The Best Places in Canada

Follow the smell of barbecue down an alley stacked with firewood and you'll find the front door. Inside, Matty Matheson's steakhouse is all maple slats, a domed ceiling, and salmon-pink booths, which sounds like a lot until you're sitting in it. The menu moves from Sicilian crudo and tartares through big dry-aged cuts cooked on the grill, with vegetable sides that quietly refuse to be an afterthought. Krug by the glass, if you're in the mood.

Three thousand live plants line almost every surface of this eco-luxury hotel in King West, which means the lobby smells like a greenhouse and that is entirely the point. Rooms run crisp and contemporary with organic textures doing the warmth-lifting, while Harriet's Rooftop handles sundowners above the neighborhood. The Michelin Guide awarded it one key, which suggests the whole sustainability-meets-pleasure argument lands.

The napkins are the size of bed sheets, which tells you everything about the food at this Lyonnaise French restaurant in Little Burgundy. Chef David McMillan has said he doesn't like creative food, and he means it: steaks, hand-picked oysters, rabbit, sweetbreads, and a lobster pasta that regulars treat as non-negotiable. The blackboard changes constantly. The wood bar and stag head on the wall make it feel like a neighborhood pub, which is more or less the idea.

The front door is frosted top to bottom, the curtains are drawn, and there's no signage to speak of, which is a choice for a French bistro on Harbord. Inside, the narrow townhouse room runs on dim lighting and Italo-disco, and the cooking is smart, seasonal, and indulgent in the way that only a chef with Joe Beef on his résumé can pull off. Pommes dauphines are a fixture; everything else shifts with the microseason. Listed in Canada's 100 Best and the Michelin Guide.

A tasting menu restaurant tucked into a small house on Clinton Street, where the kitchen channels years spent in Majorca and Venice into Spanish and Venetian cooking that leans heavily on seafood. The wine list chases obscure regions with evident purpose, and Sunday service slows down for family-style paella rounds. A spot on Canada's 100 Best keeps the room full of people who booked weeks ago and are pleased with themselves for doing so.

Hand-painted imported tile floors and marble-topped bars set the tone at this upscale seafood restaurant inside the Sutton Place Hotel on Burrard. The room is large but pulls together through chic lighting and buttery leather seating, and the menu matches the mood: baked oysters, house-made pasta loaded with Pacific shellfish, and a mixed shellfish platter that gets its own trio of sauces. Roger Ma took Vancouver Magazine's Chef of the Year in 2026.

A 20-seat fine dining room in Steveston Village, which is otherwise known for fish and chips and frozen yogurt, turns out to be an oddly perfect home for royal Thai cuisine. White-gloved servers bring each course of an 18-dish tasting menu to white-clothed tables overlooking the Fraser River. The chef trained privately with Bangkok cooks before opening this, having no restaurant background at all. Canada's 100 Best ranks it among the country's top 25.

Rabbit Rabbit is a narrow, very mauve wine bar on Herald Street that plays vinyl and loosely commits to an Alice in Wonderland bit without making you wear ears. The menu runs eclectic, so tallow-fried chips and a green scallop aguachile share a table without apology, and the pasta could double as dinner. The wine list leans European with a few natural oddballs, and it was an Air Canada Best New Restaurants finalist.

The soaring room on St-Jacques splits into a buzzy brasserie up front and a white-tablecloth dining room behind, which tells you something about who comes here and why. It's a modern French brasserie doing set menus at lunch and dinner, with a kitchen trained in France and quietly serious about aged meats and local sourcing. The power-lunch crowd fills in the rest of the picture.

The black-and-white tile floor, claret walls, and Art Deco fixtures have been pulling Plateau night owls into this classic French bistro since forever, with the kitchen taking last orders at half past midnight. The menu barely changes, which is a feature: bone marrow, beef tartare, veal kidneys in mustard sauce, profiteroles finished with maple syrup. The wine list leans Burgundy and Quebec, and the servers know it cold.

Black walls, waxed concrete floors, and rock music at full volume set the mood for a 25-seat tasting menu restaurant in Le Plateau that treats dinner as theater. The seven-course menu, inspired by the seven deadly sins, shifts almost daily depending on what catches the chef's eye, with dishes that carry their own little narratives. It ranked 45th on Canada's 100 Best and holds a Michelin selection.

The room is divided into zones shaped by wood, water, and wind, which tells you something about how seriously this Mount Pleasant restaurant takes itself. Chef Vish Mayekar runs a globally roaming menu that pulls from South Asia, the Middle East, and Europe without announcing the detour each time. You can order à la carte or hand the kitchen the wheel entirely. The cocktail program runs on a zero-waste brief and keeps pace with the food.

A working maple orchard an hour from Montreal, with a wood-fired evaporator doubling as the stove. Martin Picard and Vincent Dion-Lavallée run this cabane à sucre as a long, celebratory tasting experience, feeding groups of six to twenty-four through fifteen or more courses of Quebec terroir. Come winter, it's all tourtière and woodsmoke inside the heated cabin. By summer, the feast moves into the orchard under canvas, and the menu tilts toward the garden.

The sausage and mash has its own name here, which tells you something about how this French bistro operates. Chef Charles-Tristan Prévost, a Le Club Chasse et Pêche alumnus, runs a room in Jean Talon market country where the produce shows and the natural wine list is longer than the pretension. Bib Gourmand from Michelin. Evenings stretch into tartare and duck; service stays loose throughout.

The backyard patio at this Caribbean-Creole-Latin restaurant on College Street has wood planks, warm lighting, and enough greenery to make you forget there's a city out there. Inside, the room is a cozy nook built for sharing plates and lingering. The menu moves through fried chicken with smoked hot honey and braised beef over cheddar grits without losing momentum. The Michelin Guide gave it a Bib Gourmand, and it earned a finalist nod from Air Canada's Best New Restaurants list.

Pressed linens, polished crystal, and a kitchen that forages the surrounding forest before it cooks anything: this is formal country-house dining at its most committed. Chef Jason Bangerter pulls roughly 85 percent of his menu from Ontario, then plates it with the kind of elaborate care that rewards a long tasting menu. The cellar is vast and the wine pairings inspired. It's an hour from Toronto and feels further, which is rather the point.

A converted Victorian house in the quietly charming town of Dundas, Quatrefoil is the kind of upscale dinner spot where someone's parents are always celebrating something at the next table. The menu is short and unfussy, built around seared scallops, duck breast, and grilled tenderloin, with a team that runs the room like they've been doing it forever. A Michelin selected restaurant.

The house bread changes with whatever the chef has on hand, garlic scapes one week, sundried tomatoes the next, and it arrives crusty and worth slowing down for. FK is a neighborhood restaurant with a sun-filled room that reads more tearoom than bistro, and a market-driven menu that follows the season without making a fuss about it. Service moves at its own pace, but the kitchen's unhurried honesty tends to make that forgivable.

The kitchen is a wood-fired rig inside a converted garage dressed up with subway tiles, and the menu drifts through seasonal Italian territory, from antipasti at lunch to grilled arrosticini and handmade pasta at dinner. It comes from the team behind Elena and Nora Gray, so the natural wine list is long and taken very seriously, which in Montreal is less a quirk than a baseline expectation. A reliably convivial neighborhood restaurant on Rue Lenoir.

Dark wood panelling, velvet seating, and an open kitchen make this upscale seafood restaurant in Whistler Village feel like a sleek urban room that somehow ended up at the base of a ski hill. Alex Chen drives a seasonal Pacific Northwest menu where the raw bar alone, stacked with oysters and chilled lobster, tends to cause indecision. Locals filling the room mid-week is the tell. A spot on North America's 50 Best Restaurants list confirms what the reservation wait already suggests.

The kitchen grinds fresh masa from heirloom Mexican corn every day, which tells you something about the priorities here. Alma is a tasting-menu restaurant in Outremont where the chef threads his Tlaxcalan roots through Quebec seasonal produce, and the sommelier answers with a Catalan-leaning wine list. The result is modern Mexican cooking that doesn't ask for your permission to be unexpected. Canada's 100 Best ranks it 34th in the country.

The dry-aged fish program is the detail that separates this buzzy Fraser Street seafood spot from every other neighborhood bar doing a raw bar. The menu is small and shifts often, but the cooking stays bold and punchy, from hiramasa with aguachile to squid tagliolini that goes places pasta doesn't usually go. Vancouver Magazine gave it gold for both informal dining and seafood, and the Michelin Guide has taken notice too. Service is friendly without being precious.

A mechanic shop turned coastal Italian osteria in Cambie Village, Elio Volpe does wood-fired pizza with a brunch version that gives people a reason to leave the house on a Sunday. The room has bar seating for solo meals and enough shared plates, including a whole grilled branzino, to make a group feel purposeful. Vancouver Magazine handed it gold for both Best New and Best Italian in the same year, which is the restaurant equivalent of a very good report card.

Bone marrow crumpets are a reasonable thing to serve in Montreal if you're a British chef cooking from a tasting menu in a cozy Plateau room. Marc Cohen sources much of his meat from his own nearby butcher shop, and the seasonal menu moves at a pace that makes the whole meal feel considered rather than rushed. The wine list leans toward lesser-known labels, which is either adventurous or a little homework, depending on your mood.

The oyster mushroom souvlaki arrives with walnut skordalia and tarragon vinegar, which tells you pretty quickly that this isn't the whitewashed-walls-and-ouzo setup you've been to before. Selene is a fine-dining Greek restaurant in Hastings-Sunrise that takes the canon seriously enough to know exactly where to bend it. Vancouver Magazine gave it a Gold Medal for Best Mediterranean, and the room has earned the quiet confidence that comes with it.

The foie gras poutine arrives with duck-fat fries, duck gravy, cheese curds, and more foie gras than feels legal, which tells you everything about what Martin Picard is doing here. This Plateau bistro is loud, amber-lit, and unapologetically devoted to the richer cuts of the pig-and-foie gras canon. An entire menu section belongs to foie gras alone. Finish with pouding chômeur and feel very Québécois about the whole thing.

Down a Kensington Market hallway that looks like it leads nowhere, a door opens onto a loud, packed room doing serious Sichuan-inflected Chinese cooking. Chili oil, cumin smoke, and the char on silver needle noodles do most of the talking. The Hong Kong French toast with black sesame jam and oolong condensed milk is the kind of dessert that makes you forget you had a plan. Michelin Bib Gourmand.

No two rooms share the same floor plan in this 65-room boutique hotel, a side effect of the heritage building it lives in. The common areas double as gallery space for a serious modern art collection, and the business district address puts you close to everything without the convention-hotel anonymity. Gotham Steak House is on-site when you want a drink and a steak without leaving the building. Staff have been known to arrange bicycles for the seawall.

The name nods to the old Canadian practice of hauling a canoe between two waterways, which turns out to be a decent metaphor for what the kitchen does: carry Newfoundland produce into unexpected territory. This convivial Water Street restaurant runs on local ingredients steered by Asian technique, so cod arrives under miso hollandaise and the vegetable section is quietly the most interesting thing on the menu. Ranked on Canada's 100 Best, and no reservations about the cod.

A grand piano sits in the corner like it's been there forever, and at Bacchus, inside the Wedgewood Hotel, that's more or less the point. This is a white-tablecloth hotel restaurant where the flower arrangements are serious and the chandelier means business. The kitchen turns out European-leaning classics with enough care to feel considered rather than comfortable. A spot on Canada's 100 Best list and a AAA Four Diamond rating confirm the room isn't just dressing.

A boutique hotel a block from the Inner Harbour, the Magnolia leans into Victoria's Victorian mood without becoming a museum piece. Sixty-four rooms keep the scale personal, soaking tubs anchor the bathrooms, and the team has a habit of noticing when guests mention a birthday online and quietly doing something about it. Silk Road tea at turndown, locally made chocolates, hot cider in the lobby when it's cold. It holds a Michelin Key.

Two copper-toned glass towers rise over the edge of Yaletown, standing out from the steel-gray skyline in a way that feels either bold or slightly overdressed, depending on your mood. The hotel itself has 329 rooms, a Spa by JW, an executive lounge, and enough meeting space to host a small nation's parliament. BC Place is steps away, and the casino is on-site, so guests are rarely short of somewhere to be.

The wine merchant boutique off the lobby sets the tone: this is a downtown Vancouver hotel that takes its European clubhouse fantasy seriously. Dark wood, warm lighting, and old-world touches give the rooms and lounge a different register than the glass-tower norm. A spa, indoor pool under a sunroof, and a personal concierge round out the comforts, and the business and shopping district sits right outside.

A living wall of potted plants and a polished-pine bar greet you before the open kitchen takes over the room. This fine dining spot in Canmore pulls diners in from Calgary and well beyond for a menu that folds the chef's Québécois roots and time spent cooking in Japan into a tight, confident tasting format. Ranked 25th on Canada's 100 Best and holding four AAA Diamonds, it earns the drive through the Rockies without ever feeling like it's trying to.

The china on the afternoon tea service was a gift from the Queen in 1939, which tells you roughly everything about what kind of hotel this is. The Fairmont Empress is a grand railway-era property facing Victoria's Inner Harbour, all ivy-covered limestone and English pageantry in a city that takes its Englishness very seriously. The Michelin Guide awarded it a Key. Renovation has freshened it without sanding off the delightful self-importance.

Pine needles and deer lichen aren't typical pantry staples, but the chef at this modern Indian restaurant near Olympic Village uses foraged and hyper-local ingredients as the backbone of a daily-changing tasting menu. Whole spices are roasted and ground in-house, and the effect reads less as fusion than as a very specific argument about where Vancouver actually is. Canada's 100 Best listed it among the country's top restaurants for 2026.

Four days a week, the couple farm the land around their red-brick country home. The other three, they seat 16 guests across three rooms for a 10-course tasting menu shaped entirely by what's ready. It's an intimate farm dinner, two hours north of Toronto, with all-Canadian wines and a chef's counter close enough to overhear the cooking. The Michelin Guide has selected it, and Canada's 100 Best placed it 39th in 2026.

John Lennon and Yoko Ono staged their famous bed-in for peace here, which means this downtown Montreal hotel has been living off that story ever since, though a massive renovation has given it some new ones. The lobby pulls in local art and a genuinely urban energy, the rooms are warm rather than grand, and a 24-hour wellness center handles whatever the conference schedule did to you. Selected by the Michelin Guide.

Sitting on a small island in the middle of the Bow River, surrounded by Prince's Island Park, this rustic dining room feels like a cabin that wandered into the city and decided to stay. Exposed wood, stone, and vintage fishing gear set the mood, and fireplace tables are fought over in winter with quiet desperation. The kitchen commits to Canadian and Albertan ingredients only, landing on Canada's 100 Best list. The patio, when weather allows, is the whole argument.

The name, "Salle Climatisée," is a straight lift from old French commercial signage, which tells you something about the sense of humor running this twenty-seat Little Italy bistro. Seven savory dishes, cheese, two desserts, on a slate board that changes with the seasons. The kitchen leans on Quebec producers and turns out the kind of food that's rustic without being careless. Low-intervention wines, G&Ts brightened with verjus, and a ceramicist's Calder-evoking mobile overhead.

Lingcod Bourguignon, with bacon and pearl onions, is about as far from a typical sushi menu as you can get, which tells you something about what the kitchen is up to here. Marilena is a fine dining raw bar where the nigiri and sashimi lean on sustainable local seafood and the rest of the menu keeps the same restless energy. Vancouver Magazine gave it the gold for Best Victoria restaurant, which tracks.

Every course arrives when all thirty plates are ready, chefs carrying them out in unison while someone narrates to the whole room. Le Mousso is a tasting-menu restaurant where the chef's background in fine art bleeds into the choreography: the sommelier takes a turn at a makeshift stage, the kitchen cheers each dish, and the whole thing runs about three hours. A Michelin Selected Restaurant, and dinner here is closer to a performance than a meal.

A lobby floor that appears to float, suspended from concrete arches by metal rods, is a strong opening argument for a hotel. The Ace Toronto sits in the Garment District, designed with curvaceous brick and retro-futuristic bones. Rooms lean unpretentious: bare wood, vintage-ish furniture, efficient without being sparse. Patrick Kriss runs the restaurant downstairs, and a 14th-floor bar handles the panoramic-view duties. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

Persian rugs, carved stone at reception, and antique furnishings that feel genuinely inherited rather than sourced, the Wedgewood is a privately owned boutique hotel on Robson Square, family-run since the beginning. Rooms have dark wood paneling, marble baths, and balconies overlooking the mountains or the gardens below. The piano lounge, done in Venetian style with Murano glass and a limestone fireplace, earns its place as the hotel's social heart. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

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.

About 20 seats wrap a circular counter where the chef cooks in full view, which sets the whole tone of this intimate contemporary restaurant. The menu moves with the seasons, leaning on fermented vegetables and bright, acidic vinaigrettes to give each plate its edge. The staff keeps things warm and loose, so a solo dinner here feels less like a reservation and more like someone let you into the kitchen.

A seven-course tasting menu that shifts with the season and the whims of local farmers makes Actinolite one of those fine-dining rooms where you genuinely don't know what's coming until it lands. The chef grew up foraging and hunting in rural Ontario, and that instinct runs through the cooking, which has a Nordic quietness to it. The garden out back supplies herbs in summer. Chefs often bring the plates out themselves, which either charms you or makes you feel mildly observed.

The pizza comes out charred and puffy, the kind that makes you rethink your original plan to order pasta instead. Giulietta is a classic Italian restaurant on College Street that somehow manages to feel both polished and genuinely neighbourhood, the sort of room where the team treats first-timers like regulars they just hadn't met yet. The Michelin Guide lists it, and Canada's 100 Best has it in the top 100.

Fifty-four floors up in the TD Bank Tower, the city spreads out below you like a very expensive map. Canoe is a long-running fine-dining institution where lunch belongs to Bay Street and dinner slows to something more ambitious, the kitchen turning out contemporary Canadian cooking with serious technique. The tarte au sucre has become something of a fixture on the dessert menu, and the room knows how to move a table along or let it breathe.

Seaweed pressings on deep blue walls and dried grasses set the coastal mood at this small, plant-forward restaurant in Kitsilano. The menu rotates around whatever vegetables the kitchen is currently obsessing over, and the cooking is the kind that makes omnivores forget to keep score. A no-tipping policy made headlines when it opened, but the food is what keeps people coming back. It holds a Michelin Guide selection.