Around half of Toronto’s residents were born outside Canada, and roughly 200 languages are spoken here. It is one of the most diverse cities in the world by almost any measure, and the food is the most immediate evidence.
The consequence is that “Toronto food” is not a cuisine. It is a very large number of cuisines cooked by the people whose cuisine it is.
The genuinely local things
Peameal bacon — pork loin, wet-cured, rolled in cornmeal, not smoked. The sandwich at St Lawrence Market is Toronto’s own dish.
Butter tarts — pastry shells filled with butter, sugar, syrup and egg, baked until the top cracks. Ontario’s contribution to baking. The raisins-or-no-raisins question is taken seriously.
Poutine is Québécois rather than Torontonian, but it is everywhere: chips, cheese curds and gravy, and the curds must squeak.
Nanaimo bars, BeaverTails, and Tim Hortons — a coffee chain that functions as a national institution and produces coffee that Torontonians will defend out of loyalty rather than conviction.
Canadian whisky and ice wine from Niagara.
Where to eat by neighbourhood
Kensington Market — Jamaican, Portuguese, Mexican, Chilean, Ethiopian, in the space of two blocks.
Chinatown on Spadina — dim sum, roast meats, hand-pulled noodles. The suburban Chinatowns in Markham and Scarborough are better still.
The Danforth — Greek.
Little Italy and St Clair West — Italian.
Little India on Gerrard East — South Asian, with sari shops and sweet houses.
Koreatown on Bloor West. Little Portugal on Dundas West. Little Jamaica on Eglinton West, which the Crosstown construction has hit very hard. Roncesvalles for Polish.
Ossington, Dundas West and King West for the modern restaurant scene.
The tax and tip situation
Two things visitors from outside North America get caught by.
Sales tax is added at the till. Ontario’s HST is 13 per cent and prices on menus and shelves are shown before it. A $20 main is $22.60 before you have tipped.
Tipping is expected and is not optional in practice. The convention is 15 to 20 per cent on the pre-tax total in restaurants and bars, and card terminals will prompt with suggested percentages — sometimes calculated on the post-tax figure, which inflates them.
Servers in Ontario are paid the general minimum wage, but tipping remains a firm social expectation. Not tipping in a sit-down restaurant will be noticed.
Bars: a dollar or two per drink. Taxis: 10 to 15 per cent.
Alcohol
Sold in LCBO stores, The Beer Store, some grocery stores and — since 2024 — convenience stores, following a policy change.
Legal drinking age in Ontario is 19.
Practicalities
Kitchens close earlier than in Europe, often by ten. Reservations are needed at the better places, particularly Thursday to Saturday.
Summerlicious in July and Winterlicious in January and February offer fixed-price menus at several hundred restaurants and are the cheapest way into the expensive ones.
Vegetarians and vegans
Very well served. Toronto has a large and long-established vegan scene, particularly in the west end and around Parkdale and Bloordale, and almost every restaurant menu marks options clearly.
The South Asian, Ethiopian and Chinese restaurants cover it comprehensively without needing a special menu.
Coffee
Toronto’s specialty coffee scene is good and concentrated in the west end and Leslieville. Tim Hortons, which most Canadians drink daily, is a different proposition entirely and is best understood as an institution rather than a coffee shop.
Markets
St Lawrence Market — closed Mondays, farmers’ market Saturdays only.
Evergreen Brick Works on Saturdays, year-round.
Withrow Park, Sorauren and Trinity Bellwoods all run neighbourhood farmers’ markets in season.
Kensington is a market in the older sense — shops rather than stalls — and operates every day.
Late night
Toronto’s kitchens close early by international standards, but a few categories run late: Chinatown on Spadina, Korean on Bloor West, the King West bars, and the 24-hour diners scattered around the core.
Poutine and shawarma are the two things you can reliably find at two in the morning.
Breakfast
Not the institution it is in Sydney or Melbourne, but Leslieville has made a speciality of it and the queues on a Sunday are real. Elsewhere, a diner breakfast — eggs, home fries, toast, bottomless filter coffee — is the traditional version and costs very little.
The suburbs
The best Chinese food in the region is not in Chinatown but in Markham and Richmond Hill, north of the city, where Hong Kong and mainland migration of the 1980s and 1990s settled. Enormous Chinese malls, dim sum halls seating four hundred, and regional cooking — Sichuan, Hunan, Shanghainese — at a standard the downtown restaurants do not match.
Similarly, the best South Asian food is along Gerrard East and out in Scarborough and Brampton, and the best Italian is in Woodbridge rather than on College Street.
All of it needs a car or a long transit ride, and all of it is worth one.