Ossington Avenue gets the hype, but Toronto's most rewarding eating happens in its ethnic enclaves — a fact baked into the city's demographics, since nearly 47% of residents are immigrants, more than double Canada's national average. A recent eating crawl through four corners of the city shows just how much ground you can cover without leaving town.
The adventure starts at the Depanneur in downtown Chinatown, a cooking school and event space that hosts Saturday supper clubs. Dinner there means long communal tables, banana-leaf coverings and Filipino dishes — twice-cooked chicken, green papaya in vinegar, smoked eggplant salad — served kamayan style, eaten by hand without utensils. The pop-up costs about US$75 (B1,900), and the trade-off is clear: no restaurant-style polish, but dinner party intimacy with locals from across Toronto.
Chinatown itself rewards grazing. Spadina Avenue anchors the neighbourhood, with sandwich boards advertising $28 massages and clothing racks between pan-Asian restaurants and bakeries. Nearby Grange Park sits beside the Art Gallery of Ontario, so culture and dumplings pair easily. Standouts include Vietnamese banh mi around $3, cheung fun and sesame balls for under a dollar from a subbing Chinese bakery, and jianbing — the cre-like breakfast pancake with eggs, crunchy wonton crackers and spicy sauce — at Jian Bing Club.
Kensington Market, a national historic site, packs even more variety into a few blocks: Irish, Jewish, Portuguese, Jamaican, Mexican and Chinese waves of settlement have all left their mark. A 'Taste the World' food tour with Tasty Tours ($63) strings together stops like Monoon Coffee's savoury babka pastries, jerk chicken patties, birria tacos at Gus Tacos, and butter tea with Nepalese momo dumplings at Tfibi Café & Bar — nine locations and counting at Pancake-hc's, plus chocolate tastings at Soma Chocolatemaker. As guide Odile Chetaile put it over coffee: this neighbourhood is gold for food.
Even the suburbs deliver. In Scarborough, a journalist-led jaunt hits Hong Kong-style Hokk-gno-yts Food's crispy roast pork (10 for B400), Malaysian snacks at One2 Snacks, black sesame cake and wok-fried chilli chicken at Wok's of Asia — a chef's-table spot where you watch the flames up close — and Hakka fare with Indian-Chinese roots, a distinctly Canadian fusion born of Chinese migrants who moved to India before Canada. Dessert comes at Manzou Bakery, whose cream-laced black sesame cake one regular sums up as 'not too sweet, with a smoky accent.'
Why should holidaymakers care? Toronto's dining scene is arguably better explored by streetcar and appetite than by reservation app. A few days split between Chinatown, Kensington Market and Scarborough gets you Filipino, Hakka, Jamaican, Vietnamese and Nepalese food in a single trip — often for less than the price of one trendy downtown dinner.
