What’s on the menu at Belle Isle, a new snack and cocktail bar in the east end

Name: Belle Isle Contact: 1455 Gerrard St. E., @belleisle__
Neighbourhood: Little India Owners: Zac Schwartz, Ali Yaqubian, Patrick Ciappara and Jay Moore Accessibility: Not fully accessible

When it comes to opening a restaurant, you don’t always need to have all the answers. In the case of Belle Isle, a new spot on Gerrard East, the concept evolved alongside the bar’s construction. “We ended up building a place that inspired us to do something different with the food and cocktails,” says co-owner Zac Schwartz, who’s also a partner at the bar’s sister spot, Lake Inez. The team knew they wanted to create something that expanded on and complemented Lake Inez, so when a location became available just a few doors down, it seemed like fate.

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Schwartz says it began with a hypothesis: “How about a place where—before or after dinner— you can go for a drink and feel sexy, but everybody who works and dines there is really nice to you? Does this exist? Can it exist?” A total gut job, months of renovations, weeks spent on Jell-O-based R&D (more on that later) and thousands of painstakingly placed stained-glass mosaic tiles later, the idea started to become a reality.

“We kept things fluid,” says Schwartz, who wanted to avoid overplanning. “If you’re curating everything to the nth degree, it can be confused with rigidity, and people can sense that.” The result is a tiny cocktail bar bursting with unapologetic personality. “We never want to have a space that feels restrictive. We want you to feel like your whole-ass self in there.”

This self-expression and sense of play pulses through the room as well as in Moore’s menu of whimsical snacks, imaginative cocktails with names like Divorced Dad Dinner and three-part soliloquies as dish descriptions. Belle Isle is a place that wears its heart on its sleeve without taking itself too seriously.

One of the aesthetic starting points for the bar was the real Belle Isle, an island park on the Detroit River. “It’s a holy sliver of land,” says Schwartz, who grew up in the Detroit suburbs. “It’s kind of the only place where you can get a modicum of escapism. It’s a difficult and unwieldy city to live in at times, but you can go to Belle Isle and feel like you’re somewhere else.”

To evoke this same feeling of escapism at Toronto’s Belle Isle, the food leans heavily on storytelling and memories. “We wanted thoughtful and nostalgic dishes that didn’t have a high degree of fuckery,” says Schwartz. Visitors won’t find restaurant buzzwords like “seasonality” or “elevated” on the menu—but they will find a whole lot of fun and perhaps an escape from the everyday, if only for a while.

The Food

While the menu—which doesn’t try to fit any specific genre—may seem random, each dish is deeply rooted in memory and stretched by imagination: a greasy brown bag of shrimp toast on a cold winter’s night, a piping-hot foole from a Hamtramck hidden-gem, a Coney dog in all its steamed-bun-and-chili glory. “It’s kind of like a trashy Americana nostalgic diner, but not elevated,” says Schwartz. “Nothing we’re doing is swankier than the original version—there’s no subbing in a secretly fancy ingredient.”

The Drinks

Bartender and manager James McCole created a cocktail card that captures Belle Isle’s playful spirit. “The cocktails feel familiar but also new, and they don’t take themselves too seriously,” says Schwartz. The bases are inspired by bar favourites, like rye and ginger, but made with unexpected ingredients.

As for the wine, Schwartz wanted a list that wasn’t boring. “Drinking wine has been steeped in this phony prestige that has nothing to do with the calibre of what you’re tasting and is more about buying into this perpetuated notion of a holy vineyard or holy grape,” he says. Guests can expect underrated grapes with big flavours and small markups, like a biodynamic pét-nat made with the salty, sun-kissed verdicchio grape. They also took a crack at making their own house wines—a gamay and a pinot gris.

The Space

The actual Belle Isle houses an unexpectedly majestic public aquarium—America’s oldest, in fact. “It’s this gothic, gaudy, beautiful time capsule,” says Schwartz. Its arched ceilings and sea-green glass tiles inspired part of Belle Isle the restaurant’s interior—especially the south wall, which is covered in jade tiles and a stained-glass marlin mosaic Schwartz and his mom made. “We never want a space that feels too new or too precious,” he says. To help capture this lived-in feel, Yaqubian—a trained concrete mason who builds skate parks all over the world—was brought on board. His skills and penchant for curves made the small space come to life with textured concrete benches and walls that melt into each other.

The utilitarian concrete is juxtaposed against warm wood and the many vintage knick-knacks scattered throughout the room. Paintings hang in chipped frames, candles flicker in old food tins and a portrait of a young David Lee Roth stares guests down (co-owner Patrick Ciappara is a huge Van Halen fan). This isn’t the kind of vibe that can be created from Pinterest boards or algorithms.