Scratch

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...

When childhood friends Adrian Ravinsky and Dave Stewart first worked together at 16, neither could’ve guessed their early restaurant shifts would one day shape how they saw Toronto or inspire a business built around the city’s diversity. Growing up in the early 2000s, Toronto was coming into itself. There was pride, identity, attitude - yet Adrian and Dave kept asking one question: Why isn’t Toron...

When Erich Mrak lost his job as a chef during the pandemic, he did what many of us did - he went home and started cooking. What began as homemade pasta for friends and family turned into meal kits, a small wholesale business, and eventually, a tiny 620-square-foot pasta shop that would change everything. The name Tiny Market Co. was born in a dog park, when Erich and Danielle Soule - who was worki...

It all started with an email. One day, Calvin and Graham Reid’s dad sent a message to his kids that simply read: “This seems wild, but what do you think about starting a gin distillery?” That single note set the Reid family on a path that turned kitchen-counter experiments into one of Toronto’s most exciting craft distilleries. For the Reids, this wasn’t their first adventure. Years earlier, their...

When brothers Dustin and Daniel Gelman opened their first burger shop at the height of the pandemic, they thought it would be a one-time thing - a small, simple spot built around good food and community. Five years later, that single location has turned into nine neighbourhood favourites, each one still holding onto that same mom-and-pop feel. Having both spent years working across the restaurant...

When David Baxter first dreamed of opening a small retail bakery in Liberty Village, he imagined a cozy 1,600-square-foot space serving locals. Instead, Circles and Squares evolved into something much bigger - a wholesale operation supplying some of Toronto’s most iconic spots, from the Four Seasons to the Mirvish theatres. But David missed one thing: seeing people enjoy what he baked. Over the ye...

When Nicole Campbell and her friend Krysta Oben started Grape Witches, there was no business plan. Just a shared love of natural wine, a few wild ideas, and a belief that wine could bring people together in a new way. What began as late-night tastings and “natural wine raves” turned into one of Toronto’s most joyful, community-driven wine collectives - a place where wine isn’t intimidating, it’s i...

It all started with an order of 300 banana butterscotch cupcakes with maple buttercream made by his mom. And from there, Ness Levy helped turn Short & Sweet into one of Toronto’s most beloved bakeries. Sixteen years later, their very first customer still comes by, and the shop has become a safe, joyful space for everyone to celebrate - especially meaningful for Ness, who grew up with a nut all...

Tomer Markovitz didn’t take the easy route into the restaurant world. In fact, he nearly got fired five times from his first kitchen job. But instead of walking away, he stuck around and fell in love with the rhythm, energy, and chaos of hospitality. For Tomer, food has always been about love. Love for his craft, his Libyan roots, and his daughter, Romi, who inspired the name of his Toronto bakery...

At Jrew Creations, creativity comes in two forms: golden Jamaican patties and hand-stitched crochet. Co-founders Andrew Foster and Jaime Aludos built a business that blends their passions and heritages - Andrew’s family of cooks and Jaime’s love for crochet, inspired by her great-grandmother.  Their journey hasn’t been easy. When their first storefront flooded, they watched helplessly front row, e...