“Food and pubs go together like frogs and lawn mowers,” wrote the unswervingly provocative British restaurant critic A. A. Gill. “Pubs don’t do food; they offer internal mops and vomit decoration.” He didn’t entirely mean it, of course: the same article ends with a declaration of passionate love for a dish he had encountered in a London pub—a thick potato soup with a large island of pressed foie gras melting in the middle. But as a general observation it seems sound enough, in Canada as well as in England. Anyone who has accidentally ordered a meal in one of our fake Irish or English chain pubs knows the fried snack food and industrial meat pies are as phony and mass-produced as the pissy commercial beer and the Sherlock Holmes decor.

Fortunately, there is an antidote. Almost 20 years ago, the English mounted a counter­attack against bad pub grub by inventing the gastropub, and now the word is cropping up here in Toronto. I’ve been keeping track of the local contenders, hoping I might have a potato soup epiphany of my own, but with one or two exceptions things looked pretty hopeless until last June. That’s when the clouds parted and the sun shone down on two bonny new spots: Ceili Cottage on Queen East and the Queen and Beaver on Elm Street. Each is the brainchild of a savvy and established restaurateur, and both of them qualify as true gastropubs, but that’s where the resemblance ends—they are as different as chocolate and cheese.

A traditional pub with a casual mood, good beer and restaurant-quality cooking—that’s how most people in England define a gastropub. By common consent, The Eagle was the first of the breed, hatched in 1991 in London’s Clerkenwell area. The owners had wanted to open a restaurant but couldn’t afford it during the recession, so they took over a fading old pub and installed a credible chef in the tiny, makeshift kitchen. It still looked like a pub, with bare brick walls and mismatched chairs; it still served serious beer and was as informal as any London local, but the food (mostly simple Spanish and Italian dishes with fine ingredients, conscientiously cooked) was a revelation. A style was born. Today gastropubs have become so numerous in the U.K. that Gill and other critics have turned against them, mocking the clichés, from the vintage crockery to the inevitable finale of sticky toffee pudding. The very term “gastropub” is disliked by independent-minded pub owners not just because it’s such an ugly word (gastro always makes me think -enteritis rather than -nomy) but because they resent being pigeonholed. And that may be the most important part of the gastropub’s definition: if there’s one thing the best of them have in common it’s a refusal to conform.