still Standing
None of this displaced what was already working. McKeck's Tap & Grill, founded back in 1986 by retired NHL player Walt McKechnie, is still packing in the game-day crowd under new ownership, same name, same reputation for pub food and local brew on tap. Kosy Korner is marking 90 years of serving breakfast to locals, still opening its doors at 6 a.m. for skiers headed up to Sir Sam's, still the kind of place where the room fills up faster than the kitchen can keep pace some mornings. Boshkung Brewing Social continues to run its two patios in the village, a fixture rather than a novelty at this point.
The recent openings didn't displace the reliable spots. Instead, they changed the geography of where new restaurants chose to open. A&W opened on Hops Drive and Juna on Highland Street in early 2025. Features Brasserie, the most recent of the three, opened in Fort Irwin Cove, a stretch of Haliburton Lake Road that hadn't had a sit-down restaurant since Till Death BBQ moved out. The three openings came within about eighteen months of one another, in two different parts of the county; Highland Street also underwent construction during that period.
From the former BBQ site in Fort Irwin Cove to Juna's former clothing-store space on Highland Street, these openings reflect the county experience of the operators behind both restaurants.
If you're the kind of person who tracks which corner of Haliburton is quietly changing before anyone else notices, that instinct is useful for more than picking where to eat next. It's the same instinct Lakelands Real Estate Co. applies to every lake and every village on this list, watching not just what's for sale, but what's actually happening on the ground around it.
