The first time I dined with Chef Jeremy Austin, it was a warm summer evening in 2019, plein air, at the family farm in the rolling hills of south Grey County. Jeremy and his wife Cassie were hosting a pop-up—The Pine Dinner Series—using the farm’s market garden produce to showcase Jeremy’s culinary inspirations from his travels through China and Southeast Asia.
It was a slow, lingering immersion of good company, exceptional food, and attentive service. It felt like something special, though fleeting – turns out, it was a preview of what would become an internationally acclaimed dining destination.
Fast forward to 2025. The Pine has been named to Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants list – repeatedly. It opened in a wildly popular bricks-and-mortar location in Collingwood, later closed those doors, and reopened in a larger space in the nearby, out-of-the-way village of Creemore.
In the midst of opening the new space, Jeremy and Cassie were invited to a gala in Toronto hosted by the Michelin Guide. To their surprise – and to the amazement of restaurant industry watchers across the country, The Pine was awarded a Michelin star. This is a very, very big deal. There are only a small handful of Michelin-starred restaurants in Ontario, and just two outside of Toronto—The Pine now being one of them. Suddenly, what began as an ephemeral experiment had landed in rarified territory, sitting amongst the pantheon of the world’s most highly regarded restaurants.
On one of Creemore’s main streets, where you might’ve once seen the daily price per litre at a quaint country gas station is now painted a fresh, clean white, “The Pine” in modern font.
The space is minimal without feeling stark, clearly influenced by Scandinavian architectural design. Jeremiah, the general manager, stands in a tailored vest, neatly ironing crisp white linens for the evening’s dinner service. We chat, and I ask him what’s changed since receiving the Michelin star.
“I opened reservations for the next ten weeks yesterday,” he tells me. “We booked up in thirty minutes.” The clientele has shifted too. “We used to get a mix of locals and Torontonians who’d drive up for the day. Now we’re seeing guests flying in solely to dine with us – from Europe, China, Argentina. People who travel specifically to check starred restaurants off their list.”
I ask Chef Jeremy the same question. After some thought, he admits there are new challenges. “We’re navigating a whole new landscape. People come expecting the best food they’ve ever had—not realizing that in a way, what we’re doing is more like theatre. Everything is highly choreographed. You have to pay attention to the whole show.”
When I liken what he’s doing to visual art (Jeremy is a talented painter too, his large abstract canvases hanging on the wall beside us) he muses, “You know the Buddhist monks who make art from sand? It’s like that. One element of a dish could take days or weeks to make, and then in one bite, it’s gone. Our attempt to make something meaningful goes beyond someone simply eating it.”
The Eastern analogy isn’t accidental. All of the dishes on any given evening’s unpublished, cryptically pictogrammed tasting menu are directly inspired by Jeremy’s years working in high-end kitchens in Hong Kong and China. Yet with a name like The Pine, and a conspicuous hyper-focus on local and seasonal ingredients, there’s a deep current of Canadiana present as well.
As if to make that point crystal clear, we open with a classic Chinese dish: a tea egg, soaked in black cardamom and cassia bark oolong. But slyly, Jeremy has devilled the egg with a smoked yolk filling – a nod to small-town Canadian potlucks, and a declarative mash-up of East meets West, haute cuisine meets familiar fare. A crown of golden New Brunswick sturgeon caviar and minuscule, meticulously placed edible florets signals that we should expect upcoming opulence.
Each dish is, truly, an individual work of art – painterly and sculptural, organic and geometric. They arrive in terracotta pots, on pillows of dried chilies, clutched in the raised claws of crab figurines. Every course is an incisive expression of Jeremy’s travels through China, reinterpreted through a Central Ontario lens.
Wuxi lamb ribs come exactingly butchered, lacquered in a sauce of sundried Niagara cherries. La zi ji – typically made with chicken – is reconceived with flaky rainbow trout. The signature numbing Sichuan peppercorns remain, but the fish is charcoal-grilled and presented amidst a swirling, psychedelic palette of sauces: honey nut squash miso, pawpaw vinegar, caramelized goat butter béarnaise, fermented chili and garlic beurre blanc, and a vivid green chive oil. The depth of flavours is seemingly bottomless.
As with every course, this dish is paired with a small glass of wine—in this case, a low-tannin Dolcetto from Piedmont that, though unconventional, pairs perfectly. Jeremiah’s sommelier instincts are outside the box, and spot on.
In the middle of Shanghai is a historic neighbourhood called the French Concession, a relic of European colonialism that Jeremy used to visit on his wanderings through the city. Exactly halfway through the meal, its namesake course arrives: a thoroughly Parisian bite of brown butter-roasted sourdough, foie gras ice cream, and sour plum jam. A playful departure that encourages us to consider the menu as narrative, as geography.
Setting down the shuicai in synchronized movement with another server, Jeremy tells me, “This is the most important dish on the menu.” Usually a relatively humble dish of stir fried greens, it’s the razor sharp precision of technique chef wants us to consider here; gai lan and celtuce tossed in a dangerously hot wok fired with “a jet engine” of 150k BTUs, featuring difficult to source local ginger, and a deeply complex caramelized scallop sauce. Served in a warm granite mortar releasing evergreen aromatics from freshly clipped, quintessentially Ontario eastern white cedar, I can see why Jeremy feels this is the very essence of what he and his team are trying to communicate at The Pine: tradition reimagined, place expressed through craft.
Seventeen courses. Cod cheeks and crab brain. Beef tartare with two-year fermented shrimp paste. Crispy BBQ pork with rose jam and cow’s feet jus. Each course is as carefully considered, expertly executed, and attentively served as the last.
It all finishes with what has now become their rightfully famous Hong Kong French Toast – an impossibly decadent pain perdu soaked in condensed milk and salted duck yolk. A cart of dessert wines is rolled out, a solera and Gewurztraminer eiswein are poured. Chef Jeremy and Jeremiah sit and join us with a bottle of Champagne to toast the evening, and talk all things food, wine, and service.
I ask, what’s your goal now, with this place? Jeremy answers decisively “simple: to be better every day than we were the day before.”
A tall order for a restaurant that is, by all accounts, already approaching perfection.
To visit, reserve seats at thepinecreemore.ca.
Written by Joel Loughead
Photos by Frances Beatty
