Best Restaurants in Toronto 2026
The definitive Toronto restaurant list — Alo at the top, Edulis close behind, and ten picks that span a 40-year institution, a wood-fire Mexican kitchen, a West African tasting menu, and the east end bistro everyone is suddenly talking about.
The best restaurants in Toronto are Alo, Edulis Restaurant, Canoe, and more. Start with Alo if you want the strongest overall first pick.
Top picks at a glance
Who this guide is for
Toronto's dining scene has never been more self-assured. The restaurants that matter here aren't chasing trends — they're building on years of intention, ingredient obsession, and a quietly fierce sense of what Canadian cooking can mean in 2026. This is our definitive list.
Quick picks
On this page
How the restaurants compare
How we chose
We looked for restaurants that feel like a strong fit for the guide topic, not just the most obvious names in the city. The shortlist favors rooms with clear mood, dependable pacing, and enough distinction to help someone decide faster. Read our full methodology →
Lighting, pace, and general energy all need to support the reason someone clicked this guide.
We favored restaurants that feel best suited for the moment, not just restaurants with broad reputation.
The final list tries to give readers enough variation in neighborhood, price, and style to compare real options.
10 ranked picks
Patrick Kriss has built something that very few Canadian chefs have managed: a tasting menu room that the world takes seriously. Alo sits above a Spadina sandwich shop, and that deliberate modesty feels right — the room is calm, the service is precise, and the cooking does not need to announce itself.
The caviar service, the aged duck with preserved citrus, the cured hamachi that changes by season — every course feels like a decision, not a gesture. Canada's top-ranked restaurant since 2018, and in 2026 it still earns it at every meal.
Michael Caballo and Tobey Nemeth opened Edulis in 2012 with a clear obsession: wild ingredients. Mushrooms sourced from foragers across Ontario. Sea urchin from the east coast. Game birds that actually taste like what they ate. The menu is small and changes constantly, and the room on Niagara Street holds only a few dozen people.
The whole experience feels like eating at the home of two people who care more about the plate than almost anything else. There is no theatre here, no performance — just extraordinary, deeply personal cooking that keeps Toronto's most serious food people coming back.
Perched on the 54th floor of TD Tower with views that sweep across Lake Ontario, Canoe could easily coast on its address. It doesn't. Executive chef Ron McKinlay has quietly built one of the country's strongest programs celebrating Canadian ingredients — Arctic char from Nunavut, bison from the prairies, fiddleheads and ramps when they arrive in spring.
The wine list leans deep into VQA Niagara, and the tasting menu traces a genuinely thoughtful narrative through the seasons. This is what Canadian fine dining looks like when it is confident enough to stop apologizing for existing.
Scaramouche has been on Toronto's upper floors since 1980, and the dining room still feels like an event. The pasta room below does brisk business — the carbonara is a Toronto landmark — but upstairs is where the kitchen earns its place on every serious Toronto list. Chef Joanna Yung steers a menu that is elegantly seasonal without being precious.
The coconut cream pie has been on the menu for decades and still stops the table when it arrives. The wine program runs deep into old-world bottles the room was built to hold. Forty-five years in and Scaramouche still feels like the right answer for a dinner that matters.
Rob Gentile's King West flagship opened in 2009 and has remained one of Toronto's essential Italian restaurants ever since. The charcuterie program — coppa, salumi, 'nduja — is made in-house and rivals anything you'll find in Rome. The handmade pastas change with the season, and the cave-like room on King Street still feels like a discovery even after fifteen years.
The wine list is deeply, unapologetically Italian. The orechiette with Calabrian sausage and the ricotta gnudi with summer truffle are the kind of dishes you think about on the way home. Buca is where you go when you want Italian done with full conviction and no shortcuts.
Grant van Gameren's Spanish-inspired room on College Street is the Toronto restaurant that most feels like it could hold its own in Madrid or Barcelona. The grilled octopus is a benchmark — properly charred, properly tender, finished with a smoked paprika aioli that does everything right. The devilled eggs with smoked trout roe arrive looking modest and taste extraordinary.
The natural wine list is serious without being dogmatic, and the late-night energy carries the room well past midnight on weekends. Bar Isabel is the rare room that manages to feel like a neighbourhood bar, a serious restaurant, and a wine destination simultaneously — all in the same evening.
The wood fire is the first thing you notice at Quetzal — the massive open hearth in the centre of the King West room that drives every dish on the menu. Chef Elia Herrera's contemporary Mexican cooking leans into smoke, char, and the Oaxacan pantry she grew up with: mole negro that simmers for days, tacos de canasta made with masa ground in-house.
The mezcal cocktail program amplifies rather than distracts, and the room has a warmth that makes two hours feel like thirty minutes. Quetzal is one of the most purely pleasurable restaurants in the city — the kind of place you want to take everyone you know.
Justin Cournoyer's restaurant on Ossington holds a Michelin star, and the cooking earns it without the trappings of a traditional starred kitchen. The tasting menu changes weekly based on what Cournoyer's foragers and farm partners bring in — wild leeks one week, smoked deer heart another, pickled ramps when the season allows.
The room is small and quietly beautiful. The wine list is natural-leaning and genuinely interesting, and the whole experience feels like eating at the intersection of the Canadian wilderness and a serious culinary mind. Actinolite is the best argument for why Toronto belongs in the same conversation as any serious food city in the world.
Chef Michael Elegbede's West African tasting menu on Bloor Street is one of the most exciting things to happen to Toronto dining in years. Drawing on Nigerian and broader West African traditions — suya-spiced proteins, fermented locust beans, stews built on layers of palm oil and dried fish — Akin brings a cuisine that has been criminally underrepresented in Canada's fine dining scene to its rightful place.
Every course teaches you something while tasting extraordinary. The egusi soup, reimagined as a refined consommé. The jollof rice, elevated but still deeply comforting. Akin is the restaurant Toronto needed — a room that expands the city's sense of what serious Canadian cooking can look like.
The east end has been watching Ricky and Olivia since it opened on Queen Street East, and in 2026 the conversation has gone citywide. Chef Ricardo Chanona runs a compact room with a menu built around French bistro instincts filtered through a sharply personal lens: a roast chicken that rivals anything in the city, a crudo that changes with the day's market.
The natural wine list feels handpicked rather than assembled, and the room carries the warmth of a neighbourhood room that knows exactly what it is. This is the restaurant Toronto needed — intimate, confident, and completely worth the trip from wherever you are in the city.
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