Can a new crop of British pubs push the comforting cuisine beyond stodgy pigs and puddings?
By Jared Bland | Photographs by Emma McIntyre

The Oxley in Yorkville serves up solid standards with a side of kitsch

Toronto is a town obsessed with the culture of its constitutional overlord. We woke up early to watch the royal wedding, eagerly pirated the latest episodes of Downton Abbey, and still flock to Stratford for our annual dose of Elizabethan manners. Now we’re doing the previously unthinkable: craving British food. It isn’t a new fixation—the city has long had its share of toads-in-the-hole velvet banquettes and dark wood panelling, but there’s a new seriousness to the endeavor.

In 2009, the Manchester-born chef Andrew Carter and Jamieson Kerr, the British expat who also founded Crush Wine Bar on King West, opened The Queen and Beaver on Elm Street, the city’s first (and still best) sophisticated pub. Across town that year, the renowned oyster shucker and Starfish proprietor Patrick McMurray launched The Ceili Cottage, a raucous Irish pub that, while not British, helped lift Toronto out of its Firkin fog and raised our expectations of pub food.

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