“I guarantee no grandmother is going to do that for you”: How Stop Restaurant rose from the ashes and became a destination for elevated eastern European home cooking

“I’m allowed to cook whatever I want to cook,” says Denis Ganshonkov, the chef and owner of Stop, when asked whether the food he’s making has changed over the past year. “That sometimes makes it difficult to explain to the customer what kind of restaurant this is.”

For years, Stop has been a beacon of eastern European gastronomy in Toronto, with Ganshonkov serving up the city’s best khinkali, cabbage rolls and Russian honey cake. But, if you visit the restaurant’s new location on Roncesvalles, which opened earlier this summer after an electrical fire forced them out of their previous Dundas West location, you’ll notice something different about Stop 2.0.

Tucked into a creaky but charming hundred-year-old storefront across the street from the Revue Cinema, the new Stop exudes the same friendly neighbourhood restaurant vibes, but with something a little extra—something a bit more belle époque. Is Stop becoming French?

Related: Stop, a restaurant and wine bar serving up classic eastern European food with a twist

“There’s so much French influence in eastern European cooking,” says Ganshonkov. “In the 19th century, the tsars started importing French cooks, who were like, ‘Oh my god, you don’t need to dress everything in mayonnaise and call it a salad!’ As delicious as that is…” It’s obvious that these labels don’t mean much to the chef, who professes an almost monk-like devotion to simple, classic dishes prepared well–a kind of elevated, high-octane home cooking.

Take borscht, for example, a dish Ganshonkov believes is often butchered even by eastern European home cooks. He says the secret is to add the beets at the very last minute, fully cooked, to preserve their ruby-red depth and sweetness. “The beets are roasted and shredded–so everything is cooked separately: the beef, the stock, the vegetables. That way you control every single element. I guarantee you, no grandmother is going to do that for you, no matter what country she’s from.”

Built on an invigorating and soul-restoring beef broth, served with perfectly tournéed vegetables and a piece of braised beef shank you can cut with a spoon, Stop’s borscht also includes helpings of unctuous roasted bone marrow and cooling crème fraîche. Eaten with a few slices of divine rye (made by Ground Up Bread and available only at Stop), each crowned with a perfect yellow pat of St. Brigid’s garlic butter, this once-humble soup turns into a religious experience. It demands to be consumed slowly and carefully, the sweet broth nourishing and deeply refreshing at the same time, while the bread, baptized in the borscht, turns into something that is neither liquid nor solid, a suspension of beet juice, several varieties of Ontario cow fat and pure pleasure. "Borscht just means ‘soup,’ right? It’s just soup. But we’re taking it into the area of a full meal,” says Ganshonkov.

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Then there’s the pelmeni, an everyday dumpling made a bit more special at Stop. Ganshonkov’s—which are available only on Sundays and Mondays—are filled with beef, pork, sweetbreads and black truffle sausage and served with a Cordon Bleu–worthy chicken broth, perfectly braised baby leeks and a hunk of seared foie gras. One bite of these chubby dumplings can turn the average Torontonian to a tsar or tsarina and transport them to their winter palace.

The food isn’t the only thing that’s special about Stop. The moment I walked in, sous chef Ella Hough greeted me from her station in the restaurant’s completely open kitchen, standing behind a heroic mise of butter, herbs and scallops practically visible from the street.

I passed by a tray containing the ingredients for a menu item titled “delicate squash”: a perfectly cooked cup of sweet Ontario squash irrigated with pistachio pesto, toasted sage, and a dollop of fatty and funky fromage fort. When you consume it with a glass of Domaine Altugnac’s fresh and floral Orange Is the New Wine—one of the many heavy-hitters on Stop’s righteous old-world wine list—you feel expertly taken care of.

In an industry landscape dominated by faceless restaurant groups and Michelin Guide intrigue, it’s refreshing to be in a space where everything is so personal and out in the open. I love knowing, for example, that Hough personally prepared the delicious apple tart served at the end of the meal: a tender, toothsome, perfectly balanced treat that screams home cooking. Or that cook Louis John makes what is arguably Stop’s most iconic dish and what I would personally argue is the single best dessert in the city: the honey cake, which tastes like a gulp of cool milk chasing a mouthful of crumbly shortbread.

Everything about the restaurant—the food, the wine, the portraits of smoking cats (Ganshonkov really likes cats) and the massive antique ice box—is personal. It may be a new location, but sitting in one of the charming wooden booths or at the bar, constructed by local carpenter Graham Walizcek, you feel like a regular at a neighbourhood fixture. It’s difficult to conceive how Ganshonkov and his crew were able to build such a space in just a few months.

For months after the fire last fall, Ganshonkov and his team turned out delicious dishes at pop-ups across the city: Mama’s Liquor, 222 Bar, Pasta Forever, Batifole Restaurant, Black Dice, Tammy’s on Queen, Hank’s Liquor, Ted’s Collision, Happy Coffee and Wine, Imanishi, Midfield Wine Bar, Soos, Doc’s Green Door Lounge, the Federal and City Pool all hosted Stop at least once, reassuring Ganshonkov that he would get his restaurant back on its feet.

Then, earlier this spring, seven months after the fire, they found 397 Roncesvalles. Two months later, Ganshonkov, Hough, John and the rest of the team had transformed what used to be a fried chicken shop into one of the city’s most exciting dining rooms.

“My mother, Alyona; my stepfather, Sergey; my brother, Danil; Ella; Louis; and so many others who need to be named—Nick Murphy, Stephen Murphy, carpenter Graham Walizcek, Lindsay Wood, Collin, Olga, Meghan, Marie, Chloe, Kai—didn’t quit. They all believed in me and the restaurant,” Ganshonkov says, full of gratitude for the community that helped him pull through. “Without them, none of this would have happened.”

Stop Restaurant, 397 Roncesvalles Ave., restaurantstop.ca, @stoprestaurantto_