Scratch

After years working everywhere from dive bars and breweries to Michelin-recognized restaurants, Allen Meredith and Mallory Bey knew exactly what they wanted to open: a plain old neighbourhood bar. Inspired by their love of Buffalo’s bar culture, The Elmwood brings together saucy wings, cold beer and the kind of hospitality that makes you want to hang around for another round.  Allen and Mallory sh...

Michael Edwards spent his career researching what people want. When he sold his company and decided to try something completely different, he bought a restaurant in Roncesvalles without even knowing what kind of food it would serve. Then he Googled how to find a chef. One accidental MeetAChef.com membership later, Michael found Chef Julien Cawagas, whose Filipino-Italian upbringing, love of Italia...

Kayvan Mahbod started at Demetres as an eager 15-year-old barista who was folding menus before he’d even been hired. A few decades later, he’s its President and still approaches dessert with the same enthusiasm. From testing eleven kinds of caramel to discovering that lighting can actually change how ice cream tastes, Kayvan takes us inside the wonderfully serious world behind a brand built on ind...

When Ashley Wittig left her first food business in 2018, opening another one was nowhere on the agenda. Then she started thinking about the one thing she’d missed since giving up dairy: really rich, smooth, decadent ice cream. One year of daily recipe testing later, Honey’s was born. Ashley shares why starting over felt different the second time around, how childhood nostalgia inspires flavours fr...

Wanda Beaver thought she’d bake pies for a little longer while she figured out her career. Thirty-eight years later, she and her husband David are still doing it by hand. From Wanda’s first sour cherry pie at nine years old to turning down an art director job at MuchMusic, finding their home in Kensington Market and weathering decades of small business curveballs, Wanda and David share why they’re...

Chef Michael Angeloni’s relationship with pasta started in his nonna’s Etobicoke basement, where a long table became a family pasta factory and bags of handmade tagliatelle were practically currency. Years later, after formative chapters at Splendido, The Black Hoof, Grand Electric and restaurants of his own, pasta kept calling him back. Pasta Privato became the place to bring those experiences to...

Allyson Bobbitt grew up surrounded by baking, but never imagined it could become her career. Then, at 30, one story in a book about finding your path made her heart race and changed everything. Within 18 months, she had traded her old career for cakes. That leap eventually led her to Sarah Bell, a shared obsession with French macarons and the creation of Bobbette & Belle. Allyson shares why ri...

It started with one steak sandwich in Ricky Barrientos’ backyard. When Aki Erenberg couldn’t stop thinking about it, the two friends turned that craving into a Sunday pop-up, serving friends and family while still working their 9-to-5s. Then a stranger placed an order, an article went live, and suddenly they had to figure out how to turn backyard chaos into a real business. Aki and Ricky share how...

Adam Minster was on his way to becoming a lawyer. Chef Lia Silva finished university unsure of what came next. Both eventually found their answer in the same place: feeding people. Their paths led to RASA, SARA and Chop Hop, three very different concepts connected by a shared philosophy around hospitality, trust and knowing when to let talented people run in their own lane. From creating a neighbo...

David Schwartz’s cooking was never about one cuisine - it was about understanding how cuisines are built. Raised eating both Cantonese food and Eastern-European deli classics, David grew up noticing something unexpected: these food worlds shared the same backbone. Both emerged from necessity. Both relied on smoking, curing, salting, fermenting, pickling, and coaxing deep flavour out of what was ch...

Dining at O’Noir starts with losing something - your sense of sight. But for Dr. Jaren R. Feng, what you gain is far more important. Jaren first experienced dining in the dark as a guest. What struck him wasn’t just the novelty of the concept, but the people behind it - particularly the servers, all of whom are blind or visually impaired. Their ability to navigate the space, memorize guests, and d...

Portuguese culture in Toronto can feel frozen in time, but that’s not the story William Oliveira wants to tell. Raised in a deeply Portuguese household, William’s early memories were shaped by family trips back to Portugal and a community in Toronto that preserved those traditions almost exactly as they were decades ago. The bakeries, the flavours, the rituals - they all felt consistent, familiar,...

For a long time, David Neinstein didn’t think he’d end up in a restaurant. After building a career in marketing and completing his MBA, he found himself asking a simple question: if you won the lottery, what would you do? The answer came quickly - he’d open a restaurant. So at 30, he did exactly that. It wasn’t the expected move. Surrounded by a network of professionals in more traditional careers...

Andrea Christensen didn’t set out to build a cookie business - it found her. When the pandemic hit, Andrea suddenly had time. What started as baking for fun (something she’d always loved) quickly became an obsession with one goal: creating the perfect soft-baked cookie. As a self-taught baker with a science-minded approach, she leaned into experimentation, testing, and refining until every detail...

Not only is Golden Turtle one of Toronto’s oldest Vietnamese restaurants, it’s a story that stretches across continents, generations, and the quiet work of keeping something meaningful alive. For Linda Nguyen, the restaurant was part of her childhood long before it became her responsibility. Her earliest memories are behind the counter: folding napkins, serving customers, and watching her parents...

Lake Inez was never meant to be static. When Zac Schwartz met Dennis Kimeda and Patrick Ciappara, he wasn’t planning on becoming a restaurateur. He was paying his way through university. He wasn’t a lifer in the industry. But when Dennis - who had already built The Wren - asked him to partner on a new venture, Zac made a choice that would change everything: he gave every penny he had to something...

When COVID threw a wrench into Michael Lam and Eric Chow’s plans at Ascari, they were left with a choice. They could go their separate ways, or they could figure out how to keep working together. What they shared was a mindset, a standard for hospitality, and a deep trust built from long days inside a 140-seat restaurant where nothing worked unless everyone moved in sync. Choosing each other becam...

For Nicolò Marchisio, food has always been the way love shows up. It’s the universal feeling of coming home and being greeted by your nonna — not with questions, but with a list of everything she made just for you. And only later, as an adult, do you realize what that really meant: the shopping trip the day before, the hours spent cooking, the way she never sat down to eat because she was too focu...

Not knowing what success looked like turned out to be the greatest advantage Nick Genova and James Carnevale had. James was already deep in kitchens, drawn to the technical, almost scientific side of gelato. Nick was a freelance videographer and creative jack-of-all-trades, trying to find his footing. When James decided he wanted to make gelato, Nick was simply there — and when nothing else was qu...

Mezes began in 1990 at 404 Danforth, started by a man who had no business opening a restaurant — no formal training, no business plan — just a huge heart and an even bigger dream. Vasha Zindros’ father opened the restaurant as a love letter to his mother and his wife’s family, believing that if he could dream it, he could do it. When he passed suddenly and tragically, Vasha’s mother was left widow...

Creole, Caribbean, and Latin cuisines may look different on the surface, but historically, they’ve always spoken the same language. For Alycia Wahn, Conejo Negro wasn’t about filling a gap in Toronto’s dining scene - it was about bringing together cultures that have long shared roots. Raised cooking Italian food, trained in French technique, and shaped by years spent living and working across the...

PAI didn’t start as a restaurant idea - it started as a place. Chef Nuit and Jeff Regular’s story begins long before Toronto, in a small northern Thai town called Pai. It’s where they lived, where Jeff fell in love with Thailand before he even met Chef Nuit, and where Chef Nuit spent years as a nurse, learning to cook the way her family always had — by taste, not measurement, guided by instinct an...

For Talia Rana, the restaurant was never just a restaurant - it was home. Before Gio Rana’s Really Really Nice Restaurant became a Leslieville cornerstone, it lived in a family’s daily routine. Homework done in the side room during service. Wiping menus alongside her mom. Sitting on her mother’s lap, being fed fresh ricotta with a tiny spoon - a memory so vivid it’s stayed with her forever. The fa...

Before Burger Drops became known for its smash burgers, it started as something much simpler: Greg Bourolias just wanted to gather people and take care of them. Not in a flashy way - but the way you do at a dinner table, or on a backyard porch, where there’s always too much food and someone telling you it needs more salt. Greg grew up in a Greek household where hospitality meant abundance. Aunts a...

For Sam Davis, the dream was simple: to have the keys to his own space. But the road to Primrose Bagel was anything but straightforward. After living in New York City and falling deep into bagel culture, Sam found himself back in Toronto - where bagels were already in his blood. His cousins owned United Bakers, and long before Primrose existed, Sam was biking around the city delivering bagels to f...