As someone in the restaurant industry, the thing I hate getting asked the most is, “Where’s your favourite spot?” or “What’s the best restaurant?” To be honest, you’d probably hate my favourite spot, and I don’t believe in a “best” or “worst” restaurant. A more appropriate line of questioning might be, “My artist friends are in town from Mexico City and I want to impress them without seeming pretentious,” or “I met this girl who is far cooler than me. Where should we go dancing?”
For life’s toughest questions, look no further than your friends in the industry. They have their boots on the ground, they’ve tried all the spots, drank all the drinks — they’re the guinea pigs in Toronto’s unending lab experiment titled, “How many restaurants can we open until people start cooking at home again?”
The night has come. But where to go? Tonight, leave that decision to someone else. Sure, you can’t expect your industry friends to be good at explaining to you your life’s purpose, but what they’re certainly good at is plugging you into what’s actually worth checking out. So, here are three spots they might suggest.
Just west of Dovercourt and College — mere minutes from the nouveau party epicentre of Toronto nightlife — is the newest project from chefs Jeff Kang (Canis) and Edward Bang (Omai). Opened in April of 2024, Takja means “table” in Korean, and it’s only once you sit down and see how the tables have been sexified with beautiful bronze grill fixtures, plush red suede, and severe hardware under the hood that you can understand why it’s the restaurant’s namesake.
Order the Hansang (chef’s menu) and the table slowly begins to fill with food — live seafood, a plethora of house-fermented vegetables to accompany the grilled meat, noodles, and soups that offer reprieve from the 18 consecutive pieces of pork belly you just shoved down your face. That said, there’s something comforting about your server cutting up Wagyu onto your plate with scissors and proceeding to splash you with natural wine served by the glass.
The people who opened Ramona’s know what they’re doing. Waseem Dabdoub (Haifa Room, Standard Time) teamed up with Toronto bar veteran Michael Webster (Bar Raval, Pretty Ugly), Michael Leach (Dynasty Plants), and Colin Sims (Standard Time) to open a cocktail bar that has more than a few perks. Opened in April of this year, the bar’s design plays on their collective travels to Mexico. It has an adobe-inspired interior with soft finishes and textured walls; groovy, moody, and funky are all words that come to mind.
The style of service brings that same energy — think The Big Lebowski on an ayahuasca retreat, only a little more polished and put together. For me, what sets it apart is that you can pull up the next morning at 8 a.m., put down a couple of coffees and get some work done. The food menu starts early and goes late — chef David Solis put together a menu that complements the coastal theme by offering light and healthy snacks, all the while still finding room on the menu to include a contender for “breakfast sandwich of the moment.” Take a date, take an old friend, or take two hours of emails. Up to you. It’ll hit the spot.
I’m too young to remember the days of disco, but I’m starting to feel like I didn’t miss out. This is in large part because what was once a relic of the past has become a staple of the contemporary nightlife gambit. Opened in February of 2024, Sounds Good was a project started by Dylan McArthur, a long-time audiophile and record digger who, like many people in the music scene, yearned for more spaces to be focused on sound as much as they were on everything else.
Music is the sole element of the hospitality experience that is, in most cases, free. There’s no line item at the bottom of your bill that reads, “Sound Fee.” Who would be crazy enough, then, to pour so many resources into creating an extremely robust sound system for a restaurant? It’s only once you step foot into the dining and bar space, and then into the club downstairs, that you find yourself thinking, “Damn, it sounds good in here.” It does, in fact, live up to its name.
Although you will find vinyl spinning throughout the space, Sounds Good’s offering is split into a few different parts. Long-time Toronto music-man Ludovic Bacs takes care of the music programming and fills the space with an impressive range of sounds. Upstairs, you’ll find a menu that accommodates both those looking for a quick pre-boogie snack as well as those looking to eat dinner with some rare funk in the background.
The wine list is well-rounded, with some old school and some new school natural. The bottom line is, no matter what you’re into, there’s no denying the quality of the sound pumping out of this place. Even the most rhythmically challenged can find their groove here — trust me, I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
The pop-up restaurant is here to stay. Are we okay with that? For many restaurateurs, the pop-up restaurant is the only solution to the modern problem that every business — especially service industry businesses — must face: overhead. What was once used as a proof of concept has now become the business model in itself. Ultimately, it’s allowed very talented people to share their passion at a time when that’s become increasingly challenging. And, like restaurants, some have shone brighter than others — here are a few examples.
Started this year by Jalil Bokhari and Emma Tanaka, Jamil’s Chaat House was started to pay homage to the bridge that connects Pakistani and Indian cuisine to the street food and eastern cuisine found in Little India on Gerrard Street in Toronto. Bollywood disco, Mughal architecture in Lahore, dhaba street food culture, and Desi burger flyers that adorn storefronts on Gerrard are at the core of what Jamil’s represents. In Bokhari’s words, “It’s a home base for misfit brown kids finding a way back to our roots in a way that we can be proud of.”
Instead of trying to make a Desi burger some kind of fine-dining dish, they’re serving it on the back patios of restaurants or out of coffee shops on the weekend, which just feels right. The menu includes South Asian classics like dhal, pakora, and Desi burgers. Although the menu changes, these things feel like exactly what you’d want out of a pop-up. Chase any one of those dishes with a clarified mango lassi drink, and you’re having a unique experience that is just as much Gerrard Street as it is Lahore street food. Having done events at notable spots around Toronto, and with upcoming events at Lake Inez, Jamil’s isn’t limited in any regard to how they can operate as a result of their grounded approach; one day dishes are paired with beer or lassi, and then next with wine.
Pop-up or otherwise, See You Soon has blurred the lines. Starting in May of 2022, Keith Siu, Michael Ovejas, and Kevin Le left their restaurant jobs and took off on a bit of a culinary tour. Having gained some traction in Toronto through private dinner parties and pop-ups featuring an à la carte menu, See You Soon quickly grew into one of the more notable food experiences in the city. Without wasting any time, they made their way to B.C., doing a farm-to-table dinner in a farmhouse on Bowen Island. Over the next year, they’d find themselves at El Nopal in Paris, Oranj in London, and Gem House in New York. The world tour would mean longer residencies, where they could offer a menu that felt less pop-up and more restaurant.
Not being tied down to a particular space or style of service is a huge advantage to the team, who can alternate between offering their now-signature Filet-XO-Fish sando, and more composed tasting menu style dishes like coffee crust duck with lemongrass jus. During their month-long stints at big spots in global culinary capitals, they are just as much that restaurant as anything else inside. This is what separates them from the other pop-ups we have seen come and go over time — they aren’t one. For argument’s sake, I’d give See You Soon a new title, perhaps “liminal restaurateurism” — where the space occupied and experience provided are very present, and for that brief moment, theirs.
There’s no more perfect example of lockdown-fuelled pop-up fanaticism than Gallz Provisions. Going into 2021, owner Julia Gallay wasn’t in love with her medical startup job in the way she was with food. At the time, many restaurants were scaling back their food programs, and the first position to be cut was always pastry. As a result, many pastry chefs were left jobless. Fortunately, this came right around the time when everyone made it a priority to learn how to bake. Gallay figured she’d take a stab at it, made her mom a cake for her birthday, and decorated it with fresh flowers from her front yard. Fast-forward three years, and Gallay’s flower-adorned cakes have popped off. She has partnered up with local businesses to organize bake sales for charity, has done luncheons at notable hotspots like Dreyfus in Toronto, and occasionally makes nine-foot-long cakes to hand out by the slice for free in the back alleyways of Toronto’s Ossington strip.
What does the future hold for Gallay? When speaking with her, you get the impression she’s just really happy people like her cake and maintains a sort of stoic realism about what might lie in the future for her. In her words, “People are ordering cakes for their wedding in 2025. I don’t even know if I’ll be alive or dead — I might go back to my real job by then.”
In recent years, we’ve collectively developed a palate for something better and are fortunate enough to have many talented people willing to provide a restaurant-level pastry experience for us outside of the restaurant. The pop-up has filled the gap — today, those with talent don’t need to wait for an investor before they can showcase their talent. The door is open, and people have the space to share their restaurant-level experience outside of the restaurant. To me, cake tastes better outside, anyway.
The post An Industry Expert Takes Us Through the Best* Toronto Restaurants appeared first on Sharp Magazine.
