Toronto’s Best New Restaurants: Brothers Food & Wine

The city’s best new restaurant is so nondescript as to be invisible. Occupying a former greasy spoon that’s cheek-to-cheek with Bay Station, the entire place is no bigger than a railroad car. Christopher White and Jonathan Nicolaou, the bearded, bearish guys in charge, didn’t bother to announce the November opening with a big social media campaign. They seemed to hope the curious would wander in, note the jug of wildflowers in the window and the double fridge packed with phenomenal wines, like what they see and never want to leave.

Last year's best new restaurants

Food & Drink

Toronto’s best new restaurants

I’m now a regular at Brothers, and, every time I visit, there’s something more incredible to eat. I’ve loved the beef carpaccio layered with charred radicchio and pine nuts; the roasted half–Cornish hen on a bed of creamed savoy cabbage and chestnuts; the gnocchi, somehow both dense and downy, hiding nuggets of pecorino and nutty mushrooms; the seared hunks of veal sweetbreads under a wig of frisée; and the slow-roasted shank of a Niagara lamb, with tangy fennel and briny capers.

White and Nicolaou are longtime friends who only look like brothers. They chose the restaurant name because it sounded unpretentious and instantly classic. The two began planning their own place while working at Terroni, one of the city’s more dependable talent pools. In the intervening years, White did stints at the always-excellent Dandylion while Nicolaou cooked at Bar Raval and Bar Isabel, as well as St. John, the London restaurant that inspired a generation of Fergus Henderson followers to embrace seasonal and nose-to-tail cooking. I detect all of those influences on Nicolaou’s no-frills menu, which changes daily and is a cheat sheet to his favourite suppliers and farmers.

This year, we’ve seen a lot of chefs open small restaurants where they can cook whatever they like. Brothers is the most evolved—the leader of the pack. While Nicolaou works the ovens, White greets guests, remembering every face. He starts you off with crusty sourdough and a glass of wine, perhaps from a small biodynamic operation that has been run by the same family for four centuries and caught the eye of house sommelier Courtney Stebbings.

They’re preoccupied with building a repertoire, not with doing whatever’s trending. Nicolaou transports diners to Burgundy, to California, to Macedonia and to London. Then the Bloor line rumbles underfoot, and you’re back home.

For the first months, he baked one dessert: a lemony semolina pound cake with a dollop of cream and tart sea buckthorn. It’s simple, delicious and perfect. As the city grows taller and more impersonal, we need more Brothers.

1240 Bay St., 416-804-6066, brotherstoronto.com

Toronto’s Best New Restaurants: Doma

Let’s hope Doma survives the curse of 50C. The Little Italy address is a revolving door of restaurants—it was previously home to Backwoods Smokehouse and Whisky Bar, Red Sauce and, most missed of all, Acadia (which was also retooled several times).

The new owner, Paul Kim, is an unknown who worked the line at GTA golf clubs and apprenticed at Buca and Nota Bene. He opened Doma—Korean for “cutting board”—last fall. Cooking modern Korean, Kim is clearly inspired by David Chang’s Momofuku but also by the high priests of French cuisine, and even more by his own childhood in Seoul. He releases a new menu each month. You can order à la carte or try everything for $65 a person, which is an unbelievable bargain.

During my last visit, dinner started with a steamed bun, sticky and squid-ink black, stuffed with caramelized onions and mushrooms. Eight courses followed, each prettier than the last. My favourite was the strip loin, which he marinates in soybean paste, wraps in pickled perilla leaves and sides with cubes of scalloped potatoes and creamed kale. Tied for a close second are his duck two ways (a seared breast and duck confit dumplings), and a salad of octopus tentacle he cooks sous vide and glazes with honey, delicate cucumber granita, microgreens, springy and translucent noodles of konjac jelly, and matchstick pear—an update of Susur Lee’s famous Singapore slaw.

One dessert, his take on a lemon meringue pie, combines mugwort ice cream, artfully torn chunks of eggy sponge cake and a wodge of yuzu meringue. Get a table now, so you can say you were there when he made his debut.

50C Clinton St., 416-551-1550, domatoronto.com

Toronto’s Best New Restaurants: Piano Piano

I wasn’t the only one who felt a pang when Splendido closed. It was, for 20-plus years, where we went to be spoiled rotten by our most god-like chefs. Two words: champagne cart. And I wasn’t the only one who cringed when word got out that chef-owner Victor Barry was replacing the storied room with a family-friendly pizza joint—there would, he said, be a kids’ menu.

But Piano Piano turned out to be something much more ambitious.

More on Piano Piano

Food & Drink

Piano Piano is the best new restaurant of the summer

There is pizza, it’s true—my pick for the finest in the city, with dough made from heritage wheat and exquisite toppings (oozing fior di latte, well-aged parm, dandelion greens, ’nduja so spicy you’ll become a fire-breather, and other delectable options). Then there are Barry’s luxe pastas—pumpkin-stuffed agnolotti, springy cavatelli with oyster mushrooms, a sensational carbonara—as well as fancy cuts (bone-in veal chops, 18-ounce rib-eyes) you won’t find at your average red-sauce spot. Traces of Splendido live on in the caesar salad, which Barry elevates into something sublime, combining grilled wedges of romaine, roasted pork belly and fresh white anchovy. It’s Italian grandmother cooking—if your nonna knew her way around a five-star kitchen.

88 Harbord St., 416-929-7788, pianopianotherestaurant.com

Toronto’s Best New Restaurants: La Banane

Brandon Olsen’s fried chicken was the star of the menu during his time at Bar Isabel, and it was why we stalked him at festivals and pop-ups. So you should know: he doesn’t fry birds at La Banane, but you should still breach the yellow door. He’s showing us his polished, Francophile white-linens-and-amuse-bouche side.

Not that La Banane is another rote bistro. It’s a lot more fun—like a year-round New Year’s Eve dinner party with flapper-era cocktails in fluted glasses, an ice-bed raw bar and a disco soundtrack. No surprise, perhaps, that the same guy who executed so many consistently crunchy thighs also crafts the city’s finest example of a pâté en croûte, with golden pastry encasing peppery duck-pork stuffing and a cap of wine gelée. He serves it with moutarde violette—a throwback technique of sweetening grainy mustard with grape must and clove.

Julia Child would approve of how he finishes his creamy crab and paella gratin in the crustacean’s shell, how he intensifies the plushness of raw scallop with garlicky buttermilk and leek oil, and how he achieves that extremely rare thing: a correct omelette—crisp exterior, nearly custardy within, timed to the microsecond. An omelette for dinner is one of the more peculiarly French traditions—really, another excuse to order caviar (for an extra $80). Although La Banane is terrific, we’ll have to wait and see if it catches on like Olsen’s original poultry feat.

227 Ossington Ave., 416-551-6263, labanane.ca

Toronto’s Best New Restaurants: Canis

Chef Jeff Kang worked at Bosk, the restaurant at the Shangri-La, where every plate is photogenic but not always exciting to eat. At Canis, his first headlining act, he proves he’s the real deal.

Take how he layers strips of cured trout with wafers of pickled cucumber and radish on a pool of horseradish-infused cream, marrying the briny and the tart, the lusciously soft and the crunchy. The composition reminded me of ocean waves or the most glorious 1970s woven wall art. Kang says he’s aiming to help define Canadian cuisine. He’s taken notes from the new Nordic movement and the tenets of locavorism. He advocates a hushed minimalism—which puts him in a league with Dandylion, Boralia and Actinolite—most visible in the grey walls, grey-aproned servers and unadorned wood panelling.

But let’s not over-intellectualize. I’ll go back for the whole-roasted duck, its skin a burnished gold; a salad of pickled beets and goat’s milk ricotta; and braised lamb shoulder under a blanket of parti-coloured carrot and daikon rounds. And I’ll return for a milk chocolate mousse, buckwheat ice cream and shards of meringue. Kang wants to remind us of glaciers, though what glacier tastes this sweet?

746 Queen St. W., 416-203-3317, canisrestaurant.com

Toronto’s Best New Restaurants: Noorden

Jennifer Gittins and Michael van den Winkel have cornered the (admittedly small) Toronto market for Dutch-Indonesian cuisine. The kitchen of Little Sister, their midtown bar, turns out stunningly complex Indonesian stews and skewered meats. Across Yonge, they recently replaced Quince, a nice—if generic—bistro, with Noorden, which has a more emphatically Dutch, potato-driven menu that forays into Southeast Asia.

I recommend going with a group of friends—no low-carb dieters allowed—and sharing everything on the menu, especially the bitterballen (potato croquettes with hot mustard), ribs glazed with sambal, grilled cabbage (more sambal, plus the heat of rendang oil), ribbons of squash carpaccio with candied pepitas and micro-cubes of beet (for a light breather), and a “stamppot” (a mashed-potato boat filled with gravy and smoky bacon). One forkful will fill you up for a week.

This is drinking food, best accompanied by a gin cocktail (the bar offers 50-plus varieties). I killed a budding cold with an Angry Dutchman, which combines Bols Genever, elderflower liqueur and an over-generous dose of chili water. And I’m pres­ently taking names for a rijsttafel—a book-ahead 23-dish feast of rice, meat and, yes, potatoes.

2110 Yonge St., 416-488-2110

Toronto’s Best New Restaurants: Leña

When you’re not in the mood for a 14-hour flight to Buenos Aires, you’d do well at this handsome series of art deco rooms on the southeast corner of the Saks-Bay complex. Anthony Walsh, O&B’s top chef, got his inspiration, and his empanada recipe, from his Argentinian mother-in-law, Elena Arevalo. South American cuisine is an experiment for a man synonymous with expense-account tasting menus, though there’s no mistaking the O&B polish: plush banquettes, deep wine list, servers always at your command without hovering.

The cooking, however, is bright and relaxed. Must-haves are a dish of salt cod, pickled red onion, deep-fried cumin-dusted chickpeas, fresh fava beans and cilantro scooped up on toasts (they call it a salad, which undersells the awesome textures), and the roasted rabbit on an extra­ordinarily flavourful bed of rice cooked with tomatoes and snails. Those empa­nadas, with sweet pastry encasing peppery ground beef, slices of egg and plump black olives, live up to all the hype.

176 Yonge St., 416-507-3378, lenarestaurante.com

Toronto’s Best New Restaurants: Superpoint

I’ve been a Jonathan Poon fanboy for years, following him from Chantecler to Bar Fancy. Now, he and fellow Bar Fancier Jesse Fader have conquered Ossington with a hipster pizza-and-pasta joint that would be insufferable if it weren’t so terrifically good. Among the 2017 hipster crimes: the jagged neon signage, the ’80s rawk soundtrack, the anti-gourmet wink-wink menu items (shrimp spring rolls) and the sheer number of patrons in tuques.

More on Superpoint's pasta

The 25 best pastas in Toronto right now

But the food: wow. The reason I go back so often, despite the tuques, is the pasta—in particular, a reginette in a red sauce overloaded with slow-cooked beef cheek and a heavy blanket of shaved parmesan. The pizza isn’t up there with Piano Piano’s, but it’s still great, especially the variation on a Hawaiian with mortadella in place of ham. The chefs make an extra-creamy caesar salad topped with what turns out to be No Name potato sticks—too clever by half, but surprisingly tasty. In the fall, they made a wonderfully simple salad of ripe Ontario tomatoes, canned peaches and burrata. Reservations are scarce, so plan ahead.

184 Ossington Ave, 416-516-4656, superpoint.ca

Toronto’s Best New Restaurants: Adamson Barbecue

Barbecue makes people people do extreme things—like take a weekly pilgrimage to an East York industrial park and line up hours before the door opens for Lone Star–style stuff that’s as authentic as it gets this far north. Adam Skelly, who co-owns the smokehouse with his girlfriend, Alison Hunt, uses wood-fuelled smokers and hand-slices brisket by the pound.

More Adamson Barbecue

Food & Drink

Who’s lining up for Adamson Barbecue at 10:30 on a weekday morning?

For the ultimate experience, order the Texas Trinity—it’s intended to feed two but can easily satisfy four. Skelly fills an aluminum cafeteria tray with half a pound of brisket, half a pound of ribs, your choice of sausage, sides like a creamy potato salad with red pepper and scallion, baked beans, plus fixings (pickles, onion and house-made white bread for soaking up precious drippings). The most appropriate beverage to wash all that down is Big Red, a Texas brand of cream soda that Skelly, clearly an expert in extreme foods, imports himself.

176 Wicksteed Ave., 647-559-2080, adamsonbarbecue.com

Toronto’s Best New Restaurants: Awai

Vegetarians, once consigned to the salad section of the menu, have a lot to be thankful for. Plant-based restaurants recently spread roots around the city, and even erstwhile foie gras worshippers like Nota Bene’s David Lee have all but sworn off animal products. My pick of the crop is the new west-end home of Nathan Isberg, formerly of the Atlantic. He’s one of our most cerebral chefs. His every plate is a dissertation on the culture and evolution of taste. That makes him sound like a bore, but he’s truly an incredible cook.

While there’s no mistaking that Awai is a vegetarian restaurant—the Persian carpet wall hangings, Joni Mitchell and tisane selection are dead giveaways—even the most hard-core meathead will succumb to Isberg’s ravioli stuffed with braised artichokes; his flatbreads blackened from a wood-fired oven and loaded with cherry tomatoes, their fruitiness intensified by a complex herb mixture that includes floral, Quebec-sourced sweetfern, alder tip and juniper; his crisp-fried baby eggplant with creamy insides brought into relief by a zesty chermoula; and his black arborio and wild rice paella, with a funky trio of oyster mushrooms, black truffles and huitlacoche, plus a scattering of puffed rice for extra texture. He offers salads, too, including one dazzler with candy-like overnight-roasted apple, quick-pickled onion and various shoots and sprouts, but it doesn’t feel like a return to the salad days of the past.

2277 Bloor St. W., 647-643-3132, awai.ca

Toronto’s Best New Restaurants: Maple Leaf Tavern

The secret to this place isn’t the million dollars sunk into the century-old building’s restoration, or the potency of the double Manhattan, which is so popular it’s on tap. It’s not the old-timey jumbo shrimp cocktails or the all-star cooking team (though they’re great—pulled from spots like the Spoke Club, Scaramouche and the Saint).

The secret is the kitchen’s built-in wood-fired grill with racks raised and lowered by custom pulleys. Wood-grilled everything is as trendy as it gets this year, and any restaurant would be lucky to have this set-up. Executive chef Jesse Vallins grills veggies and whole potatoes, whole fish, he-man tomahawk chops, mutton and rib-eye. The smoky, charred outcome is like campfire cooking, only far better.

955 Gerrard St. E., 416-465-0955, mapleleaftavern.ca

Toronto’s Best New Restaurants: Montgomery’s

The first signs aren’t promising: a rickety door leading into a fluorescent-lit antechamber, the odour of vinegar thick in the air, and a cave-like dining room of industrial carpeting and mismatched teak. You could be in a church soup kitchen, not one of the most-anticipated restaurants of the year.

Guy Rawlings first grabbed attention during his stint at Dundas West’s Brockton General, where he made magic from humble ingredients. He left to help manage Bar Isabel, among other gigs, and his fans waited five long years for him to return to a stove. At Montgomery’s (it’s the family name of his wife, Kim), he’s pre­occupied with pickled veg and air-cured meats, and the result is one of the most peculiar and fascinating menus around.

Supersour fermented cabbages and roots serve as a snack. He douses slices of field tomatoes in a hot sauce, and yet a sprinkling of dried mint is what catches you off guard. His fixation on the labour-intensive and handmade—he brews his own vinegar to brush on a salmon collar, repurposes left­over whey from cultured cheese in a vegetable dish and smokes the mustard that accompanies a goose creton—pays off. Once you’ve joined Rawlings’s cult, all is heavenly.

996 Queen St. W., 647-748-4416, montgomerysrestaurant.com

Toronto’s Best New Restaurants: Lasa

People who keep track of these things all agree that Filipino food is currently the trendiest. Toronto, with its large Filipino population and ambitious second-gen chefs, can take some credit for this. It’s the ultimate fusion cuisine, melding the spiciness of India, the shrimp paste–based dishes of Malaysia and the predilections of China (rice and spring rolls figure prominently) with souvenirs from hundreds of years of contact with traders and colonists.

This midtown spot, my favourite of the new wave, is a spinoff of Queen West’s Lamesa, which introduced downtowners to home-cooking classics usually found in outer-GTA strip-mall eateries. Come for a lunch of skewered pork (tangy from a marinade of ginger, soy and 7-Up); squash and bok choy poached in a coconut-miso broth; lumpia Shanghai (ground pork–stuffed spring rolls); oxtail stew fragrant with garlic and peanut sauce; rice served with deep-fried tofu and a fried duck egg; and, in the summer months, halo-halo, a Day-Glo dessert of shaved ice, flan and taro ice cream.

634 St. Clair W., 647-343-1110, lasabylamesa.com

Toronto’s Best New Restaurants: Harry’s Charbroil

I’ve heard gossip that Grant van Gameren, the relentlessly successful chef behind Bar Raval and Bar Isabel, has no less than a dozen new business concepts in the works. Maybe it’s Bunyan-esque hyperbole, but it squares with the past year, when he opened three: the mescal-centric El Rey (No. 17 on this list), a cocktail bar called Pretty Ugly and this spot, a takeover of an ancient Parkdale diner.

He left the look intact, including the patchwork linoleum floors, smoky-mirrored walls and tabletop jukeboxes (last updated circa “Beat It”). The short-order menu, however, has been van Gameren-ized. Be sure to get the burger with a green chorizo patty, its heat slightly tempered by a sweet tomatillo relish. I’m also a fan of the skirt steak on a bun, which is especially good dipped in a bowl of gravy (by request), and the Miami-style ribs, which are sweet, tender and paired with a tart green sauce. Nearly everything comes with chunky fries. They’re crispy and addictive, though I’d try to save room for a dessert special like cherry crumble with vanilla ice cream. Experience Harry’s while you can: it sits next to a now-closed No Frills and one of the neighbourhood’s last-surviving parking lots—in other words, prime condo territory.

160 Springhurst Ave., 416-532-2908

Toronto’s Best New Restaurants: Ardo

There’s a rule dating back many decades that family-run Italian restaurants require black-and-white photos of 1950s street urchins, a Sinatra soundtrack and at least one bumbling server from a Fawlty Towers casting. But few of them have a chef-owner like Roberto Marotta.

He’s as dashing as a Fellini star and a sophisticated interpreter of Sicilian classics, which translates to piping-hot arancini as big as goose eggs, beautifully charred and tender octopus with caponata, couscous and mussels with Moroccan spices, and lighter-than-light gnocchi in a supercreamy mushroom sauce. The only proper way to end the night is with a thimble of bitter amaro, and a candied orange and fresh ricotta cannoli—one of the city’s best.

243 King St. E., 647-347-8930, ardorestaurant.com

Toronto’s Best New Restaurants: Baro

Chef Steve Gonzalez’s greatest invention is a riff on the Peruvian fried rice dish arroz chaufa. He serves his in a heated stone bibimbap bowl and adds duck confit, squeaky-fresh edamame and tobiko, then stirs it all together with egg and enough chili to let you know he isn’t messing around. I’d easily scrape away at the rice grains caramelized on the bowl’s surface all night on my own.

But, like Valdez—Gonzalez’s last King West spot, which closed to make way for a condo tower—Baro is designed for partying, with its sharing plates of ponzu-spiked hamachi ceviche and beef empanadas (both commendable), and its long (very, very long) list of tequilas. There’s even a secret lounge on the second floor that’s only accessible with a password that changes daily. I’m content with my crunchy rice.

485 King St. W., 416-363-8388, barotoronto.com

Toronto’s Best New Restaurants: El Rey

Grant van Gameren’s mescal bar in Kensington has a short menu that’s unlike our other Mexican options. The kitchen is run by Kate Chomyshyn and Julio Guajardo, who start the day grinding corn for the incomparably fresh tortillas used for cheese quesadillas and tostadas topped with short ribs and a richer-than-Midas mole.

More on El Rey

Say hola to Toronto’s Little Mexico

Most of the seats are outside on the patio. There’s no better spot to share skewers of Peruvian-style beef hearts and chimichurri, oysters with house-made hot sauces, and a flight (or several) of premium mescal.

2A Kensington Ave., elreybar.com

Torontos Best New Restaurants: Jackpot Chicken

Whenever I felt a cold coming on this winter, I’d head to Craig Wong’s new Chinatown restaurant—his comeback after Patois, his Chinese-Jamaican fusion spot, was destroyed in a block fire. His chicken, poached Hainanese-style in a winter melon broth and served on a bed of schmaltz-fried rice along with a bowl of chicken broth and (more) winter melon soup, is the closest thing to a curative.

Less healthful, but well worth it, are appetizers like deep-fried tempura broccoli dressed with Kewpie mayo, shrimp potstickers enhanced with Japanese curry paste, and chips of crisped chicken skin painted with house-dehydrated sriracha sauce.

Jackpot Chicken, 318 Spadina Ave., 416-792-8628, jackpotchickenrice.com 

Toronto’s Best New Restaurants: MeNami

After a few too many years of geeking out on ramen, I’ve decided I’m really an udon guy, especially if I’m in the vicinity of this (way, way) uptown izakaya. The chef, Hwan Jeong, pulls his noodles fresh on premises in a climate-controlled room. His menu lists 18-plus varieties, from the fairly conventional (udon with spicy pork, and udon with dried shrimp and seaweed) to the slightly freaky (udon coated with black sesame purée such that it resembles worms, and udon baked with shrimp, scallops and bacon in an approximation of a mac and cheese—tasty in small doses).

My go-to is the kake: room-temp noodles in a chilled broth with a generous grating of ginger and green onion. It’s the best way to appreciate the chewiness and springiness of the fresh noodles. I swear, you’ll be so mesmerized, you won’t notice you’re slurping cold soup.

5469 Yonge St., 416-229-6191, menami.ca

Toronto’s Best New Restaurants: Bar Begonia

The prize for ugliest restaurant exterior goes to Anthony Rose’s newest location, his fourth in a handful of Dupont blocks. (Midtowners don’t seem to mind his monopoly.) But behind the grey stucco and greenhouse windows is a handsome room of marble-top tables, bistro chairs and an impressively stocked bar overseen by the Toronto Temperance Society cocktail wizard Oliver Stern.

The Critic: Bar Begonia

Food & Drink

How Chantecler and Bar Begonia ditched trendiness and became 2016’s hippest hangouts

To eat, there are breezily assured renditions of bistro standards: endive and shallot vinaigrette, mussels steamed in white wine, steak frites with a pool of bordelaise, and snacky bites like gougères and roasted veg to dip in aïoli. As at Rose’s other spots, Bar Begonia doesn’t take reservations, which is a pain when you’re stuck waiting outside, knowing the view inside is so much better.

252 Dupont St., 647-352-3337, barbegonia.com