Plenty of food influencers are happy collecting free meals and staying comfortably behind the camera. Marcello, the creator behind @marcelloeats, is choosing the much harder path: actually opening a restaurant. With nearly 140,000 followers on Instagram and over 115,000 on TikTok, Marcello has spent years building an audience by reviewing viral food spots across southern […]
Say the word “steakhouse” and most people picture the same thing: marble floors, low chandeliers, white tablecloths, and a wine list that requires its own table of contents. Shinji, which opened in the Financial District on July 8, is deliberately built to subvert that image. The restaurant comes from Harlo Entertainment, the team behind MIMI […]
Toronto is about to get its first taste of Mailo’s, a Greek pasta chain that has built a devoted following overseas and is now crossing the Atlantic for its North American debut. The Toronto location marks a notable expansion moment for a brand that has succeeded by blending Mediterranean tradition with a contemporary casual dining […]
Summer in Toronto arrives with a particular urgency — the months are precious, the evenings are warm for a finite window, and the city’s collective desire to be outside and social reaches a pitch that doesn’t exist in any other season. The rooftop bar scene exists to meet that desire, and in 2026, it’s doing […]
South Asian cuisine has long been one of the most underappreciated fine-dining categories in Canada — a cuisine of extraordinary depth and complexity that has too often been evaluated against price points that don’t reflect its ambition. Aangan, which landed on Toronto Life’s 2026 best-new-restaurants list, is part of a broader shift in how the […]
There’s a type of Toronto nightclub that doesn’t need to advertise itself widely, because its reputation among the people who matter most to it — committed dance music fans, DJs who request it for their touring riders, clubbers who know the difference between a sound system and a great sound system — does all the […]
If you’ve spent any time around Toronto’s food social media ecosystem in the past couple of years, you’ve probably encountered Penelope Focacceria, the Woodbridge-based bakery and sandwich shop that has developed a following wildly disproportionate to its original square footage. The focaccia — properly made, properly cured, properly topped — became the kind of thing […]
There are Toronto brunch restaurants, and then there are Toronto brunch institutions. Mia Brunch Bar falls into the second category — a spot that opened six years ago and has spent the intervening time building a loyal following that doesn’t just like the place but feels something closer to proprietary affection for it. The long-awaited […]
Anthony Rose’s Schmaltz Appetizing, the beloved Jewish-style deli that has been a daytime institution in Toronto since it opened, has launched a dinner service that takes the menu in an unexpected and exciting direction. “Schmaltz by Night” kicked off this week, and the early word is that it’s well worth a visit. The dinner menu […]
Sometimes the most significant restaurants are the smallest ones. N.L. Ginzburg — the restaurant that made both Toronto Life’s 2026 best-new-restaurants list and Canada’s 100 Best‘s annual ranking of the country’s finest new dining destinations — is intimate in scale and enormous in ambition, a combination that Toronto’s restaurant scene has been producing with increasing […]