Simply Crepes started with a family recipe from a dairy farm in rural Quebec. Co-founders Pierre and Karen Heroux built their restaurant concept around the homespun crepes Pierre's grandmother cooked on buttered cast iron — simple, unpretentious, stuffed with whatever was good that morning. Two decades and multiple locations later, the formula still works. The Canandaigua location on South Main Street, with its outdoor patio and proximity to the live music venue The Central, is the most relevant for Finger Lakes visitors, though the original Pittsford spot on Schoen Place along the Erie Canal remains the flagship.

The menu goes far beyond crepes, though the crepes remain the anchor. Savory options wrap local goat cheese, roasted vegetables, and house-made sauces into properly thin, golden-edged packages. Sweet crepes lean on real maple syrup — a nod to the Heroux family's Quebec roots — Nutella, and seasonal fruit. But this is a full-service restaurant with scratch-made soups, salads, grain bowls, and cocktails. The kitchen uses pure maple syrup as a key sweetener across sauces and dressings, and the seasonal menu changes keep regulars coming back. Four consecutive FLX Finest awards for Best Brunch confirms what the weekend wait times already tell you: arrive early, especially on summer Saturdays.

The atmosphere is warm and casual, closer to a neighborhood bistro than a formal dining room. Service tends to be genuinely hospitable rather than performative. It's the kind of place where you go for a birthday brunch with your mother-in-law or a slow Saturday morning with a good book and a coffee. Outdoor seating in Canandaigua is especially appealing in summer, when the patio serves cocktails and the street has that small-town Main Street energy that makes the Finger Lakes feel like a place you could actually live.