Is this Bloor Street or the 11th arrondissement? A new French restaurant brings a piece of Paris to the Annex
Brasserie Côte is the sister spot to Union and Côte de Bœuf
Name: Brasserie Côte
Contact: 400 Bloor St. W., brasseriecote.ca, @brasseriecoteannex
Neighbourhood: The Annex
Previously: By the Way Café
Owners: Teo Paul (Union, Côte de Bœuf, Hearts, Le Tambour) and Eamon O’Dea (Côte de Bœuf)
Chef: Damien Cochez
Accessibility: Not fully accessible
Despite being less than a month old, Brasserie Côte—the sister spot to Ossington’s Union and Côte de Bœuf—feels like it has occupied the corner of Bloor and Brunswick for a lifetime. That sense of history isn’t accidental. Teo Paul, an Annex boy through and through, and Eamon O’Dea share a long and storied past. The two met in 1996, when O’Dea, a Parisian expat and front-of-house expert, came to Toronto to visit his then-girlfriend (now wife). “Teo’s sister was my girlfriend’s best friend—they both grew up in the Annex together,” says O’Dea. “We went to visit her dad’s farm in Heathcote, right near where Hearts is now, and that’s where Teo and I first met.”
O’Dea split time between Paris and Toronto for years, maintaining his friendship with Paul. “I’d been working front-of-house positions in Paris since 1989. Over the years, Teo and I bonded over our shared love of food and the restaurant world,” he says. In 2001, O’Dea opened a restaurant in Paris called Somo and asked Paul to cross the pond and run the kitchen. He jumped at the opportunity, and the two built the restaurant together over the next five years. After a short stint in Piedmont, Paul eventually returned home, where he opened Union and helped transform Ossington into the city’s hippest strip.
In 2013, Paul opened Côte de Bœuf, Union’s sister butcher shop with a takeaway counter. “We were operating as a butcher shop initially and doing private dinners,” he says. “I eventually got a liquor licence because I wanted to make it into a Parisian-style bistro, but I was struggling to get that sense of Paris in there—no one working front-of-house had actually lived there.”
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As luck would have it, by then, O’Dea was living in Toronto with his wife and kids. “I brought him in for the bien sûr–ness of it all,” Paul says. “And that’s when it became what it is now.” Based on Côte de Bœuf’s success, in 2024, the pair finally decided to open a spot together. And last year, they got the keys to their new space, in the neighbourhood they were both raising their kids in.
Brasserie Côte—set to operate daily from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., with a non-stop à la carte menu and two to three plats du jour in the evenings—is an amalgam of Paul and O’Dea’s shared past: echoes of the Parisian kitchens and bars they frequented, like Le Baron Rouge, alongside the in-house butchery and farm-to-table ethos of Côte de Bœuf and Union.
The Food
The menu, executed by Lille-born chef Damien Cochez, leans into the brasserie canon—escargots à l’ail gratinés, steak frites, tartare de bœuf. While the framework is unmistakably French, the components are almost all local: meat sourced from three Ontario farms and butchered in-house, produce from the Greenbelt, and seafood sourced from Canadian waters whenever possible. And yet, this being a Toronto kitchen, there are subtle global inflections that ripple through the dishes and reflect the city’s multicultural fabric, with touches of Spanish, Japanese and Barbadian influences.
The Drinks
The bistro-style wine list surveys the breadth of France—from Bordeaux to Burgundy to the Rhône and points in between—without veering into pretentiousness. Bottles start at $75 and top out around $150, and a tight by-the-glass selection includes three whites, three reds and a rosé, all rotating with the seasons. Cocktails are of the classic and easy-going variety: martinis, bellinis, Campari sodas. This isn’t a precious cocktail bar but something looser, more convivial. “I just want an easy-going, flowing bistro,” says O’Dea. “I’ll leave the clarifying to the mixology guys.”
The Space
Warm millwork, brass-railed banquettes (which double as wine storage), porcelain tile floors, and a moody mix of vintage and bespoke lighting work in tandem with a striking half-tonne L-shaped custom-made zinc bar to conjure a distinctly Parisian je ne sais quoi.
Erin Hershberg is a freelance writer with nearly two decades of experience in the lifestyle sector. She currently lives in downtown Toronto with her husband and two children.
