Food in Toronto
Good mid-range Jamaican restaurants are hard to come by in Toronto. The majority are budget restaurants geared for takeout. Simone’s Caribbean Restaurant is one of the exceptions. It stands out in the competitive Greektown restaurant scene and has survived for almost a decade. A testament to its quality.
Competition is fierce between dim sum restaurants in Richmond Hill and Markham. Diners there are unforgiving so if a restaurant survives a few years with long queues, it’s probably a good sign. Yang’s Fine Chinese Cuisine been around for more than a decade and is still popular for its dim sum. It would be even more popular if it was located in a more accessible location like other restaurants along Highway 7.
For the longest time, Georgian restaurants could only be found north of Finch and Dufferin. That’s where the community of ex-USSR immigrants resides. Tiflisi bucks that trend by opening in The Beaches, and offers unique items and weekday lunch specials.
This review is for 2021. Keep an eye out for the next onam sadhya on 2022-09-08.
Toronto’s burgeoning Kerala food scene explodes in one summer weekend of the year. That’s for onam sadhya, a feast celebrating the harvest festival. Restaurants shut down normal service and assemble the same onam sadhya set meals all day. Lines are long but most are in a jovial mood. It’s a fun activity to join in, even if you are not from Kerala.
Kerala is a southern Indian state with a bountiful coastline. Its cuisine is not widespread in Toronto, so onam sadhya is a good occasion to sample them. I am not familiar with Keralan food. I was going to visit Kerala in 2020 but COVID happened. So, I can’t judge the authenticity of restaurants here.
Onam (ഓണം) is the harvest festival of the Malayali people in Kerala, falling between August and September. Sadhya (സദ്യ) means banquet. Put them together and you get the harvest feast. More than 20 items are splayed on a banana leaf. The meal is traditionally vegetarian.
One of the first things you’ll notice is that the rice is not typical of the rest of India. It’s matta rice, a short-grained and plump variety. It has the texture of brown rice and is similarly coloured reddish-brown.
Other food items in onam sadhya may include any of the following. I hope you like coconut.
This being Toronto, there aren’t exactly a lot of banana trees to pluck leaves from. And importing banana leaves is too expensive to feed the masses that slam Keralan restaurants for onam sadhya. So, restaurants here use a waxed, green-coloured paper instead. And in the era of COVID-19, it’s all takeout and DIY.
Onam sadhya is a big deal in Kerala, similar to a Christmas dinner. I recommend pre-ordering to avoid waiting in line for an hour or more. Nearly all Keralan restaurants here offer online ordering.
Inspired by the foods featured on this site? Global Toronto Eats is launching Hike to Eat, a meetup group for foodie hikes. The focus is, of course, good food, especially in neighbourhoods that don’t get a lot of attention. Art, culture, history, and nature are fair game too, but there will always be a strong culinary component.
Pool resources and try more foods together. Meet other food enthusiasts. Get a workout. Hike and eat.
There is no shortage of biryani restaurants in Toronto. The dominant style is Hyderabadi, cooked with a panoply of spices and sealed with dough to lock in flavours. Finding other regional styles is slightly more challenging. I haven’t come across a good Sri Lankan one until I stumbled upon Bhai Biryani.
Macau is a minor oddity of China. It was a Portuguese colony for over 400 years and was only reunified with China in 1999. As such, there are some influences from Portugal and its other colonies, but the feel is unmistakably Southern Chinese.
The most famous specialty is pastéis de nata (egg tarts). As for the next most famous dish, it’s likely unknown to the rest of the world. My vote goes to galinha à Africana (African chicken): roasted and covered with a piri piri and peanut butter sauce. It’s not actually African but an amalgamation of Central and Southern African ingredients.
Woodstone Eatery is one of the few Macanese restaurants in the Toronto region. It feels like a Hong Kong cha chan teng (茶餐廳; Westernized Chinese cafe) with Macanese items. Still, it’s a splendid choice with good cooking and down-to-earth prices.
This humble restaurant in a nondescript plaza doesn’t even have a website, but is thriving through word-of-mouth. The draw is their authentic and tasty Sichuan food.
Sichuan cuisine is the second most prevalent Chinese cuisine in the world, after Cantonese. It’s no exception in Toronto. Many Chinese restaurants here have a token Sichuan dish or two. The cuisine’s signature ingredient is Sichuan peppercorns, which has a numbing effect on the tongue. It might be a good thing because it distracts from the burn from the thick layers of chilli oil and slew of dried chillies.
Sichuan dishes are easy to make but hard to do well, so one has to travel out of the Toronto core to get good Sichuanese food. The best places are cheap and cheerful establishments, like Szechuan Noodle Bowl.
Minerva Tiffins is moving to 16 Lebovic Avenue.
Nestled in an industrial plaza near the Golden Mile is a little stall called Minerva Tiffins. It used to be the only tenant in the desolate food court for a long time. Today, it’s joined by three or four others but make no mistake, Minerva Tiffins is single-handedly running the show here. On the occasions I’ve visited, all the diners went straight for Minerva.
Undoubtedly, word-of-mouth and some media coverage helped, but the reason for its sustained success is its incredibly fresh-tasting South Indian food. Specifically, Andhra snacks. It’s grown so much that it’s moving to a proper restaurant of its own.
As the only proper Moroccan restaurant in Toronto, Morocco House does a valiant job in offering the renowned dishes of that country. It’s strange that there aren’t more Moroccan restaurants. It’s fun to eat off a tagine and there can be so many delicious preparations of couscous that is not just a salad afterthought.
