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Not so long ago, Toronto was a white-bread city. That was before chefs started baking Danish rye, sous-viding bacon and otherwise messing with the old bread-meat-bread formula. Today’s sandwiches are unconventional, artisanal and, we can confirm after extensive testing, utterly delicious. Here, our picks for the top 20 Toronto sandwiches.
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Legree at County General (Image: Laurent Hilaire)
Garth Legree, the Splendido alum who helped open The County General in 2011, has been hired as head chef at Little Anthony’s. Owner Andreas Antoniou says that with Legree at the helm, he’s hoping to replicate the success of sister restaurant Estiatorio Volos across the street, serving straightforward Italian-American dishes that are nevertheless prepared at a high level (for example: all pastas will be made from scratch). Legree starts on Monday, replacing Aaron Foster, who was in charge of the kitchen during the restaurant’s big revamp last year.
The County General now takes lunch reservations (Image: Laurent Hilaire)
No one likes spending hours in the cold waiting for a table at a hot new restaurant. But ever since The Black Hoof opened in 2008, it’s become de rigueur for new spots to spurn reservations in favour of buzz-building lineups out the door. Thankfully, there are signs of change, and some of those very restaurants have now recanted from their earlier ways. We’ve rounded up the most recent places to make the switch below:
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(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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(Image: Renée Suen)
Greasy southern comfort food has been surging in popularity for a few years now, but it’s always difficult contemplating a return to the office after a helping of chili, say, or fried chicken. The County General, Splendido’s cooler younger sibling on Queen West, has a solution, in the form of its perfectly lunch-sized fried chicken thigh sandwich ($14).
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Shelley Miller’s Throw-Up will be outside Metro Hall (Image: Shelley Miller)
Nuit Blanche opens on Saturday night at 7:03 p.m. (see our full guide), and with an entire night of roaming Toronto’s transformed streets, galleries and everything in between, odds are you’ll get hungry. To help, the folks behind the festival have dispatched a fleet of food trucks, which will be out in full force at three designated downtown “rest stops.” Several restaurants are also keeping their doors open late with special offerings. Below, our roundup of where to eat in each zone, near city hall and outside of the box (i.e. near the independent projects in Parkdale).
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Hungry for pork buns, but not willing to wait for Momofuku to get here already? Like urban exploration? Like the idea of guerilla or pop-up anything? County General is offering all of those things and a limeade from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. in an alleyway off King Street that you typically wouldn’t eat in. Run! And bon appetit!
At approximately 4 a.m. last Nuit Blanche, some friends and I filed into the brightly lit New Ho King on Spadina for heaping plates of General Tso chicken and hunan tofu. Similarly wired Nuit Blanchers squeezed past our chairs and guffawed loudly from neighbouring tables. The mood was celebratory and a little overwhelming, and by the time we left an hour later, stomachs full, there was still a lineup.
One mark of a great city is that its citizens can purchase a decent meal whenever they want, or a roll of aluminum foil whenever they happen to need it. Or play a game of five-pin whenever they’re feeling spontaneous (Rexdale Bowlerama is open till 4 a.m.). By this standard, Toronto is now officially a 24-hour city, accommodating all sleep schedules with a booming all-night culture.
It used to be that the only options were a handful of diners—The Lakeview, Fran’s and Vesta Lunch—or a quick taquito from one of our 19 7-Elevens. They’re now joined by restaurants you might actually visit during normal-person hours. The King West party crowd can rely on the Thompson Hotel for break-of-dawn burgers and Reggie’s Old Fashioned Sandwiches for the old-fashioned sandwiches one needs before staggering home to pass out beside the toilet. The County General, which took over Oddfellows’ old space last fall, is open until 3 a.m. from Thursday to Saturday, which is great for when you can’t sleep but don’t want to feel like the whole world is dead. Whenever I walk by, the sidewalk outside is clogged with belligerent men, and women in fearfully high heels. Sometimes I join them; more often than not I hike up to New Ho for the greasy, delicious carbs I know and love. It’s great to have options, even when you’re a creature of habit.
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Even if scores of buzzing foodies crowding into the narrow alleyway at Honest Ed’s is not your idea of a fun night out, you should still check out the all-flashing, day-glo, carny-tastic website that The Stop has set up for the Night Market, a $50-a-pop fundraiser featuring food and drink served out of custom-made stalls. The stacked list of vendors includes both Generals (Brockton and County), Cowbell, Delica, GwaiLo, Paulette’s Chicken and Donuts, SupiCucu, The Grove, Ursa, Yours Truly, Grace, Woodlot and many more, and beverages will be provided by Great Lakes Brewery, Lake of Bays Brewing, Muskoka Brewery, Steam Whistle, Still Waters Distillery and Tromba Tequila. The event takes place June 20, from 7–11 p.m. Utterly unsurprisingly, there are now less than 50 tickets left. [The Stop’s Night Market]
Nine years ago, Mark McEwan scandalized Torontonians with his $35 truffled Bymark burger. That was before words like “grass-fed,” “heritage” and “dry-aged” entered into the burger lexicon. The city is now crammed with craft burgers, and carnivores no longer flinch at steep price tags. Competitive chefs bring in whole cows from nearby farms, bake their own buns, smoke their own bacon (twice), replace ketchup with tomato chutney and source the most pungent cheeses they can get their patty-flipping hands on. Thankfully, the mom-and-pop shops haven’t been artisinalled out of business—there are still plenty of sublime greasy-bag burgers around, as well as a few new-school diners ironically replicating them. Here, the very best of the city’s boundless burgerdom.
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Louianna olive oil, polenta and mushroom croquettes from Fabio Bondi and Ravine Vineyard’s Sand and Gravel Redcoat
Toronto’s sixth annual Green Living Show kicked off last Friday at the Ex and continued through the weekend. Ecoholic Torontonians gathered en masse for the three-day event that showcased everything from locally produced coffins, for those adamant on remaining green until the bitter end, to a Miyazaki-esque solar-powered airship. The Dish hit up this year’s GLS to check out the event’s first ever Farmers Market and to snack on the Farm Fresh Fare dishes. The weekend featured a rotating cast of Toronto chefs, including The Gabardine’s Graham Pratt and Local Kitchen’s Fabio Bondi, who had partnered up with local producers like Kolapore Springs and 100km Foods to prepare tapas-sized plates ($2-$4).
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This year, a handful of sandwich-centric restaurants tapped into the primitive appeal of meat plus bun. Here, five hearty two-handers. Read the rest of this entry »
Toronto chefs are reimagining the McMuffin with house-made breads and luxurious ingredients
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