Toronto Life’s roundup of the restaurants with the biggest buzz, the longest lineups and the toughest tables to snag.
A long running powerhouse prepares for a three-week break and David Chang spills the beans on where he eats in Toronto.
All stories relating to David Chang
Best New Toronto Restaurants 2013
One thousand three hundred and eight. That’s how many restaurants opened in 2012—more than triple the year before, and the year before that. Toronto is in the middle of a restaurant boom that’s changing the way we eat, drink, date, schmooze, celebrate and generally revel in the city. The shimmering Momofuku triplex has dignified business execs devouring pork ssäm with their hands, and couples happily—gratefully—shelling out $400 for 10-course tasting menus. Downtowners are piling into rowdy izakayas for after-work sake and Sapporo, while Brit pubs are, to the amazement of every Firkin-going anglophile, becoming destinations for refined dining. Canadiana is no longer just a term for moose-print sweaters and maple leaf mittens, but a bona fide big-city cuisine borne of chefs obsessed with heritage meat and wild plants, preferably foraged in the Don Valley. Yes, Toronto is so flush with new places to eat that keeping up with them has become a full-time job. This year, Toronto Life’s critics were busier than ever, stuffing our faces, snapping photos on the sly and analyzing every last aspect of the dining experience. After much debate, we winnowed down 1,308 establishments to the top 10. Here, our annual ranking of the most innovative, interesting and delicious new Toronto restaurants.
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The Dish Power Rankings: muddied waters edition
Toronto Life’s roundup of the restaurants with the biggest buzz, the longest lineups and the toughest tables to snag.
After four weeks in the top spot, Edulis gets bumped for a red-hot new barbecue restaurant. Meanwhile, OddSeoul continues its steady rise.
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The Dish Power Rankings: winter deep freeze edition
Toronto Life’s roundup of the restaurants with the biggest buzz, the longest lineups and the toughest tables to snag.
The city’s most powerful restaurants stayed busy despite storms and frigid temperatures. Below, Porzia makes a dramatic climb to second place and a drop-in from a UK food celeb nabs Momofuku Noodle Bar its first appearance on the list.
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The Dish Power Rankings: Top Chefs and Bieber power
Toronto Life’s weekly assessment of the restaurants with the biggest buzz, the longest lineups and the toughest tables to snag.
On Monday, the contestants for season three of Top Chef Canada were announced, catapulting their respective restaurants onto this week’s power rankings. Meanwhile, the mighty power of the Biebs bumps up the hype for an Annex diner, and the depth of Toronto’s appetite for brunch tacos is revealed.
The Dish Power Rankings: The Valentine’s madness edition
Toronto Life’s weekly assessment of the restaurants with the biggest buzz, the longest lineups and the toughest tables to snag.
Edulis’s charming (and tiny) dining room propels the restaurant to the top this week on the strength of its Valentine’s bookings. Lower down, a couple new sold-out tasting menus debut, as does College Street’s next hot brunch destination.
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Critic: we review Cafe Boulud, the casual Yorkville bistro from New York chef Daniel Boulud
Toronto expected four-star French dining from Cafe Boulud in the Four Seasons. Instead, the city got another trendy two-star bistro
Left: Boulud’s casual new cocktail bar, dbar, in the Four Seasons lobby; Right: A portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat by the artist Mr. Brainwash at Cafe Boulud
Daniel Boulud is a very famous chef. Perhaps you know him from TV, where he’s been a frequent judge on Top Chef and appeared on Barefoot Contessa and Late Night With Jimmy Fallon. You may know him from his seven cookbooks or from Letters to a Young Chef, his self-help book for aspiring chefs. If you’ve been to one of his 14 restaurants—in New York City, Miami, Palm Beach, London, Singapore, Beijing or Montreal—you might even know him from his food.
The Dish Power Rankings: buzzing diners and taco insurgents
Toronto Life’s weekly assessment of the restaurants with the biggest buzz, the longest lineups and the toughest tables to snag.
The Hoof Raw Bar steals the top spot this week, now that Jen Agg has revived the mega-popular Hoof Café brunch (see last week’s rankings). Over in Parkdale, a new southern Italian restaurant is gaining ground and in The Junction, there’s a new contender for Toronto’s top taco.
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The 15 Toronto restaurants recommended in Where Chefs Eat, a new culinary guidebook
Where Chefs Eat is a new 633-page collection of answers to a very simple question: where to go for a good meal? Those answers are from some 400 of the world’s top chefs, including Ferran Adria, Daniel Boulud, David Chang, Fergus Henderson and Rene Redzepi, as well as Toronto chefs Michael Steh, formerly of Reds, and Claudio Aprile, chef and owner of Colborne Lane and Origin. The guidebook is edited by Guardian critic Joe Warwick, who also co-founded the World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards. It’s not only an inventory of the flashy big-name places in a city, but also of regular neighbourhood and cheap eats spots. There’s even a category for places the chefs wish they opened. We flipped through the tome to pull out the 15 restaurants in and around Toronto recommended by the world’s top chefs.
The Dish Power Rankings: brunches and bans
Toronto Life’s weekly assessment of the restaurants with the biggest buzz, the longest lineups and the toughest tables to snag.
Momofuku Shōtō loses the top spot this week to the perennially buzzy Grove (see last week’s rankings). The Black Hoof drops off the list, but is replaced by the Hoof Raw Bar, which is hosting the return of Toronto’s favourite brunch service circa 2010. Also noteworthy: a new restaurant opens in Parkdale, likely the last until the ban is lifted, and a new tasting menu from one of the city’s top Italian restaurants.
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The Dish Power Rankings: feasting menus and Maple Leafs edition
Toronto Life’s weekly assessment of the restaurants with the biggest buzz, the longest lineups and the toughest tables to snag.
The biggest movement this week was lower down on the list, where over-the-top feasting meals at Catch and Dyne managed to knock off a few restaurants that weren’t quite buzzy enough (see last week’s rankings). Café Boulud took the biggest hit, slipping three places after Jared Bland took the New York superchef’s bistro to task for its lack of ambition in our February issue. Real Sports Bar and Grill makes its entry in the list thanks to the long-awaited return of the Leafs this Saturday.
The Dish Toronto Restaurant Power Rankings: game on
Toronto is in the middle of a great restaurant boom. Over 150 restaurants opened in the last year alone, most of them hyped on Twitter, deconstructed on blogs (like ours) and ranked in countless year-end roundups. Tracking the ups and downs—the praise and the pans—has never been more entertaining. That’s why we’ve decided to launch our first-ever Power Rankings, a list of the restaurants with the biggest buzz, the longest lineups and toughest tables to snag. Below, the 20 restaurants that are dominating the foodie conversation in Toronto right now.
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The Momofuku Effect: How David Chang took over the city’s menus long before Momofuku even opened its Toronto doors
(Photographs courtesy Momofuku)
The New York mastermind behind Momofuku is one of the most copied chefs of the last decade. His brand of fusion—Asian street food elevated to fine dining—has been inspiring Toronto chefs for years. In fact, if you’ve eaten at the restaurants below, chances are you’ve already tasted Chang’s influence. Here, eight Momofuku signatures and their Toronto counterparts.
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Trend We Love: Huitlacoche (a.k.a. corn smut), spotted on Mexican and non-Mexican menus alike
Tacquitos de huitlacoche at Pachuco. The huitlacoche is on the right (Image: Signe Langford)
Huitlacoche (pronounced weet-la-KOH-chay), a corn fungus that’s popular in Mexican food, has two commonly used English names: the gross-sounding “corn smut” and “Mexican truffle,” which over-promises a little on its earthy if not quite transcendent taste. It’s been showing up with increasing frequency on Mexican menus for the last few years; more recently, we’ve noted an uptick in the use of huitlacoche at other types of restaurants too. Here’s where we’ve spotted it:
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Review: Momofuku Daishō, the new place for family-style fried chicken and bo ssäm
Fried chicken dinner at Daishō (Image: Renée Suen)
One of three new David Chang restaurants, Daishō has a split personality. The glass-walled room, with its dazzling bird’s-eye view of the opera house, attracts date-night couples who order from an à la carte menu of modern Asian dishes like deliciously caramelized deep-fried Brussels sprouts tossed with puffed rice and mint, succulent ruby slices of secreto (a shoulder cut steak) doused in XO sauce, and a sweet-sour-salty salad of apple, kimchee and bacon. The main draw, however, is a separate menu for groups of four to 10, who gather at picnic-style tables for large-format meals, including a heaping plate of two chickens, jointed and fried Southern style, in an intensely savoury buttermilk breading.
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