A look at five of Toronto’s most beautiful restaurants

The room should announce a restaurant’s intentions and evoke a sense of place within the city. And it should be built to be timeless, by “selecting materials that are really long-lasting, that get better with time,” said Ali McQuaid Mitchell of Futurestudio, the design firm behind Bar Prima and Lee. “Marbles, leathers, woods — as they get worn in, they actually become more beautiful.”

Here, five of the most stunning dining rooms in Toronto, based on beauty, innovation and how well they fit in our city.

Ten years ago, the young design firm Partisans was approached by chef Grant van Gameren, Robin Goodfellow and Mike Webster to create an eating and drinking experience inspired by the ancient wood pintxo bars of Barcelona, Madrid and San Sebastian, and unlike anything else in Toronto.

“It’s a miracle that we got that commission,” reflected Alex Josephson, architect and co-founder of Partisans. “Architecture requires so many things to go right for you to do something extraordinary.”

The College and Bathurst room was originally all open brick and tin ceiling, often found across Toronto in what’s left of our Georgian architecture. “That journey through the front door of Raval has to completely transport a person in 600 square feet,” said Josephson. “How can you take an unassuming storefront in Toronto and tell the whole world to visit?”

The designers took cues from the chefs’ personal esthetic, such as their tattoos. “We unfolded these floors and walls, kind of like you would a geometric shape into flat surfaces, and we started drawing on that as a continuum, as if it were a tattoo.”

The room took shape in a modern interpretation of Art Nouveau, a century-old style defined by the sinuous curves of organic material. The space adopted a muscular quality, with fibrous lines and striations carved into the wood, a South-African mahogany they entrusted to the Toronto-based specialty fabricators at Millworks Custom Manufacturing to cut. The hand-drawn blueprints were translated into three-dimensional geometries using architectural software, and then it was time to install the practical stuff like drip trays, a spot for citrus and windows to the kitchen — everything you need to support the flow of a good bar.

Bar Prima had to be dramatic, rooted in Italian sophistication.

To achieve that vision, chefs Nick Iaboni, Julian D’Ippolito and Craig Harding turned to Futurestudio in 2023. Its founder, Ali McQuaid Mitchell, has her methods for getting inside the client’s point of view. “We’ll ask the chef to make us a playlist,” she said. “We’ll keep the playlist going in the studio as we’re working on the project to understand from the client’s perspective what they think the mood of the place is going to be.”

When you walk into the intimate space, you’re transported worlds away from bustling Queen Street West. The entrance’s glass blocks were sourced from Murano, Italy, where glassmaking traditions go back centuries and special mineral compositions make infinite combinations of transparent colours. Through it, you can see the shadows of people walking by, creating an eerie effect.

The gold ceiling is a standout feature: four-by-four-inch sheets of gold leaf were gently applied with a paintbrush, a process that took several weeks.

And the radiating intensity of the Yves Klein blue banquets electrifies the room. “Craig is actually really interested in fashion and he gave us a lot of imagery of, say, Balenciaga bags, which we translated into notes like details in the banquet leather,” said McQuaid Mitchell.

But the beauty doesn’t come at the expense of practical things like good lighting and comfortable chairs. “We test all our chairs, like can you sit in it with high heels, can you cross your legs,” said McQuaid Mitchell. “All the ways in which people would be sitting and enjoying the space.”

“Understanding the chef’s menu, that drives everything, that becomes the nucleus of our starting point,” says designer Guido Costantino. Some chefs use tweezers to control the plating of a dish; others opt for hand-torn salads.

At chefs Nick Manzone and Luke Donato’s new no-nonsense pasta bar, Occhiolino, the energy spills into the room from the kitchen. The long powder coated steel bar sits guests a metre away from cooks shouting and assembling orders.

It’s brash and lively compared to Costantino and Domenica Rodà’s previous design work at Osteria Giulia, which Costantino describes as “more contained; the room has a much quieter, monastic feel. You don’t hear the pots, you don’t hear the hustle and bustle of the kitchen.”

Occhiolino is dedicated to simple food made with practised technique. “In terms of the palette, we tried to keep it reductive, like pasta,” Rodà says. “Flour, salt, water, to concrete, brick, wood and steel. It’s not about mimicking but about keeping it honest.”

The restaurant is housed on Bathurst, just off College Street in what used to be an autobody shop, and before that a carriage house. Repurposing a building keeps its story going when it would otherwise be lost to development, preserving a sense of local heritage. “Its roots work perfectly with the philosophy of the restaurant,” says Costantino. “You can’t get any more basic than flour, water and salt as a starting point, and it really drove a lot of our design decisions.”

Opening a restaurant in a quiet neighbourhood — like Porzia’s, on Oakwood — as opposed to a buzzing strip requires a different thought process. “Part of the approach was to make it seem like a place that has been there before and has been there for some time,” says Sara Parisotto of Commute Design. “You want it to be a space that people are comfortable going to, and not that you have to go home and change to come and eat there.”

Owner Basilio Pesce envisioned Porzia’s as a restaurant that wouldn’t absorb him; a mature and comfort-driven experience for himself and for his guests. A place to enjoy hefty 14-layer lasagna bolognese and soft-serve tiramisu close to home.

Parisotto and co-founder Hamid Samad, her colleague since 1999, shaped the dining room around the kitchen, which they see as Porzia’s heartbeat, pumping food into the dining area and bar. The bar and kitchen are clad in gorgeous narrow blue tiling, accenting the room with a coolness and trust. Warm wooden walls, shelves and tables set a comforting mood in the room sparsely decorated with a few family photographs. The fixed stools that surround the bar feel intimate and steady, setting the stage for the familiar person-to-person contact of a friendly community.

Making a restaurant look good is one thing, but making sure it suits its setting is another entirely. “We approach the restaurant from two perspectives: one as the client’s perspective, the other as someone who is just in the neighbourhood,” said Samad.

That’s why the just over one-year-old restaurant is by all measures a local spot, a place where you can drop in for a weekday dinner with family or sit at the bar to have a casual lunch for one. “Over-developing our city has come at a cost,” said Samad, “and that cost is what you experience when you walk through Oakwood village versus downtown Toronto.”

Restaurateur Ambica Jain sought to bring elevated South Asian cuisine to Toronto by opening Adrak Yorkville in the spring of 2022.

The menu, created by a team of chefs led by Vineet Bhatia, represents regional cuisines from across India, and the space had to look just as expansive. “It was [informed by] their love for India, its colours, vibrance and diversity, and more importantly the image of a progressive and elegant cultural aspect of India,” says Bennet Lo of design firm Dialogue 38.

The space is infused with nods to India’s cultural traditions, with a twist.

The furnishings, which lean toward a Mughal style, were made in India and shipped specifically for the restaurant. Ornate arches are a staple in the hallways of Mughal palaces; here, they hearken back to 18th-century grandeur but are built with a modern, minimal sensibility. Traditional geometric and floral tile carvings are referenced in the vibrant wallpaper. And the symmetry of the dining room provides a serene flow but is also characteristic of both Mughal style and British colonial bungalows.

Rattan has been popular in India for centuries, a common denominator from villages to palaces, seen in infrastructure, decoration and colonial-era furniture. And the rattan-esque vector pattern seen throughout Adrak helps tie all the elements together. “It’s a journey into exploring all the tastes and beauty of India,” Lo said, “without forgetting the essentials of the past.”