9 Best Restaurants in Toronto, Ontario

Spearheaded by world-renowned restaurateur Daniel Boulud, Café Boulud occupies the coveted dining room of the Four Seasons Hotel Toronto and presents itself as a serene, airy French brasserie decked out with sage-green banquettes and gilded accents. The café does simple, well-executed classic and contemporary French fare, like mouthwatering rotisserie duck, a signature Frenchie burger and cocktails like the French 55.

A good drive away from Toronto's two Chinatowns on the edge of Yorkville, MIMI Chinese offers a memorable dining experience built on regional dishes from the Guangdong, Sichuan, and Hunan regions of China. It's an upscale yet unpretentious room, with a dark red-and-black aesthetic, waiters in black bow ties, and one-way kitchen mirrors that give you a full view of bustling chefs plating dishes and slicing up glistening barbecue pork char siu (though they can't see you). The sharing-style menu, which had a cult following before the restaurant even opened, is split into sections including Raw & Cooling, Savoury & Warming, and Noodles & Rice, all meant to play off each other. The best bet is the $100-per-person Chef's Choice, but either way you won't want to miss the social-media-famous Four Foot Belt Noodle, sliced up tableside with scissors. A playful drink list includes a shareable Tea Ceremony green tea cocktail, a Jungle Panda tiki creation with Chinese baijiu, and an extensive collection of sakes. 

The modern dining room at One, inside the Hazelton Hotel, is all rich woods, smoked glass, cowhide, and onyx—and thankfully the food lives up to all the razzle-dazzle. "Lobster spoons" with vermouth butter and miso-glazed black cod share space on a broad, varied menu with fresh pastas and exceptional house-aged steaks sourced from Prince Edward Island and Alberta.

This southern Italian hideaway has been a magnet for visiting celebrities and well-heeled Yorkville locals since the early 1990s, and it's still one of the city's most popular posh restaurants. The dozen or so pastas, including freshly made gnocchi, are reliably excellent, but the grilled seafood options, spanning yellowfin tuna to tiger shrimp to calamari, are stellar.

Eataly's wonderland of fresh Italian groceries can also be enjoyed on-site in seven different restaurants, bars, counters, and cafés. There's the Trattoria Milano for northern Italian dishes and aperitivo, La Piazza for shareable plates like salumi and cheese, La Pizza & La Pasta (pretty self-explanatory), Birroteca for fresh beer in partnership with Indie Alehouse, multiple big patios to sip drinks like Aperol spritzes and wines, plus multiple cafés for pastries, sandwiches, pizzas, chocolates, and gelatos. 

Sensuous paintings of nudes and the sea and signed celebrity photos line the walls at this two-story seafood institution. The kitchen prepares dishes from the Dalmatian side of the Adriatic Sea, and members of the international artistic community who frequent the place adore the unusual and healthy array of seafood and fish. The black risotto with squid, served in a shareable portion size, is a must, as are the grilled prawns with lemon garlic butter.

The upscale-yet-whimsical take on vegan food at Planta caused quite a stir when it opened in 2016, and the restaurant (now one of four in the city) is still a favorite of the Yorkville crowd. Menu standouts include satisfying thin-crust pizzas with plant-based mozzarella, an excellent veggie burger, and a queso dip that will fool even the pickiest cheese lover.

If you want your latte made by a robot, this is the spot to get it. The first location of a new automated coffee kiosk concept that's slowly creeping across the city, the Robo Café makes the specialty espresso-based coffee drinks like cappuccinos, cortados, and flat whites---complete with ice or oat milk---you'll find at indie coffee shops throughout the city, but taking the barista out of the equation. A step above vending machine coffee (they actually don't use the "v" word), it's a blue window with a screen where you press in your order, pay with a tap of your debit card, and then you're on your way.   

Yorkville is filled with ice cream and gelato shops, but Summer's is the most beloved. A family-run shop since the '80s, this ice cream parlor doesn't do anything fancy or trendy but excels with the classic, made-in-house flavors. There are always at least 26 of them, with favorites like chocolate fudge brownie, pralines 'n' cream, and Toronto Pothole (a little bit of everything) often seen on cones throughout the village.