The Creative Plate Eatery Restaurant

Amazing food, very friendly staff and wonderful atmosphere! So happy find a great restaurant in Muskoka that’s open year round. Excellent variety of food for every taste and they were very helpful with dietary restrictions. Will definitely be back!

Awesome restaurant with great food. All dishes are simply great. Lamb shank is the best I had.

Like an unfunny version of Fawlty Towers. The food was mediocre and the menu was confused. It labels the pan fried pickerel and Caribbean jerk chicken as vegetarian options, which alas we failed to recognise as the warning it was. For a starter we had hummus with assorted other dips - clearly none of them made from scratch, despite the claim on the menu that everything was. What was probably tzatziki still bore the pattern of being dispensed out of a nozzle, although it so lacked in taste it could have been something else. For my main I had the Mexican stuffed pepper, which was nondescript, bland to the extreme, and came with a large salad mostly consisting of romaine lettuce. I'm an at-best average cook and I could make the same meal at least as well, undermining the entire point of going to a restaurant. The accompanying guacamole appeared to have been scooped out of a jar and had the tangy metallic taste of over-processed avocado. I couldn't do anything to help the blandness, there was no salt or pepper on the table, and we were never offered any, although some other patrons were. The service was abysmally, embarrassingly bad. Some highlights: 1) Mains were brought out less than 10 minutes after our very large shared starter, and unceremoniously put in front of us while we were still clearly in the middle of the starter. 2) Constantly checking up on us to make sure the food is okay like insecure teenagers on a date, at one point having two wait staff ask us how it was going with less than a minute between them. 3) The staff were generally loud, intrusive and for some strange reason always running even though there were 3 staff for at most 5 tables. 4) One of the staff members spent roughly ten minutes standing next to one of the tables (evidently familiar with the customers) loudly telling them how she'd been doing and how one of the other staff members had just spent 3 months in Thailand and Cambodia. 5) The staff member who had just spent 3 months in Thailand and Cambodia loudly telling these same customers about her experiences eating spider and rat and other such exotic touristic delicacies. In what world is it okay to loudly describe in the middle of a restaurant, surrounded by people trying (and failing) to enjoy dinner, your experience of eating a large spider? Particularly if you are a member of staff? Particularly if you can't even get the species of spider right? Note to staff member: Banana spiders are from South America, you probably ate some kind of tarantula. 6) The snotty sign in the foyer telling people not to complain on social media about their experiences seems to suggest that the management are aware their restaurant isn't very good - that they have no clothes - but rather than improving their offering they are demanding people not complain. Stalin would be proud. The apparent popularity of this place is baffling. Does entering Muskoka render most people's taste buds useless? Has the enlightenment not yet reached cottage country? Is The Creative Plate Eatery part of some large conspiracy to drive me insane? It remains unclear. If your entire experience of food from birth to today was Kraft Dinner served to you on a prison tray, I imagine you might this your experience here tolerable but unexciting. Otherwise, avoid.

Prior to my visit, I touched base with Connie via email before visiting to ensure they were going to be open during our visit and to see if they could handle a group of 14 people, she answered quickly and assured me everything would be good. Shortly after we arrived I introduced myself to Connie and she was very welcoming and accommodating. She did explain that she was short staffed and training new staff and there might be a delay. Once the food was served everyone had commented that it looked and tasted homemade, very tasty! After we were finished our waitress announced that because of the delay they would like to provide us with some homemade chocolate fudge cheese cake that was to die for........ Overall we were very happy with the food and our experience and told Connie we will be back next year on our next visit.

The food is always delicious and the ingredients often unexpected. Connie has an eye for beautiful food. The beet salad was a whole lot more than beets! The Creative Plate is a Muskoka gem.