The Best Places in University—Rosedale & around

Bentwood chairs, a marble bar, and jazz on Sundays give this College Street cocktail bar the plausible deniability of a Parisian café. The drinks are where things get interesting: curry leaf and rum, cognac stirred with masala chai, combinations that sound like a dare and drink like they were inevitable. North America's 50 Best Bars places it at number eight, and the hospitality matches the ambition. The garden patio fills up fast.

1. The 50 #55 · The World's 50 Best Bars
2. The 50 #8 · North America's 50 Best Bars
3. The Pinnacle Guide 1 Pin

The dining room occupies a former bank, and the high ceilings and long linen tablecloths suggest the space hasn't entirely forgotten its past grandeur. This is fine dining Italian, with a tasting menu or prix fixe built around Ontario produce and serious technique. Irreverent artwork keeps the mood from tipping into solemnity. The wine list leans deep Italian with growing Ontario representation. DaNico holds a Michelin star and placed third on 50 Top Italy's global list.

1. AAA Four Diamonds
2. 50 Top Italy #3 · The Best Italian Restaurants In The World
3. Michelin Guide 1 Star

A ten-metre open fire pit runs the length of this sleek College Street Mexican restaurant, and nearly every dish on the menu answers to it. The undulating ceiling, designed to echo the tarp-covered stalls of Mexican markets, sets the mood before the food does. Tortillas are pressed to order from heirloom corn nixtamalized in-house, and the mezcal and tequila cocktail program keeps pace with the kitchen. It holds a Michelin star and a spot on North America's 50 Best Restaurants.

1. The 50 #8 · North America's 50 Best Restaurants
2. Michelin Guide 1 Star
3. AAA Three Diamonds

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.

1. Air Canada 2021 · Finalist · Best New Restaurants
2. Canada's 100 Best #94 · Best Restaurants
3. AAA Approved

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.

1. Air Canada 2024 · Finalist · Best New Restaurants
2. AAA Approved
3. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

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.

1. AAA Three Diamonds
2. Air Canada 2018 · Top 10 · Best New Restaurants
3. Canada's 100 Best #89 · Best Restaurants

The password is posted on the door, which is either charming or cheating depending on how much you needed the walk. Inside this cocktail speakeasy on College Street, warm amber tones and a bar stocked long enough to require a second look set the scene. The team runs food-forward cocktails, occasionally served with homemade lollipops or mango rice cake, which raises fewer eyebrows than it should. It landed on North America's 50 Best Bars.

1. The Pinnacle Guide 1 Pin
2. The 50 #74 · North America's 50 Best Bars
3. Spirited Awards 2025 · Regional Top 10 Honoree · Best New International Cocktail Bar – Canada

The ssämjang is fermented in-house, which is either a signal that the kitchen takes Korean barbecue seriously or that it has too much time on its hands, probably both. This upscale Korean BBQ spot on College Street dry-ages an international roster of proteins and has servers manage the grill so you don't have to. The banchan rotates with the seasons, and the cocktail list leans Korean. Canada's 100 Best landed it at number 46.

1. Air Canada 2024 · Top 10 · Best New Restaurants
2. Canada's 100 Best #46 · Best Restaurants
3. The 50 The 50 Discovery

There's no menu at this Bloor West cocktail bar, which is either the most liberating or the most anxiety-inducing news you'll get all evening. The bartenders build something custom around what you're after, or they'll walk you through the house-made liqueurs until the right one finds you. The room shifts from low-key spirits conversation to full party depending on the hour, so arrive accordingly.

1. The 50 #54 · North America's 50 Best Bars
2. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide
3. Spirited Awards 2024 · Regional Top 10 Honoree · Best International Cocktail Bar – Canada

The soft-serve ice cream comes spiked, which tells you something about how Bar Mordecai runs its cocktail program. This lively Dundas West bar spans a hotel-lobby-feeling main floor and a karaoke basement, with an events calendar that fits bachata classes, tarot readings, and drag-hosted bingo into the same week. The fizzy wine list runs from Champagne to sparkling sake to non-alc. It landed on North America's 50 Best Bars.

1. The 50 #94 · North America's 50 Best Bars
2. Spirited Awards 2024 · Regional Top 10 Honoree · Best International Cocktail Bar – Canada
3. Spirited Awards 2025 · Regional Top 10 Honoree · Best International Bar Team – Canada

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.

1. Air Canada 2023 · Finalist · Best New Restaurants
2. Canada's 100 Best #32 · Best Restaurants

The worn white cabinets behind the bar hold the spirits like a well-organized medicine cabinet, which feels right for a cocktail bar that started as somewhere to wait for a table across the street and quietly became a destination of its own. Up a short flight of stairs on Dundas West, the room is tiny, warm in winter, breezy in summer, and usually full of people who knew exactly where they were going.

1. Difford's Guide 5 stars · Difford's Guide
2. Canada's 100 Best #49 · Best Bars
3. Foodism Legendary Icon · ICON Awards · Jen Agg

1. Air Canada 2025 · Finalist · Best New Restaurants
2. Canada's 100 Best Recommends
3. Foodism Legendary Icon · ICON Awards · Jen Agg

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.

1. Canada's 100 Best #55 · Best Restaurants
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant
3. The 50 The 50 Discovery

1. AAA Three Diamonds
2. Air Canada 2024 · Finalist · Best New Restaurants

The door says printing shop; the door is lying. Past a psychedelic mirrored hallway, this speakeasy opens into red velvet banquettes and warm rods of light, somewhere between a 1970s supper club and a set from a film that hasn't been made yet. The basement runs centrifuges and rotary evaporators, which is not how most bars do it, and the cocktail menu makes that fairly obvious.

1. The 50 #90 · North America's 50 Best Bars
2. Spirited Awards 2025 · Regional Top 10 Honoree · Best New International Cocktail Bar – Canada

Tagliatelle gets rolled fresh daily, and the menu drifts between English and Italian, but N.L. Ginzburg is doing something more specific than a trattoria. Named after anti-fascist Italian intellectuals, this College Street spot threads Italo-Jewish culinary history through hyper-seasonal Canadian ingredients: a liver toast that nods to both Tuscan fegatini and Jewish chopped liver, rugelach at dessert. Italian movie posters and terrazzo floors do the decorating.

1. Canada's 100 Best #6 · Best New Restaurants
2. Canada's 100 Best #35 · Best Restaurants

Most of the space is a working kitchen supplying pasta to other restaurants around the city, which tells you something about priorities. The pasta shop itself opens for lunch only, for a few hours, with two or so pasta dishes on offer that day and not much else. Diners line the sidewalk on an industrial strip of Dovercourt Village to claim one of the scarce tables. The Michelin Guide has it selected, and the limited menu is the whole point.

1. Canada's 100 Best Recommends
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant
3. Eater The 38 Best Restaurants in Toronto, Canada

Pork secreto with a honey and apple cider reduction is the kind of thing that makes you stop talking mid-sentence at this Spanish taverna on College Street. Grant van Gameren keeps the tapas menu rustic and unadorned, which takes more discipline than it sounds. Half portions mean you can cover a lot of ground, a useful feature when the sherry cocktails are this easy to keep ordering.

1. Air Canada 2013 · #1 · Best New Restaurants
2. Difford's Guide 4.5 stars · Difford's Guide
3. AAA Three Diamonds

The sinuous cocoon of curved South African mahogany is the first thing you clock, and it's enough to make you forget you're on College Street. Bar Raval is a pintxos bar and all-day Spanish hangout with a Michelin Bib Gourmand, pouring daytime cava, serious vermouth, and sharp cocktails from a tight modern program. The food runs from conservas to late-night snacks, and the room is designed to make leaving feel like a personal failure.

1. Difford's Guide 5 stars · Difford's Guide
2. Canada's 100 Best #10 · Best Bars
3. Air Canada 2015 · Top 10 · Best New Restaurants

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.

1. Air Canada 2015 · Top 10 · Best New Restaurants
2. Canada's 100 Best #92 · Best Restaurants

Vintage amps and speakers from the '70s and '80s line the walls of this Japanese kissaten-style bar on Dupont, which pulls double duty as a daytime café before DJs take over at dusk. The cocktail list leans on yuzu, oolong, sake, and Japanese teas, with signatures drawn from famous albums. Rice paper Noguchi lamps and koinobori streamers hang overhead, and the mid-century furniture makes clear that nobody here is in a hurry to leave.

1. Canada's 100 Best #31 · Best Bars

The long counter and vintage wallpaper say diner; the cocktail list politely disagrees. This College Street bar leans into the greasy-spoon aesthetic while the kitchen sends out cod with Osetra caviar and the bartenders fold Szechuan peppercorn into a White Negroni. Cold beers are always an option, of course. Regulars fill the stools early and stay a while, which tracks for a place that ranked on Canada's 100 Best Bars.

1. Canada's 100 Best #47 · Best Bars

1. Air Canada 2024 · Finalist · Best New Restaurants

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.

1. Air Canada 2017 · Finalist · Best New Restaurants
2. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand
3. Foodism Legendary Icon · ICON Awards · Jen Agg

1. Air Canada 2012 · Finalist · Best New Restaurants
2. Canada's 100 Best Recommends

The marble bar running through the middle of this Dundas West wine bar is where solo diners tend to end up, treated like regulars whether or not they are. Enoteca Sociale is a Roman-style enoteca where nearly everything, bread, charcuterie, and the pastas that anchor the menu, is made in-house. The cacio e pepe draws the room's loyalty in a way that tends to settle arguments. A Michelin Bib Gourmand, and the kind of place that fills up before you remember to book.

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

Paneer fans will appreciate that the name is a love letter to the ingredient, not a quirk. This sunny Indian restaurant in Kensington Market fills a window-wrapped room with sharable chaats, claypots, and curries seasoned with real precision. The butter chicken runs an almost painterly orange, and the coastal fish curry goes deep. Naan comes garlic-flecked and crisp, though you'll want rice too for the sauces. The servers narrate the menu at cheerful length. It holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand.

1. Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand

White-and-orange tile, vintage posters, and a bar long enough to mean business set the tone at this narrow Italian wine bar on Dundas West. The kitchen is barely the size of a coat closet, which makes the from-scratch pastas and focaccia all the more baffling. Half the room is here for the surprisingly deep Italian wine list and has no intention of eating. The other half ordered the ricotta-stuffed cacio e pepe coil and isn't sharing.

1. Foodism Legendary Icon · ICON Awards · Jen Agg
2. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

A team visible through the back folds dumplings by hand all day at this Chinatown institution, and the room fills accordingly. It's a casual dumpling shop with a full Chinese menu, though most regulars ignore the latter. The boiled pork and dill are the ones to know. Bags of frozen dumplings sit near the door for when you want the same thing at home at midnight, which, fair enough.

1. Michelin Guide Selected Restaurant

1. Canada's 100 Best Recommends

An unmarked brown door on College Street, opened only by membership card, is all the warning you get. Inside, a narrow staircase climbs to a small, dimly lit speakeasy with dark wood, ten bar seats, and two tucked-away seating areas. It's a members-only cocktail bar, though out-of-towners willing to email ahead have been known to get in. The kind of place that makes you feel like you know something most people don't.

1. Difford's Guide 5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Spirited Awards 2024 · Regional Top 10 Honoree · Best New International Cocktail Bar – Canada

A turquoise bay-and-gable house in Kensington Market, Fika is a Nordic-inspired coffee shop where the owner roasts his own beans in the back room on a machine he describes as "a toy." The cardamom cinnamon buns and Dala horse ginger snaps are the kind of baking that makes you linger, and the hygge aesthetic earns its name without trying too hard.

1. Sprudge The Sprudge Guide To Coffee In Toronto

1. Spirited Awards 2024 · Regional Top 10 Honoree · Best International Restaurant Bar – Canada

1. Eater The 38 Best Restaurants in Toronto, Canada

A kopitiam and cheese shop sharing one address on College Street, which is either a very specific vision or a beautiful accident. The Singaporean-Malaysian menu runs deep, the kind of cooking that earns Michelle Yeoh as a fan without making a fuss about it. Roti prata comes flaky and dip-ready, and the stacked lunchbox format means you can cover a lot of ground in one sitting.

1. Eater The 38 Best Restaurants in Toronto, Canada

Fried chicken is the whole point at this snug 26-seat comfort food spot in Kensington Market, and chef Jerome Robinson has been making that case since a 2018 pop-up built a following before there was even a proper dining room. The mac and cheese arrives buried under deep-fried thighs in Carolina butter sauce, which covers two food groups if you're generous about it. The '90s hip-hop energy from the old Dundas West location made the move intact.

1. Eater The 38 Best Restaurants in Toronto, Canada

Absinthe comes out the traditional way here, slow drip and all, which tells you where this New Orleans-inspired bar's priorities lie. The cocktail list splits into classics and signatures, and the Louisiana-comfort food is priced like the neighbourhood actually lives here, because it does. Live blues on weekends keeps things from getting too precious. The kind of bar that already has regulars who know the staff by name.

1. Difford's Guide 3.5 stars · Difford's Guide

1. Foodism Legendary Icon · ICON Awards · Jen Agg

1. Foodism Culinary Icon · ICON Awards · Iván Castro