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Canada’s Restaurants
Beloved neighbourhood restaurants as voted by our readers
From coast to coast, The Globe’s writers uncovered the stories of twelve independently owned, locally-loved
and enduring restaurants.
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Some restaurants are more than places to eat. They become emotional landmarks. Byblos Le Petit Café, in Montreal’s Plateau, is one of those rare places that has absorbed the lives, conversations, homesickness and hunger of the people who have passed through it for more than 30 years.
Founded by Héméla Pourafzal, who was born in northern Iran, Byblos has long contributed something deeply meaningful to Montreal’s culinary landscape: a generous, lived-in expression of Iranian food and hospitality. It is not the kind of restaurant that feels polished into sameness. The cooking feels personal, rooted and domestic – carrying the memory of mothers, family kitchens, leisurely breakfasts and comfort.
That spirit is everywhere in the room. Framed faces with gentle, watchful expressions line the walls. Bookshelves give the space the feeling of a small cultural salon. Colourful handwoven blankets and cushions invite people to settle in. On the counter below a shelf of four shishas is a plump little goldfish in a small aquarium. In Iranian culture, goldfish are part of the traditions of Norouz, the Persian New Year, as symbols of spring, renewal and life in motion. This goldfish had been rescued. “It’s been there for six years,” says owner Pourafzal, laughing candidly. Paintings by Hamid Pourafzal, Héméla’s brother, add an intimate family layer to the atmosphere. It does not feel designed by a committee. It feels accumulated, cared for, inhabited.
The menu carries that same comforting spirit. The fragrant dishes transport guests far beyond the Plateau. Tea is served from morning to night, and the homemade jams make it easy to understand why Héméla is affectionately known as the queen of preserves. Among its dishes are lamb stew, which was not an easy sell when Héméla first opened the café. Many Montrealers, she recalls, were hesitant. “Try it, and if you don’t like it, don’t pay for it,” she would tell them. Today, she says with a laugh, it has become the café’s most popular à la carte dish.
But the dish most closely associated with Byblos is the feta and dill omelette – closer to soft scrambled eggs than a classic omelette – inspired by the flavours of her native Iran. Over the years, it has become a Montreal staple in its own right.
“I never expected it would become so popular,” Héméla says. Today, the omelette has become, in the eyes of many loyal customers, as emblematic of Montreal as smoked meat or bagels. It is a comparison she receives with gratitude.
What Byblos brings to Montreal is not only Iranian food. It brings continuity. It remains a familiar place to return to for tea, for breakfast, for comfort, for conversation, or for one of those days when sitting somewhere warm makes the world feel a little less lonely.
If you go, try
Price range: Most breakfast items from $5 to $21, three-course meals from $22 to $42
Feta and Dill Omelette
Tender and cloud-like, with a creamy, salty richness that lingers gently on the palate. Dill cuts through that richness, keeping each bite from feeling heavy while adding a fresh, gentle grassy-anise aroma.
Koukou Chegherteme
A Persian frittata with tender shredded chicken and saffron. The texture is denser and more layered, with the eggs holding everything together in a soft, savoury bite. The saffron adds a delicate floral warmth, giving the dish its golden hue and a quiet depth.
Borani Bademjan
A classic Persian eggplant-and-yogurt dish, tangy, cooling and savoury, with the silky softness of eggplant folded into creamy homemade yogurt. Its gentle acidity brightens the palate, while its lush texture makes it feel both refreshing and deeply comforting. Essential to a generous shared table.
Restaurant Wong, with its legendary neon sign on Rue De Buade in the heart of Old Quebec, has been part of Quebec City’s culinary landscape since 1960. For generations, it belonged to a familiar Chinese-Canadian tradition, one built on comfort, predictability and nostalgia. But over the past three years, this third-generation establishment has been quietly redefining itself.
Under chef Steven Wong, the menu now draws from childhood flavours, Cantonese references, Quebec ingredients and the instincts of a self-taught cook coming fully into his own. The result is not fusion for fusion’s sake. It is something more interesting: a thoughtful negotiation between inheritance, identity, community and creative freedom.
Wong’s cooking reflects the complexity of growing up between cultures in Quebec. The room itself seems to understand that tension. Guests are greeted by a laughing Buddha before entering a dining room where a glowing ceiling installation stretches overhead like a luminous canopy. Its panels, decorated with Chinese illustrations, calligraphy and landscape scenes, hover above red paper lanterns. The exposed stone walls of Old Quebec pull the room firmly back into its geographic reality.
As surprising as it may seem, the nineties-inspired soundtrack is not incidental. It belongs to the same autobiographical impulse as the menu. Steven Wong is not trying to recreate an imagined China, nor is he chasing a generic contemporary Asian aesthetic. He is building a restaurant around the sounds, flavours and memories that have shaped him.
The pandemic, strangely, helped make this possible. As the local chef community rallied around restaurants, and diners began paying closer attention to neighbourhood institutions, Wong found both recognition and encouragement. That support helped open a creative door, he says.
There is still a sense that Wong is in transition, and that is part of what makes the restaurant compelling. The menu, while already more focused than before, still carries traces of the restaurant’s older abundance. The silken tofu with ground pork in a spicy Sichuan pepper sauce may be the kitchen’s most convincing dish. The tofu is delicate, almost custard-like, while the pork brings savoury weight and the sauce wakes the palate with generous heat, without overwhelming it.
A major overhaul planned for December promises fewer dishes, more local ingredients and an even stronger commitment to personal storytelling. That sounds like the right direction. The restaurant’s greatest potential may not lie in pleasing every memory attached to the restaurant, but in trusting the clarity of Steven Wong’s own voice.
If you go, try
Price range: Main dishes from $9 to $28
The Asian-Style Burrata
This dish that may be the clearest expression of Wong’s current voice. Canadian-made burrata is served with a compote of Asian pear, yuzu, chrysanthemum, ginger and Thai basil, then paired with fried wonton chips. It’s creamy, floral, citrusy and crisp in all the right places.
Quebec Bison and Pork Egg Rolls
Wong takes a familiar Chinese-Canadian dish and deepens it with local meat, savoury richness and a fruity sauce whose acidity keeps the whole dish lively, balancing nostalgia with a thoughtful sense of place.
Mun Fu Baby Back Ribs
Made with Quebec pork in a hoisin, five-spice and ginger sauce, the ribs are generous and layered with sweetness, spice and depth moving through the fall-off-the-bone meat. The dish feels like a nod to the family’s origins in Hen Gong, a southern Chinese village known for its sugarcane farmland.
Dining at Halifax’s Aster Café feels less like going to a restaurant and more like paying a visit to the home of your favourite immigrant auntie. It’s curated by an impulse that has nothing to do with Instagram perfection. The tables are dressed in burgundy tablecloths with clear plastic over top. Folk art and straw hats from the old country hang on the wall. A tiny wall-mounted flatscreen TV broadcasts the feeds from four security cameras, not unlike the apartment lobby cam my own grandma loved watching.
When you walk in, the air is perfumed with kibbeh, the spiced clarified butter that is vital in Ethiopian cooking. Many of the herbs and spices used in chef-owner Tsehaye Debele’s kitchen are sourced by her husband, Zelalem Guda, who buys them on regular trips home to Ethiopia.
On a recent Friday afternoon, two women were sharing an order of the quintessential dish beyaynetu: small mounds of various stewed and stir-fried vegetables atop a base of injera, a thin fermented pancake made from teff flour.
Debele, who immigrated from Ethiopia in 2001, approached the two women asking not how things tasted, but what they needed more of. After they raved about the gomen – kale cooked with fried onions, ginger and garlic – Debele retrieved an extra portion from the kitchen for them with a warm smile.
In its eight years of operation, Aster has become a home away from home to an eclectic mix of customers: newcomers living in the rental apartments nearby, vegan college students, young families, taxi drivers, homesick East Africans and university professors. It’s one of the most nourishing, affordable sit-down meals you can get in the city.
Alia Saied brought her partner to Aster on their second date in 2021. It’s since become their go-to spot for spontaneous dinners with friends, birthday celebrations and entertaining out-of-town visitors.
When the couple’s daughter was first born, they’d bring her to Aster and after setting out the food in front of them, Debele would scoop the infant up in her arms and walk around the restaurant cradling and cooing to her so Saied and her partner could enjoy their meal in peace.
Debele assumes this level of loving familiarity even with first-timers. When diners have asked for cutlery, Debele has torn off pieces of injera with her own hand and scooped up a bit of misir wot (red spiced lentils) and then put the food directly into their mouths. It’s both a lesson in how Ethiopian food is meant to be consumed, but also an example of gursha, a cultural tradition meant to exhibit love and affection, that some translate as “I feed you before I feed myself.”
“I like to be like family with my customers,” Debele says. “Like best friends.”
If you go, try
Price range: most main dishes from $15 to $20
Beyaynetu
A vegan meal that even the most carnivorous will enjoy. Standouts are the unbelievably flavourful beets and kale, which are stir-fried with aromatics and then finished with kibbeh – a mix of herbs and spices that have been bloomed in melted organic butter. The injera is labour-intensive and takes multiple days to ferment but is always freshly-made, light and spongy.
Lamb Tibs
To make this Ethiopian classic, stir fried peppers, onions, chilis and bite-sized pieces of lamb are cooked fast on high heat, and in the final seconds of cooking, a glossy coating of kibbeh gives it a punch-up of flavour.
Doro
This is Debele’s signature dish, which she says is her “customer appreciation” offering on Saturdays. It’s a sweet and fiery chicken stew served with hard-boiled eggs that take on the beautiful brick-red tint of the berbere-spiced gravy.
When Cedar’s Eatery first opened in Charlottetown in 1979, staff had to patiently explain the menu to diners. Most had never heard of hummus, tabbouleh and falafel, let alone tasted it.
Cedar’s introduced Lebanese cuisine to a population where most traced their lineage back to the British Isles and, almost half a century later, the pioneering restaurant remains a Charlottetown institution.
You might mistake Cedar’s for a British pub upon entry: wood-panelled walls, cozy booths with paisley upholstery and century-old antique prints of ads for soap and cocoa on the walls. But look closer: a stained glass cedar tree on the wall, a hookah on a raised platform by a booth, a glass cake stand displaying baklava on the bar.
At lunch hour on a recent weekday, tables filled up with regulars: retirees trading updates on their grandchildren, public servants with ID badges clipped to their waists discussing summer plans; a family group spanning three generations roasting the tardy cousin who hadn’t yet arrived.
Owner Ryan Abdallah, whose parents opened the restaurant three years before he was born, was raised in the kitchen, dinging the bell when orders were up and eventually learning how to make everything from fattoush salad to stuffed grape leaves.
Though his father Maroun, now 80, is retired, he stops by the restaurant every morning. He’ll sit down, have breakfast, tea, “and he’ll walk around the kitchen and tell me what’s wrong and how to fix it,” Abdallah says with a grin.
Like father, like son. When Abdallah is in the kitchen or roaming the dining room, he’s instructing staff to add bigger scoops of hummus to plates and ensuring there’s enough chicken breast in the shish taouk entree that diners will get two meals out of it.
Server Jamie Crawford warned me and a dining partner that the portions are massive, and he was right. We needed three to-go containers to pack up the remnants of our feast. On their way out after dinner, a trio of women – all of whom had their own doggy bags of leftovers – surveyed the spread on our table and made approving remarks about what we’d ordered. And then one broke into a cartoonish waddle as she went through the door to emphasize how full she was.
Casual shawarma shops are now common in Charlottetown, a city once dominated almost exclusively by oyster bars and taverns. But Abdallah believes the ingredient quality, the table service and especially the portion sizes are what keep the restaurant humming throughout the day.
If you go, try
Price range: appetizers from $20 to $28, main dishes from $24 to up to $46 for the kebab plate
Cedar’s Falafel
Made from mashed chickpeas and fava beans, the falafel is crispy, moist and light and is served rolled up in a foot-long pita. Ask for extra napkins – the zippy Lebanese tahini sauce will be dribbling down your chin with each bite.
Halloumi & Dressed Tomatoes
The best form of squeaky cheese is not the ubiquitous Canadian cheese curd, but Cedar’s thick, salty, caramelized slices of seared halloumi set atop a cucumber coin. Consider it a cousin of the classic watermelon and feta pairing. And even out-of-season slices of tomatoes taste good when they have a thick cloud of tangy toum, a creamy garlic sauce, on top.
Lebanese Combination Platter
The servers will tell you they can bring more pita to dip into the mound of velvety hummus, but you won’t have the space for it after you’ve also feasted on the herby, slightly sweet stuffed grape leaves and the crispy miniature football of kibbeh. This is one you order “for the table.”
As I made my way up the gravel drive, I could almost taste the warm bread with salty molasses butter I had at Fork Restaurant almost 10 years ago: Nan’s bread, a miniaturized version of the two-bun-style loaves most Newfoundland grandmas have been making for generations. At the time, Fork was operating as a pop-up in a coffee shop, where chef-owners Kyle Puddester and Kayla O’Brien would collect buckets of saltwater down the jagged rocks of Witless Bay to produce their own salt. Now, they have grown into a restaurant homestead on two hectares of land overlooking Mobile’s harbour – and Nan’s bread is better than ever.
The husband-and-wife team have created the kind of dining experience of which people often say, “Oh, I love that place. I’m going to plan a trip this weekend – it has been too long.” Though sometimes overlooked because it’s a 40-minute drive from St. John’s, it is well worth the journey for many tourists and “townies” alike. Fork finds the balance between local tastes and curating a fine-dining menu – no easy feat in rural Newfoundland.
The first few weeks of the season, locals clamour to book reservations. Fork’s cozy dining room hosts a mixed group, from iceberg-seeking tourists sitting cocooned in knit pillows on the banquette, to groups of friends sitting by the windows overlooking the ocean.
Puddester has always championed local ingredients from the restaurant’s on-site farm or found by foragers, melding them with techniques from around the world. Cod tongues get a boost from light crispy tempura batter; agnolotti is stuffed with charred carrot and tossed with fiddleheads, and a clever take on chips and dip is made with foraged wild leek. Local cod is a staple on the menu, typically served with some kind of potato (as is tradition in Newfoundland), though sometimes it comes in the form of pierogi, cabbage, and dill, and at other times it’s given the Italian treatment with gnocchi, puttanesca and anchovy bread crumbs.
Desserts are O’Brien’s specialty, utilizing French pastry techniques and drawing inspiration from Newfoundland. Trifle with rhubarb jelly, touton ice cream sandwiches and her version of a cinnamon bun – a cream cheese panna cotta with cinnamon salted caramel – and spiced cinnamon sugar fritters are on offer.
This year, Fork has hired Kyle Griffin to be the restaurant’s dedicated gardener. “The goal is to have a small-scale regenerative farm on our property growing vegetables, herbs, berries and edible flowers,” explains O’Brien. “That’s the dream!”
If you go, try
Price range: most main dishes from $20 to $25, with duck breast an outlier at $46
Fried Paneer Cheese
A small plate that’s been on the menu for years is a delight for all the senses, with beautifully presented crispy cubes of paneer and fragrant tikka masala, with cilantro chutney, yogurt and crispy onions.
Duck Breast
An impressive duck dish is always on the menu. Seared duck breast arrives with a savoury crispy granola, citrus hints, goat cheese and wildflower honey from a nearby apiary, or served with herb-toasted barley atop a puddle of carrot purée with lavender. On my most recent visit, the duck was a tribute to the humble turnip, a staple in Newfoundland cookery, served two ways (roasted and puréed) with a maple jus and bursts of tartness from partridgeberries.
Tea and Toast Bread Pudding
A witty spin on Newfoundland’s beloved breakfast, O’Brien infuses bread pudding with Tetley tea and serves it with a vanilla bean and Carnation milk gelato, topped with brown butter caramel.
Ottawa is a fantastic place for Vietnamese food. That’s in part a legacy of Project 4000, a 1979 effort by then-mayor Marion Dewar to resettle thousands of refugees after the Vietnam War.
Now, you can get pho, bun, rice wraps and banh mi at almost any hour of the day or night. But most of Ottawa’s Vietnamese restaurants feature the same dishes – to the point that the menu numbers are often identical from one place to another.
Huong’s Vietnamese Bistro, on the other hand, serves up something distinct for the knowing regulars who impart it with cult status. Named for its chef, Huong Nguyen, the restaurant has been around for 18 years – “like a teenager,” notes Kim Luu, co-owner and husband of the chef.
When it opened, they wanted to differentiate themselves from the many Vietnamese restaurants clustered on nearby Somerset Street in Chinatown, Luu says, so Nguyen came up with dishes no one else serves.
An appetizer of fried rice cake with egg might arrive at your table with him jokingly introducing it as “Vietnamese poutine.” The addictive quality of rice cake “fries” that are perfectly crisp on the outside and pillowy like French toast within lives up to the nickname. Hainanese chicken – steamed chicken perched on a bed of rice infused with the flavour of the rendered fat – is another specialty.
At other places, spicy sate soup arrives with a slick of red chili oil on its surface, but at Huong’s, the broth is thick and silken because it starts out as a paste of lemongrass, dried chilis, sesame seeds, peanuts and onion.
The restaurant’s menu is unchanging, as are the specials scrawled on a whiteboard in Vietnamese and Chinese characters. A steady stream of dine-in and takeout customers duck into the utilitarian dining room with the unmistakable body language of regulars.
“They don’t need a menu,” Luu says, gesturing at customers Diana Cosovean and Noahm Ellis, having a late lunch during one mid-afternoon lull.
The couple have been visiting regularly together for five years, after a friend of Ellis’s introduced him to the place. This is how it goes with Huong’s: a secret handshake network of people who know.
“It’s just better quality here,” says Ellis. “I leave rejuvenated, I feel good after eating here, but the restaurants on Somerset don’t do the same.”
Their go-to order includes spring rolls and tom yum soup that’s closer than anything else in town to what they tasted on a trip to Thailand. For mains, they rotate between bun, rice dishes or fold-it-yourself rice wraps, which came with a tutorial from Luu the first time they ordered.
Over at the restaurant’s cash counter, there’s a row of miniature provincial flags, and a wall papered with dozens of banknotes from all over the world, passed along by customers.
“Believe it or not, each bill I can tell who’s given it to me,” Luu says.
They’re all insiders who know where to get Vietnamese dishes you won’t find anywhere else, even in Ottawa’s plentiful landscape. And now you know the secret handshake, too.
If you go, try
Price range: main dishes from $10 to $17
Green Papaya Salad with Vietnamese Beef Jerky
An airy nest of long, thin ribbons of green papaya and carrot with cilantro, topped by delicate shards of sweet-and-savoury beef, dressed with fish sauce.
Bún with Meatballs
Rice vermicelli topped with a neat row of taut, bouncy pork meatballs, their char enhanced by a touch of honey.
Spicy Sate Soup with Chicken or Beef
The herbal, floral heat builds with each spoonful – enough to make you question your life choices, but not so much that you regret them.
Above a pair of grinning ceramic cats in the basement at Batifole, on the way to the bathroom, is a chalkboard sign that displays the restaurant’s cheeky slogan: “Best French food in Chinatown.”
It’s this kind of polished but unpretentious, excellent but unfussy approach that’s kept Batifole running for 22 years – and turned the French bistro into a city staple and local favourite.
Back in the early aughts, Pascal Geffroy, then a 36-year-old French chef from Provence, visited and fell in love with Toronto. In 2013, he decided to take over the existing Batifole, what was already a 30-seat French bistro located on an unassuming stretch of Gerrard East surrounded by cellphone stores, Chinese herbal shops and pho restaurants.
From there, he’s built an east-end institution. The menu is small, and focused on classic French staples: beef tartare on crackling crostinis; duck confit, rich and fatty on creamy cassoulet; and foie gras terrine with homemade brioche.
From the French flag displayed proudly in the front foyer, to the certificate from the Meilleurs Ouvriers de France that Geffroy won back in 2004, to the background chatter from the French-speaking servers, everything at this restaurant screams French, French, French.
But look closer and there are nods throughout to this city, and the restaurant’s East Chinatown location. Case in point is the produce, all purchased from nearby Chinese grocers, such as green onions to garnish the cassoulet and sesame seeds on the scallops, served with sesame Hollandaise (made with sesame oil instead of butter).
“I like to make the classics, with a twist of modernization,” says Geffroy.
And what keeps locals coming back isn’t just the food, but the feeling. The dining room is filled with regulars – the silver-haired Riverdalers enjoying a pre-theatre meal; the Leslieville moms meeting for an after-work rosé; the young couple with a kindergartener in tow. The space is deliberately laid-back, with walls decorated in vintage copper pans and flea market finds, some chipped paint here, a ceramic rooster there – eccentricities that only further endear it to locals.
(Speaking of eccentric, here’s a fun fact: The lamp from A Christmas Story that’s displayed in the back of the restaurant – that classic stocking-leg with the fringed shade – isn’t just another antique market treasure. The scene from the 1983 Christmas classic, where the family eats at a Chinese restaurant, was filmed in this very space.)
On most nights, Geffroy plays the convivial host. He makes the rounds in the dining room, warm and chatty, and charming to regulars and newcomers alike. Because while refinement matters, what matters even more, he said, is that customers feel relaxed.
“I like for people to feel like they’re coming home,” he says.
If you go, try
Price range: main dishes from $32 for the beef tartare to $68 for the hangar steak.
Pan-seared Scallops
Perfectly seared, sesame-crusted giant Japanese sea scallops with buttery parsnip purée and a sesame “Hollandaise.” There are two scallops per order, but I’d happily double it (or hey, triple it) and call it a main.
Fish Stew
This dish, which was a special on both my visits, should very well be a menu staple. Juicy pieces of lobster, wine-drunk mussels and artichokes are served in a shellfish and creamy tarragon sauce. Ask for an extra order of bread to mop up the sauce.
Soufflé
The menu warns that this takes at least 20 minutes to prepare, but don’t let that put you off. The soufflé here is textbook. A crisp, golden top. Perfect rise. And, when you break the crust with your spoon, a tiny exhale of sweet, custardy steam. Served with a Grand Marnier ice cream, it’s like climbing into a warm, pillowy-soft cloud.
The restaurants that have come and gone on Toronto’s Ossington strip are like a list of forgotten food trends. Craft mac and cheese. Breakfast tacos. Bulgogi cheesesteaks. And today, a trip to Ossington is not complete without navigating a traffic jam of lineups for all of the Instagrammy new places, from ice cream sammies to stone-ground matcha.
But throughout it all, one restaurant – Foxley Bistro – has somehow remained constant.
Chef Tom Thai’s west-end fixture has quietly made a name for itself as perhaps the antithesis to Ossington buzz. There are no gimmicks here. No fads. Just consistent, reliably delicious, big, bold flavours from a mix of Southeast Asian and Latin American cuisines. The plates are small and meant for sharing, and the roster of dishes has remained the same, for the most part, since the start. There’s the Arctic char ceviche and the sticky, sweet pork side ribs, for example, or the crispy lamb dumplings.
It’s a menu that, after almost 20 years in business, is pretty much down to just the greatest hits, said Thai. “Everything on the menu is someone’s favourite,” he said. “If it’s not broken, there’s no point in changing it.”
His clientele includes some of the city’s top chefs. Thai explains this in his characteristically humble manner: Foxley has always been open on Mondays, when most other restaurants are closed. So chefs began eating there. They liked the flavours, and kept coming.
The service here is warm, quick and endearingly casual – like you’re part of the family. On more than one occasion, my requests were met by my server with a simple thumbs-up. But you’ll trust them implicitly: Not only did he not try to upsell me, he even cautioned against over-ordering.
It’s the perfect neighbourhood restaurant – even for those who don’t live in the neighbourhood. On one visit, I overheard a couple at a table next to me bemoaning their move to the east end. As a result, they hadn’t been back at Foxley in years.
“We’ve been here since 2007,” said the server cheerily. “And we’re still just as good.”
If you go, try
Price range: from $9 to $30, per tapas plate
Arctic Char Ceviche
This one hits all the notes. Fatty slices of Arctic char cured in mouth-puckering citrus, and then served in a miso-chili bath. A small mountain of green apple matchsticks on top add sweetness and crunch. It’s sweet, salty, spicy, acidic – and addictive.
Baked Eggplant
Half an eggplant slathered in sweet, savoury miso and yuzu, and then roasted until the flesh is tender and melting. It’s served in a cast-iron pan with a small spoon, so you can eat it like ice cream.
Grilled Hangar Steak with Chimichurri
Steak and chimichurri. Simple, right? But Foxley’s version of this classic dish is punched-up with generous doses of lime juice, chili and so, so much garlic.
When Karri Green and Nico Schuermans opened Chambar back in 2004, they did so with one goal in mind: to deliver fine-dining-quality food without the white-tablecloth pretension. At the time, it was a bold move – Vancouver was home to many great casual eateries, and many excellent fancy ones, too. But what was missing, they believed, was something in the middle.
“It was: How do we offer that elevated service, that fine-dining everything – except no tablecloths or, ‘Which fork do I use?’” says Green, who is originally from New Zealand. “Just take all the complicated stuff out and have a really good product.”
Twenty-two years later, Chambar remains true to that mission – and it has made the restaurant one of the most revered in the city.
The kitchen is run by Schuermans, who is from Belgium and cut his teeth at Michelin-starred Brussels restaurants La Villa Lorraine and Comme Chez Soi, as well as at The Savoy hotel in London. His vision for Chambar was to honour traditional French techniques, but to morph them with some of his other culinary influences – particularly Morocco and the Middle East. As such, Chambar’s menu is a richly layered interpretation of high-class bistro food. Certain dishes, like the lamb tajine and the moules frites (available three ways), have been staples since day one. Also worth mentioning is the extensive beer list, which leans heavily Belgian and will impress even the brewing nerds.
Equally crucial to Chambar’s magic is its atmosphere, which is Green’s domain as principal owner and self-described “queen bee.” The restaurant’s aesthetic – exposed brick, glass lighting fixtures from Vancouver’s own Bocci, smooth wooden tables (not a tablecloth in sight), shiny leather banquettes – immediately sets the tone: this is a place in which to hang out. To have fun. To indulge a little. The name of the restaurant, in fact, is foundational to this ethos: the colloquial French word is used to describe the scene of convivial chaos that takes place, as Green describes it, “when the teacher leaves the room and all the kids go crazy.”
Service plays into this feeling, too, with food arriving fast and piping hot, and every staff member seeming genuinely happy to chat. “You come to get out of your house and leave your day at the door,” says Green. “And we ask our staff to do the same.”
Green and Schuermans met while they were both living in Australia and decided to move to Vancouver together. Although they are no longer a couple, they remain business partners and have three children, aged 20, 18 and 13 – all of whom have worked in the restaurant.
Throughout its impressively long tenure, Chambar has stayed true to its values: come as you are, eat well, leave satisfied. Portions are generous, with healthy amounts of protein and vegetables, and very little starchy or carby filler. And prices are fair. Green and Schuermans also recently launched a weekly three-course set menu for just $28. Even in 2004 that would have been a smoking deal.
If you go, try
Price range: small plates starting at $24; large plates from $35-$49
Chèvre Chaud
French goat cheese is baked until gooey and bubbling, and served with bouncy house-made focaccia and a knockout espelette pepper-infused honey.
Tajine d’Aziz à l’Agneau
Fall-off-the-bone braised lamb shank is presented on a bed of fluffy almond couscous alongside sweet figs, fresh cilantro, and fragrant cinnamon.
Pomme Frites
Yes, they are that good. A heaping bowl overflows with crispy French fries dusted with addictive seasoning salt.
There are some things you can count on in Ucluelet. Like surfboards strapped to car roofs, the briny ocean scent misting through cedars, and an occasional rainforest deluge to send tourists scurrying for cover.
There’s another in this small community on Vancouver Island’s rugged West Coast – a line of people snaking onto the sidewalk and waiting for a table at Heartwood Kitchen. This beloved breakfast and brunch eatery is a long-standing locals’ favourite. For visitors, all roads seem to lead to the converted heritage house that is home to Heartwood. Its wood-sided exterior, painted bright yellow, beckons like a beacon.
Chef Ian Riddick and his wife Heather Riddick, along with their friend Anthony Pugh, fellow chef and carpenter, form the dynamic trio of owners behind Heartwood.
“Ian’s a classically trained chef. He went to George Brown College, trained with chef John Higgins, and worked at the King Edward in Toronto,” says Heather. “Now he’s known for fried chicken and French toast.”
In 2013, after Ian landed a job as executive chef at Long Beach Lodge Resort, the Riddicks moved to Ucluelet, known locally as Ukee. But the couple also had an entrepreneurial itch to scratch and started forging the dream of opening their own restaurant with Pugh.
The stars aligned when a for-sale sign went up in front of the century-old Matterson House, which at various times had been a family home, an air force officer’s mess during the Second World War, a church property holding and a restaurant. Heather says the price was too good to pass up for a heritage house that came with a backyard botanical garden of brilliant rhododendrons ideal for special event catering. Pugh donned his tool belt for renovations and in 2018 Heartwood opened its doors.
The menu is as unpretentious as a greasy plaid shirt on a logger. It features items that you’d find at breakfast diners from coast to coast. However, it’s the attention to detail and unique twists on standard offerings that make Heartwood special. Ian buys pork loin and cures peameal bacon in-house, a nod to his culinary roots browsing for ingredients at Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market. The hot sauce is also house made. At under $40 taxes and tip in, including a bottomless cup of filtered coffee, the price is as right as rain in Ukee.
“I love the atmosphere of the Heartwood, and of course the food is fantastic,” says Globe and Mail food writer Julie Van Rosendaal. “The best eggs benny I’ve ever had.”
Stepping through the door of Heartwood Kitchen feels like entering a family home. The ambience is warm and informal. The open kitchen bustles. Servers navigate between just eight indoor tables and six seats on the front stoop. Black and white photos portray the Matterson House history.
“We’ve made Heartwood part of the fabric of our community. Our locals support us and they recommend us all the time,” Heather says. “I think that’s one of the things that we’re most proud of.”
That and the fried chicken.
“If we ever take it off the menu, there’s going to be a mutiny,” she says with a laugh.
After all, customers demand it.
If you go, try
Price range: from $16 to $27 per plate
Ukee Fried Chicken Benny
Served with two eggs, topped with perfect Hollandaise sauce. Comes with a salad of fresh local greens, smash browns and the piquant hot sauce.
Ukee Fried Chicken and French Toast
Baguette slices, soaked in egg mixture and refrigerated overnight, are baked in the oven the next morning, crisped up on the flat top to give them a delicious custardy texture, then served with fresh fruit and maple syrup.
Avocado Toast
Sourdough loaded with a colourful toppings of cherry tomato, pickled egg, beet-chickpea hummus and smashbrowns on the side.
Every town needs a deli, a place where the sandwiches are thick, the fries are crispy, the borscht is beefy and the menu is so immutable it’s practically chiselled in stone.
Opened in the mid-eighties by Aaron Bernstein’s parents as a butcher shop with some prepared foods, regulars started asking why they couldn’t sit down to eat their soups and sandwiches. With the addition of 78 seats, it became busy, but also unwieldy.
In 2012, after studying engineering and working in aerospace, Bernstein spent time in the family business and started thinking about how to improve it.
“Every day I was watching people leave because they were waiting an hour for their food,” recalls Bernstein. “When too many tables were dirty to keep up, they’d close.” With his mother’s approval, they reduced to 52 seats and began making more items from scratch. These days, it’s half retail, selling frozen soups, deli meats and shabbat candles, and half restaurant, tables packed with retirees drinking coffee and kids drawing with crayons.
According to owner Bernstein, regulars comprise more than 80 per cent of his clientele. When a couple walks in at 2:30 on a Monday, a server looks up and says, “You’re late,” as familiar as if they’re family.
Audrey Zimmerman has been a loyal customer since it opened. “Once they put the chairs and tables in there, it was no contest.” She’s here three times a week, after the gym. “When they see us, there’s coffee on the table and they ask, ‘your regular order?’”
For groups that come weekly at the same time, the restaurant throws a reserved sign on a table. One group, started as friends of Bernstein’s grandfather, has been seeking new members as older ones have died off. “They’ve been recruiting younger people,” says Bernstein. “My chef’s dad joined the group. He’s 75. He’s the young blood.”
If you go, try
Price range: from $15 to $22 per sandwich
Warm Corned Beef Sandwich
In a land without a geographical tie to the tribalist deli preferences of Quebec (smoked meat) or New York (pastrami), corned beef can confidently take centre stage in Manitoba. The menu has two versions. One is a perfectly serviceable sandwich made with corned beef from Manitoba’s own Smith’s Quality Meats. The second is what Bernstein and former chef Beth Jacob created themselves: It’s brined for 12 days with cinnamon and mace, then boiled, the brisket cut by hand. The chunky slabs of corned beef are piled high into slices of inch-thick rye bread lined with a faint schmeer of mustard.
Chopped Liver Sandwich
In some chopped liver, caramelized onions are a conduit – and tamer – of aggressive flavoured liver. And sometimes, as at Bernstein’s, the roasted beef liver is effectively a binding agent for a mouthful of onions. Either way it’s an acquired taste. It’s all balanced out with lettuce, tomato and onions.
Tongue Sandwich
The mortadella of Jewish deli meat – a fatty option somehow made to feel light by being shaved thin. After pickling for ten days, the tongues are boiled, cooled and peeled. The wafer-thin, highly marbled meat is stacked high like a thousand-layer cake between fresh slices of bread. Best enjoyed with Bernstein’s homemade hot mustard, sure to clear any nasal passage.
Maybe it’s the hoop-back chairs and knobby-kneed wooden tables. Or the wall-wide mural of a European mountain meadow in summer. Or it could be the wiener schnitzel, which draws heaps of praise.
Customers may have different reasons for loving Bistro Praha, a Czech restaurant nestled in the heart of downtown Edmonton. But their attachment to the food, the staff, and the restaurant’s inimitable vibe has kept the bistro busy and buzzy for almost 50 years.
Launched in 1977 by Frantisek Cikanek, an immigrant from then-Czechoslovakia, the Bistro quickly attracted a following by staying open until 2 a.m. Edmonton Symphony Orchestra artists and patrons of the nearby Citadel Theatre poured into the dimly lit space after shows, where Cikanek would sing, play cello, and generally charm the pants off patrons by talking politics while bringing out extra dishes for special guests.
And everyone was special.
“I would just walk in and they would say ‘Cordon Bleu with pan-fried potatoes and Kir Royale,’” recalls Eva Marie Clarke, 56, who grew up in Edmonton and was a regular at the original Bistro.
Cikanek helmed the restaurant until his death in 2000 with a small and steady staff, including fellow expat Milan Svajgr and his glamorous sister Sharka. Cikanek’s family kept things going until 2009 when a fire destroyed the historic brick building. Patrons feared the worst – did this mean the end of the schnitzel? – but Milan and Sharka re-opened a few blocks away in 2011. Today, Milan, 68, runs the Bistro with his wife and business partner, Alena Bacovsky, 71. She also cooks. (Sharka died in 2019, but a framed photograph of her taken in Paris in an Audrey Hepburn pose continues to draw fond comment.)
Bistro Praha is not fancy – there is wall-to-wall carpet on the floor – but it oozes character. The restaurant attracts tourists and celebrities, including Oilers’ star forward Leon Draisaitl, Rod Stewart and Joni Mitchell (the latter signed the bottom of a chair for posterity’s sake). But nobody loves it like a local.
For Edmonton musician Wilfred Kozub and his wife Daryl, it’s their go-to for comfort.
“They always treat us so well,” he says. Classically trained in piano, Kozub enjoys the Bistro’s background music. It’s a hit parade of concert and opera tunes: Is it Wagner’s Die Walkure? A piano solo by Debussy?
“You don’t know the composer necessarily. But you recognize it,” he says.
Walking into Bistro Praha, says fervent patron Doug McLean, is like entering a restaurant in Prague where the menu, studded with house-made classics like fried breaded cheese, steak tartare, and schnitzel, defies change.
“The food culture in Czechia is amazing and we’re lucky to have a place like that in Edmonton,” says McLean, 51, who has visited Czechia numerous times since his first trip as a teenager in 1992.
“It brings back all the memories of that trip from back in the early ‘90s. That’s what food does.”
If you go, try
Price range: from $15.95 for a European wiener to $48.95 for AAA filet mignon
Smoked Salmon
Resplendent with red onions, capers big as grapes, cream cheese and a generous amount of tangy rye bread.
Wiener Schnitzel
This classic European dish is breaded and pan-fried until lightly puffy, served with sliced lemon and potato salad.
Crêpes
Seven kinds of crêpes are variously stuffed with fruit or drizzled with Grand Marnier. The Butter Crêpe a la Frantisek is layered with apricot jam and ruffled with whipped cream. Don’t be embarrassed to ask for extra chocolate sauce.
