Five new eastern European–inspired restaurants for midwinter comfort food

As we muddle through winter, shoulders hunched and fur-lined hoods up against the bitter chill, a fresh batch of Toronto restaurants are offering up respite in the form of cozy eastern and central European–inspired recipes.

Some of the city’s best new spots for dead-of-winter comfort food borrow from Slavic culinary influences. Bowls of deep-red borscht share the limelight with clean, dill-inflected crudo. Heaping plates of chewy dumplings are balanced with zingy house pickles. And there should always be room left for cheesecake.

Related: Five Toronto takes on schnitzel, the comfort food classic

“Torontonians love Italian food, and I think there’s something about the coziness and comforting flavours of eastern European cooking that’s very tangential. There’s lots of garlic, onion and rich flavours. And we love a carb in this town!” says Shauna Godfrey, chef and owner of Maven. “I started making my grandmother’s recipes for family and friends during the pandemic because that’s what felt comforting. I never imagined I would be cooking using these influences in a restaurant setting. Seeing people resonate with this food brings me so much joy.”

Here are five spots for the kind of cozy comfort food that will bolster your steely resolve through these cold, dark days.

Related: A winter hater’s guide to loving winter

Stop Restaurant

397 Roncesvalles Ave., restaurantstop.ca

When Stop Restaurant reopened on Roncesvalles, chef-owner Denis Ganshonkov began a subtle shift away from the eastern European staples his regulars were familiar with and toward a more French-inspired approach. His current winter menu transforms the nostalgic ingredients he and many of his tight-knit team members recognize from childhood, combining them in new forms with understated elegance.

“Winter cooking to me is all about bold and rich flavours,” says Ganshonkov. “Comforting dishes and longing feelings of warmth, dried roses and art that make one feel the beauty in every breath, every moment.”

Seasonal ingredient-driven dishes like caraflex cabbage with spinach and hazelnut pâté, or beet-cured BC king salmon with crème fraîche butter and crispbread, are subtle references to a culinary canon known more for its heaviness. Even in winter, Ganshonkov’s vegetable dishes play a main role. “We like vegetables. If they’re treated properly, there’s no need to cover them up with animal fat or mayonnaise,” he says. “The way that I cook is very delicate. Nothing is exploited. Everything is prepared to celebrate its own natural flavour.”

The old-school interior feels lived in, and the reception is warm but not forced. An air of brooding, gritty romanticism—reinforced by the many framed pictures of cigarette-smoking cats hanging on the walls—invites lingering over a glass of inky red wine. Surely the likes of Mikhail Lermontov and Françoise Sagan would have found their muses in a place like this.

Hoyra Gastrobar

1566 Bloor St. W., eathoyra.com

Tanya Matkivska, the owner of Heavenly Perogy, has expanded her comfort-food influence from church-basement takeout to a full sit-down menu of Ukrainian and other eastern European classics at High Park’s Hoyra Gastrobar. Based on her grandmother’s recipes, dishes lean traditional but polished. Cabbage rolls and varenyky testify to generations of perfecting while banosh, a cornmeal porridge topped with bacon, spinach and parm, and bohrach, a hearty beef stew, are deeply comforting culture-crossing reminders of home.

The two meanings of the Ukrainian word hoyra—“cheers” and “onward”—capture Matkivska’s defiant hopefulness about the future for her family, Ukraine and the world. And cooking is at the heart of it all. “Throughout our history, we’ve been trying to survive in the face of outside pressures,” she says. “Just looking to live a full, normal life—a life centred on family, peace and freedom. Much of our culture comes from our connection with the land. Ukraine has always had great farmers, gardeners and cooks. When I was a child, we worked in the garden or foraged for mushrooms in the forest as a family. It was then that my grandparents would pass down their wisdom by telling stories from their lives. Now I tell these stories to my kids.”

While half of the 50-seat dining room is usually made up of Ukrainian families grateful for an authentic taste of home, the other half comprises curious locals and Heavenly Perogy fans who cherish Matkivska’s infectious warmth, hospitality and culinary chops.

Visit the restaurant until February 12 for its Winterlicious menu and wash it down with a glass of hot Hoyra Grog, made with rum and uzvar, a traditional Ukrainian winter punch of dried fruit, honey and soul-warming spices.

Linny’s

176 Ossington Ave., linnysrestaurant.com

Chef David Schwartz’s deli-inspired steakhouse juxtaposes traditional Polish Jewish cooking and modern fine dining. Linny’s is not your average chophouse where gaudy excess thrives on indiscriminate expense accounts. It’s less about giant hunks of meat and more about studied preparations. Accordingly, opting for the chef’s tasting menu—which is called Friday Night Special even though it’s available every night—means getting smaller portions of more things and avoiding FOMO.

The magic starts with the cocktails. Creations like the Borscht Milk Punch and the Dilly Dally transform classic eastern European ingredients—beets and dill, respectively—into inventive yet refined drinks with some serious wow factor. And an old-world wine list echoes the suave nostalgia of the space.

Guests might begin with a challah service that comes with cheese, jam and delicate house-pickled cucumbers, green tomatoes and lacto-fermented sauerkraut. Or a fluke-and-fennel carpaccio with fennel oil, garlic and watercress. Several dishes neatly weave together flavours of savoury smoke, punchy salt and tart accoutrements. The famous house specialty, Linny’s Cut Pastrami, is brined, heavily seasoned and smoked for 15 hours, then sliced thickly to order. Prime cuts like the Speckle Park hanger steak showcase a love for top-quality Canadian products. And for dessert, the braided babka with a dollop of vanilla ice cream—crisp and soft in all the right places and deeply chocolatey—is a must. Bubbe would be proud.

Beisl

1154 St. Clair Ave. W., @beisltoronto

This sort-of-secret kitchen tucked inside True History Brewing serves polished Austrian fare to go with the brewery’s lineup of mostly German- and Czech-style beers. On a given evening, locals fill the long communal tables, sipping lagers and sharing heaping plates of things like razor clams topped with crumbled house-made bratwurst.

Chef Caleb Way spent his teens in Vienna. Culture shock on his return to Canada cemented his resolve to one day find a place to cook the dishes he had come to know and love. After years working in Trinidadian, Vietnamese, Japanese and Italian restaurants, Way jumped at the opportunity to take over the kitchen of the St. Clair West brewery. “The beer and the food go perfectly together,” he says. “It’s crazy how well it worked out.”

The current winter menu evokes the warm, comforting vibes of a beisl, the Austrian term for a family-run tavern. While the plate-size pork schnitzel and the potato salad with dijon vinaigrette are true Austrian classics, the beef cheek goulash comes in an unexpected form: a whole braised cheek takes centre stage, steakhouse-style. It’s slathered in a dark four-day demi-glace reduction, a dollop of sour cream for maximum contrast, and a bowl of cheesy and chewy spaetzle on the side.

But isn’t goulash Hungarian? “Because of the Austro-Hungarian empire, Vienna was one of the largest cities in Europe for a long time, with diverse influences from Hungarian and Balkan cuisine as well as the Ottoman introduction of coffee,” says Way. “Now Vienna is known for having some of the best coffee and coffee houses in the world.”

While it may not be eastern European exactly, this neighbourhood hotspot is a nexus of nostalgic European comfort foods.

Maven

112 Harbord St., maventoronto.ca

From pandemic-times supper club to sit-down restaurant, Maven serves up warm hospitality alongside a menu of eastern European Jewish fare. The expert move here is to start with the challah. Chef Shauna Godfrey has studied and perfected her grandmother’s recipe. It’s freshly baked each day and comes with an optional (but we say mandatory) upgrade to add chicken liver mousse topped with sour cherry compote. This is not an afterthought basket of bread—it’s a main event.

Dishes are designed to work as stand-alones or play harmoniously as a sharable feast. It’s all carefully orchestrated with the discipline of Godfrey’s classical training and work in fine-dining kitchens from Toronto to New York—but you won’t find a hint of pretension here. “I don’t feel like we need to push boundaries and change everything in the food scene,” says Godfrey. “My goal is that people come, feel taken care of and have a good time.”

The crisp, juicy chicken schnitzel is an exemplary classic, elevated with a lacto-fermented plum sauce on top, mustard and lemon on the side, and nothing more. The marinated beets with cumin, blue cheese and hazelnuts are earthy, comforting and masterfully balanced. “I have a list of anchor ingredients that help define the boundaries of what we do here,” says Godfrey. “They’re flavours I grew up with: caraway, dill, beet, plum, camomile, chicken fat, onion, poppy seeds. Sometimes I’ll smell the duck cholent and it feels like I’m stepping into my grandmother’s house. It’s very nostalgic for me.”

Maven’s thoughtful ecosystem even repurposes the confit’s duck fat into cocktails: the Fat Chance features duck fat–washed bonal, a French fortified wine. The European-led wine list offers an ever-changing collection of mostly all-natural bottles, with choice highlights available by the glass.

Coming soon: Rose’s Pantry, an adjunct shop of take-home goods. In addition to coffee and breakfast sandwiches, it will carry everything you contemplated smuggling home from the restaurant table—the everything-bagel-seasoned cashews, the house coleslaw—as well as a new range of prepared meals you can serve at home.