The Best Places to Eat and Do in Canada

Perched above Bloor Street's shopping strip, Amal is a Lebanese restaurant where the room leans sleek and the mood tips toward a night out even at lunch. The halal menu runs through mezze, skewers, and grilled mains in a modern register, and weekends bring belly dancers or a DJ to remind you this isn't a quiet neighbourhood spot. The kanafeh makes a strong case for dessert.

A plain façade on rue Sainte-Catherine hides a quietly ambitious modern restaurant that sits somewhere between casual lunch spot and date-night destination. The kitchen leans on delicate plating and sharp contrasts of texture, and the private-import wine list is the kind of thing the knowledgeable staff are happy to walk you through. Evenings skew a little dressier; lunches draw the crowd that figured out the value.

Natural light pours through lattice screens and past paintings by local Iranian artists at this modern Persian restaurant on West 4th. The kitchen leans into the architecture of Persian flavors: tart dried limes, fragrant spices, richness from nuts and seeds. A judge once said the food has "a mother's touch," which is either the nicest thing you can say about a restaurant or the nicest thing you can say about anything.

Roast duck and char siu hang lacquered in the window on East Pender, which is all the sign Chinatown BBQ really needs. It's a casual Cantonese barbecue spot with vintage art on the walls, a lazy Susan in the middle of the table, and regulars who look like they've never once consulted the menu. The barbecue pork travels well in a takeout box, but the room has its own pull. The barbecue goose, a chef's recipe, requires two days' notice.

The white shirts and black aprons are not an affectation; the staff here dress like Parisian servers because the whole point is a Parisian brasserie, transplanted to Outremont and running the same menu it has for years. Braised beef cheek, boudin noir, rum baba: the classics, done straight. The arched brick windows flood the room with light at lunch and turn it into a glowing fishbowl after dark. The wine list leans Burgundy and Rhône.

The Peking duck here requires a phone call to reserve, then arrives tableside in a cloud of flambéed rum, carved to order, with the carcass reborn as soup or a peppery stir-fry for the finale. This Shaanxi restaurant on Granville pairs that theater with biang biang noodles, roast lamb, and waterfront views. A Michelin Selected pick, it draws a crowd that planned ahead and dressed for the occasion.

An old house in the heart of Mont-Tremblant village, turned into a cozy fine dining room where the chef's past life cooking on yachts quietly shapes the menu. Local ingredients get the globe-trotting treatment: Lake Tremblant walleye shows up in a crispy tempura, and the osso bucco is the kind of low-and-slow thing that makes you cancel your ski plans. Italy and France anchor the wine list, and the service is warm without being fussy.

The outdoor sparkling bar overlooking the vines is a good hint at what you're in for at this winery restaurant on the Niagara Stone Road. Inside, it's a prix-fixe contemporary dining room running two and three courses, with the kitchen sourcing close to home and leaning hard into the seasons. The patio at lunch, with rows of vines stretching out ahead of you, is the move. A AAA Four Diamond property and a Michelin Selected Restaurant.

Hand-folded dumplings that change with the seasons set the tone at DaiLo, Nick Liu's New Asian-French restaurant on College Street. The menu is built around sharing, with dishes that are generous, boldly seasoned, and clearly personal. Whole fried trout with nam jim and Hainanese chicken with black truffle under the skin suggest the kitchen's register. The cocktails are taken seriously, and the wines are well-chosen. Come with people you like feeding.

The name means "flame," and the yakitori skewers are reason enough to remember that. Honō is an izakaya on Rue Saint-Joseph where pale wood and a live grill set a casual, share-everything tone at prices that won't make you do math. Miso-marinated salmon, artisan chicken sausage, confit duck heart on a stick: the menu roams further than most. A Michelin Bib Gourmand, and a connecting door leads to sister ramen bar Honō Ramen next door.

A slim vintage diner on Roncesvalles that's been around forever, The Ace holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand for doing brunch better than most restaurants do dinner. The sourdough hits the griddle in the morning and the smell makes the lineup feel shorter than it is. The French toast, a thick brioche square with caramelized pears and whipped ricotta, is the kind of thing that makes people rearrange their Sundays.

The interior leans European, all Armani-quiet sleekness, but the kitchen stays firmly in Japan. Yuwa is a chic Japanese restaurant in Kitsilano where the menu shifts daily around whatever is freshest, and the co-owner doubles as one of Vancouver's sharpest sommeliers, which shows in a sake and wine list that keeps food people talking. The monied west-side crowd dresses accordingly and never needs to ask how anything works.

A casual Thai restaurant on East Broadway where the green curry beef shank reportedly stops conversations cold. Song holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand and Vancouver Magazine's gold for best Thai, and the room feels built for lingering over pomelo salad and lemongrass wings with a group that shows up hungry. The menu runs deeper than the familiar standards, though the pad Thai earns its place on the table without apology.

A glazed wine cellar anchors the dining room at this modern French bistro on Cartier, where the open kitchen lets you watch the team plate food that leans more confident and less classically Gallic than the name might suggest. Portions are smaller but the ingredients are not modest, and the owner's own market garden supplies the produce in season. It holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand, which tracks with the neighborhood crowd it draws.

A copper-clad bar, vinyl on the turntable, and a menu that changes every day: Buvette Scott is a wine bar in the Saint-Jean-Baptiste neighbourhood where small plates and good pours are the whole point. Plan on four dishes, split them, and pick something from a wine list that leans local and stays affordable. The Michelin Guide awarded it a Bib Gourmand, which tracks for a room this unpretentious and this easy to return to.

This is a seafood restaurant with a wall of vintage etched mirrors and a menu that cheerfully ignores the rules. The focaccia arrives on a toddler's melamine alphabet plate, the caesar gets sprouting broccoli and tempura crunchies, and the margarita involves gingered rye and douglas fir. Now and then the spot prawn guy walks in mid-service with the day's catch, which is as close to a fish market as a mirror gallery gets.

Aged white cheddar popovers land on your table minutes after you sit down, and coffee cake muffins follow you home. That's the bookend philosophy at this sleek, upscale steakhouse in CIBC Square, where the real business is a dry-ageing programme serious enough to earn a spot on the World's Best Steak Restaurants list. Cuts come from Canada, Japan, Australia, and beyond, and the Burgundy-heavy wine list is ready to make any of them expensive.

Named for the balsam fir, this bright, casual bistro in the Laurentians feels like a neighbourhood spot that happened to end up somewhere very pretty. The team, with roots at Le Mousso and Le Club Chasse et Pêche, turns out modern Québécois cooking built for sharing over natural wine. The Michelin Guide gave it a Bib Gourmand, which tracks for a room where bottles circulate freely and nobody seems in any particular hurry to leave.

The team behind Faux Bergers runs this lively little wine bar on the main drag in Baie-Saint-Paul, where the point is Charlevoix ingredients handled simply and shared around the table. It holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand. The room fills fast with locals and visitors who order in rounds, and the menu moves with the seasons, leaning on the kind of regional produce that makes this corner of Quebec worth the detour.

A family-run restaurant on the banks of the St. Lawrence, with a terrace that earns its postcard reputation in summer. The kitchen leans hard into Quebec terroir, right down to the duck, which comes from a local farmer who once cooked here himself. Menus shift with the seasons, service runs warm and unhurried, and the adjoining shop sells mostly local goods for the drive home. A Michelin Bib Gourmand.

Lines form before the doors open at this cash-only Chinatown institution, which has been running Vietnamese and Cambodian food out of the same room forever. The menu stretches to nearly a hundred dishes, but regulars navigate straight to the beef luc lac, the salt-pepper-sugar wings, and a plate of thinly sliced raw beef in pineapple fish sauce that sounds odd until it arrives. It holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand.

The menu lists "Silk Pappadelle with sesame, pecorino and secrets," which tells you a lot about what Deer + Almond is up to. This fine dining room on Princess Street lands on Canada's 100 Best at number fifty, and earns it through Prairie ingredients routed through unexpected global detours: local venison with Thai nahm jim, beets alongside tuna and ginger-soy. A four-course prix fixe runs the dining room; the bar takes à la carte orders from the same kitchen.

Patrick Kriss runs the tasting-menu temple ALO one floor up, and Aloette is what he does when he loosens his collar. The room is barely wider than a train car, the menu reads like a diner, and the cheddar brioche arrives complimentary before you've even decided anything. Everyone orders the burger; everyone ends with the lemon meringue pie, which is tall enough to cause a scene. Selected by the Michelin Guide.

A covered outdoor taqueria on Yukon Street that feels like someone smuggled a great Mexico City back-alley spot into a Vancouver residential neighbourhood. The Mexican cooking leans a little ambitious, and the cocktail program punches well above the taqueria average. A Michelin Bib Gourmand, and the kind of place regulars quietly hope you won't find out about.

Eight seats tucked at the back of the main room, twice nightly, all ingredients flown in from Japan. Sushi Yūgen is a kaiseki-influenced omakase counter where the chef builds around 18 courses and occasionally lands something like okoze, the devil scorpionfish, which is either thrilling or alarming depending on your disposition. The wine list leans toward white Burgundy, and the Japanese whisky selection includes bottles that don't surface anywhere else in the country.

A slim, stylish contemporary Chinese restaurant on Laurier where the menu quietly mixes Montreal sensibility into familiar staples. Sesame noodles and garlic fried rice get the same serious attention as steamed oysters with fermented black bean sauce or beef tartare spiked with doubanjiang. The cocktails follow the same logic, which is either reassuring or alarming depending on how adventurous you're feeling. Selected by the Michelin Guide.

Red lanterns and a ceramic lucky cat set the tone, but scallion bao filled with stracciatella cheese does the explaining. This tiny Bloordale Village restaurant lands a Michelin Bib Gourmand for cooking that defies easy labeling, pairing pan-fried radish cakes and pork wonton noodles with miso cheesecake and Parmesan tapioca fritters. Servers pour natural wines throughout, cheerfully, as if the bottle might run out.

Heirloom corn from Mexico, pressed and griddled into tortillas daily, is the entire argument for this taco shop on Adelaide. The room is white kitchen tile and worn wood, the menu is short, and everything arrives fast and hot before the meal is suddenly, almost rudely, over. A Michelin Bib Gourmand, and the kind of place you're already planning to revisit before you've finished chewing.

Reclaimed wood panels and colorful murals set the tone at this Indian street food spot on a busy stretch of Bayview, where the menu roams across regions rather than settling into one corner of the subcontinent. Chaats arrive lashed in chutney, thalis land as genuinely oversized platters, and the deep-fried cauliflower in sweet chili glaze has its own following. Servers talk you down from over-ordering, which is kind of them. It holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand.

You climb a flight of stairs off Cambie to find white tablecloths, chandeliers, and a wall of pristine fish tanks keeping watch over the room. It's an upscale dim sum shop drawing the kind of crowd that irons its shirts, but the Michelin Bib Gourmand signals the menu won't punish your wallet the way the setting implies. The kitchen plays dim sum mostly traditional, with occasional detours that actually make sense.

Angus An runs a small empire of Thai concepts across Vancouver, but this Kitsilano original is where it all started and still where the cooking cuts deepest. Maenam is a sit-down Thai restaurant where the kitchen balances bold aromatics with serious precision, and rustic-looking plates consistently surprise you. The wine list is genuinely thought-through, not an afterthought. It holds a Michelin Guide selection and has taken Vancouver Magazine's gold for Best Thai more times than anyone's counting.

Two celebrity chefs with serious Montreal pedigree, David McMillan and Derek Dammann, opened this fire-driven steakhouse in the West Island with a soft spot for vegetables and seafood alongside the expected meat. The sprawling room has real character, the bar is genuinely welcoming, and the wine list goes in unexpected directions. It landed on Canada's 100 Best list, which tracks for a place this confident in what it is.

A sushi and pan-Asian restaurant that comfortably wanders into Italian and French territory without apologizing for it, Peacock landed on Canada's 100 Best list in 2026. The chef layers flavors across cuisines with a clean, unhurried hand, moving from sushi classics to charcoal-grilled fish with black-bean marinara without it feeling like a concept pitch. The room on Grant Avenue draws a crowd that follows cooking, not categories.

A 32-seat corner pasta spot in the Rail District that feels more like a borrowed cabin than a restaurant. The portions here are sized for sharing, which is good, because ordering one dish each and then making eyes at your neighbour's plate gets old fast. Pappardelle with duck ragu, bigoli with shellfish, meatballs that show up unannounced and dare you to finish everything else after. The Italian wine list is short and well-chosen.

Six seats wrap an omakase bar where 17 to 20 courses lean on sustainably sourced, mostly Canadian fish and produce some of it grown on the chef's own farm. Darren MacLean runs Japanese technique through an unmistakably Canadian larder, and the daikon "steak" alone makes a case for taking vegetables seriously. The sake list is long and thoughtful, the cocktails herbaceous. Canada's 100 Best puts it at number 75 in the country.

Briana Kim's intimate tasting menu restaurant on Somerset runs nine vegetarian courses that lean hard on fermentation, and the results smell more like a forest than a salad. House-made sesame tofu arrives in pine-smoked tea broth with seaweed mole, a sentence that shouldn't work but does. Preserved figs in black-garlic oil show up somewhere, and you're glad they did. Wine pairings or house-made non-alcoholic drinks round out an evening that is quietly, stubbornly its own thing.

Tucked behind an old church, this converted rectory keeps its bones visible: exposed brick, parquet floors, and tables made from salvaged pew wood. Candide is a prix-fixe restaurant where the monthly menu follows whatever the market dictates, leaning heavily local and mostly plant-forward. The terrace fills fast in warm weather. A Michelin Selected Restaurant, it's the kind of dinner where the room does half the work before the food arrives.

Jen Agg's Kensington Market restaurant holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand, which tells you something about the short, shape-shifting menu: it changes often, leans on raw bar, house-made pasta, and whatever the kitchen feels like doing, and it overdelivers quietly. The room is loud and good-looking, the wine list is serious, and the crowd arrives dressed like they knew about this street before you did. Cash in your pocket optional; attitude is the currency here.

The menu goes up on a blackboard each morning and comes down when the kitchen's done, which tells you most of what you need to know about this 40-seat modern French bistro tucked inside Moncton's Aberdeen Cultural Centre. Michel Savoie cooks Acadian ingredients, local seafood, pork, and pasta, through a French lens, and the cavatelli with scallops has its fans. Canada's 100 Best lists it among the country's top restaurants.

A nine-course tasting menu anchors this intimate fine-dining room on Rue Bélanger, though à la carte keeps things from feeling too precious. The chef came up at Joe Beef and Paloma, and the cooking carries that pedigree without showing off about it: seasonal, tightly composed, precise enough that sea urchin in a butter evoking Sunday roast chicken lands as a coherent idea rather than a stunt. Canada's 100 Best named it among the country's top restaurants.

A former foundry in Griffintown, with ceilings high enough to lose a secret and exposed brick that somehow looks intentional, is now one of the more atmospheric Italian-Mediterranean restaurants in the city. The Carrara marble bar is a fine place to sit alone and feel cosmopolitan. Crudos lean bright and citrusy, pastas run deep and rich, and the menu is short enough that everything on it earns its spot.

Three seats. Two chefs. That's the whole room at this omakase sushi bar on Denman, and the math is deliberate. No gold leaf, no theatrical dry-ice fog, just precise nigiri and a quiet confidence that comes from cooking for fewer people than most restaurants seat at the bar. The Michelin Guide has it listed, and the intimacy earns every bit of the attention that comes with that. Show up ready to eat slowly and say very little.

The two-sided fireplace in the center of the room does a lot of heavy lifting at this sleek hotel lounge inside the Fairmont Pacific Rim. Pull up a seat at the marble bar or grab one near the stage for nightly live music, and order from a sushi-focused menu that leans on local salmon and steelhead. The Michelin Guide has it listed, and the crowd dressed just well enough to be here tends to linger.

Copper and wood panels give the dining room an easy elegance, but the room is really just a warm place to sit while the kitchen does its work. This is an upscale Cantonese restaurant where the menu runs deeper than most, with a "kitchen specialties" section that includes wine-marinated crispy duck tongues and kidneys alongside the kind of congee that makes you want to cancel your afternoon. The Michelin Guide has it listed among its Vancouver selections.

Local artwork and soft industrial lighting set the tone at this city-chic fine dining room in Gastown, where the kitchen plays with combinations that have no business working as well as they do. The menu runs à la carte or as a tasting menu, with a vegetarian version available, and the cooking leans into unlikely pairings with enough confidence that the surprises land. A Michelin Selected restaurant, and one diners tend to return to.

The name is a bluff, there's no hotel, just a warm Indian restaurant in Quebec City with a bar serious enough to anchor the room. The front-of-house team is the kind people mention unprompted. The kitchen leans into tandoori vegetables and braised lamb korma alongside classics like pakora and dal, with a tasting menu that pulls local produce into the mix. Comfort food with good bones and a cocktail to start.

A bistro on Saint-Jean that's been around long enough to feel like civic furniture, Le Hobbit runs brunch until two in the afternoon and keeps going through dinner in a pair of warm, well-worn rooms. The eggs Benedict have achieved something close to neighborhood mythology, and the desserts hold their own. A strong list of beers and ciders gives the menu a slightly different angle than most places nearby. Book ahead.

The blackboard menu changes with the season and the chefs' mood, which keeps the Powell Street regulars coming back to see what's new. This casual fine dining spot leans hard into local ingredients and pun-heavy dish names, so brace for something like "Straight Outta Kombu" before a plate that outpaces the joke. The cocktails are worth starting with. A Michelin Selected Restaurant doing real work in a neighborhood that doesn't demand it.