What to Eat Now

Toronto’s most creative chefs are conjuring up new food businesses, elevating the art of takeout and bravely opening new restaurants—despite the odds. Here are our picks for the absolute best things out there at this very weird moment in time

It’s been a year since

anyone has eaten a juicy rib-eye or a bowl of impossibly fragrant Thai curry—or anything, for that matter—inside a packed Toronto restaurant, an experience once as central to life in this food-obsessed town as piling onto the streetcar at rush hour. (That, we don’t miss.) Since then, more than 10,000 restaurants have reportedly closed across Canada—hundreds in Toronto—taking countless jobs along with them. The rest continue to scrape by on a mix of takeout, delivery and outdoor dining, along with Covid relief funds and, if they’re lucky, flexible landlords. But for all the red ink, the past year has also been one of mind-boggling reinvention and sweat-soaked resilience that deserve the highest of accolades. Take, for example, the bold chefs and restaurateurs plowing ahead with plans to open shiny new dining spaces, pandemic be damned, that will feel like a culinary windfall when it’s safe to once again welcome guests. Or the creative and delicious ways these restaurants, and others, have found to package the in-restaurant experience—from the food to the ambience—for home consumption, making our own four walls feel, if just for one meal, like the real deal. But perhaps the most exciting development of this fraught period is the explosion of entrepreneurial passion projects that have popped up in virtually every corner of the city, with homebound cooks and bakers and enthusiasts of all culinary persuasions selling the food of their dreams with nothing more than an oven and an Instagram page. It all amounts to a reshaped culinary landscape that promises to steer our dining habits long after the pandemic fades and we all start obsessing over OpenTable bookings again. Here’s what that looks like in 2021.