LITTLE SHMIDDY’S HOT MEAT HOUSE 584 Parliament, at Wellesley, 416-961-1600, littleshmiddyshotmeathouse.com
Michael Lamos has chosen an evocative, if potentially misleading, name for his first restaurant. At best, it conjures up visions of a sand-battered roadside diner off some desert highway where bleary-eyed truckers chow down on open-faced turkey sandwiches. At worst, replace “roadside diner” with “strip club.”
But there’s no formica, no naugahyde and no Channing Tatum to be found anywhere in the 15-seat Cabbagetown eatery – just warm wooden panelling and cozy bench seats. There is, however, an open-faced sandwich – but it’s made of tender brisket and smothered in a savoury mess of egg, avocado, black beans and roasted herbed tomatoes.
The name, as it turns out, is a holdover from Lamos’s original plan to serve a rotating menu of meaty sandwiches to Cabbagetowners at the noon hour. But the neighbourhood wasn’t particularly hungry for lunch, so he retooled the place to focus on hearty dinners and eye-popping brunches made with vast quantities of local and homemade ingredients.
The locals come regularly now, and they know to show up hungry. A house favourite is the French toast stuffed with goat cheese and crème fraîche, which I spotted on another table during a recent visit and briefly mistook for a tree stump smothered in berry-pear-ginger compote. Caesars come in bucket-sized Mason jars, but what’s really worth marvelling over is the toasty slice of candied bacon on top.
Most popular, however, is the Chicken Schnitzel Double Down. “I actually stopped serving it for a couple weeks, and people were freaking out,” Lamos says.
Thick, moist chicken breast schnitzel and rounds of fresh, flavourful bacon get stacked onto duck-fat-fried challah with cheddar, spicy mayo and a layer of vinegary napa cabbage slaw that slices right through the fat. (“It’s fermented a bit, so it’s good for you.”) In short, it’s the profane and the sublime on a single sandwich. And you can even get it with fries.
“It’s like a heart attack on a plate,” Lamos admits. “I actually say to people, ‘Okay, I’ll buy you guys dessert if you finish everything on the plate, including the fries.’ And then they’re at the three-quarter mark, and it’s like… they’re sweating.
“But there are a couple of girls who just come in and pile the whole thing in – it’s amazing.”
Gryfe’s bagels form the backbone of Cafe Neon’s breakfast sandwiches, like this smoked trout version.
CAFE NEON 1024 Queen West, at Ossington, 647-351-6366 241 Wallace, at Ward, 647-352-8366 cafeneon.ca. Breakfast daily, full brunch menu on weekends.
The Greek diner is such a staple of so many North American towns, it’s a wonder nobody tried to give it an update before Cafe Neon.
Though both of the café’s locations (the original in the Junction Triangle, plus a two-month-old sibling on West Queen West) are pure modern coffee shop, done up in blond wood, steel and bold hits of colour, the menu reveals a Mediterranean heart: feta-scrambled eggs, dill, oregano, lemon, liberal glugs of olive oil.
“I’ve always loved diners,” says Neon co-owner Katy Chan. “Niki (Tsourounakis, her partner) was always like, I want a café. So we thought, let’s mash it together.”
That formula was a success in the west end, where former caterer Tsourounakis noticed a lack of local lunch spots while out on Wallace for a gig. “We thought we were going to use the back kitchen as a catering kitchen,” she recalls. “What happened is the food kind of took over.”
They weren’t in the market for a second location until a friend sent them a photo of what had previously been Cafe Bernate on Queen, asking if they wanted restaurant equipment.
“As a joke, I said ‘I don’t want the stuff, I want the place!'” Tsourounakis says. “The phone rang 10 minutes later and it was [the friend], saying they were going to take over the space but couldn’t. Literally, I think we came the same day and looked at it and fell in love.”
“We make really intelligent business decisions, like, ‘Oh, yeah, this place feels great,'” Chan deadpans.
Up front, there’s a coffee counter serving Sam James’s Cut Coffee (in the absence of the SJCB Coffee Pocket – R.I.P.).
“When we were painting and sanding and everything, we were going out every couple of hours to get his espresso,” Chan says.
Head to the back dining room for the full breakfast and lunch menu, which includes two-egg breakfasts, ginger-cardamom oatmeal and hefty breakfast sandwiches piled high onto Gryfe’s bagels. On weekends, they extend the menu to include poached eggs with cornmeal-crusted Ontario fish cakes and benedicts with pulled pork or trout. Blueberry buttermilk pancakes come with a mess of toppings – Greek yogurt, bacon, fruit salad – because Chan, like me, is one of those tortured souls who can’t just order a plate of pancakes and be done with it.
They’re meticulous about their ingredients: the trout and Sanagan’s pork are smoked in-house, and Tsourounakis makes a special trip every week to Gryfe’s for those bagels.
“It takes a good two days out of the week to source everything,” Tsourounakis says. “But at the end of the day it’s all worth it when you put the food in front of someone.”
At Bugigattolo, Italian lunches become brunch – like this mortadella sandwich topped with a runny egg.
BUGIGATTOLO 54 Fraser, at Liberty, 416-583-3895, bugigattolokitchen.com. Breakfast daily, full brunch menu on weekends.
Italy as a country is not particularly big on breakfast. When I was an elbow-high Canadian expat growing up in Friuli, the adults would only ever have a caffe latte or maybe a cookie before heading out the door. Meanwhile, my nonna would offer to fix me a bowl of “Cheerios,” a term she used for everything from corn flakes to cocoa-flavoured Rice Krispies.
Francesco D’urzo, part of the family behind Bugigattolo, corroborated my childhood memories.
“In Italy, your breakfast is a coffee, cappuccino, croissant – out,” he says. But that hasn’t stopped the shabby-chic spot in Liberty Village from turning Italian staples into the brunch dishes they were always, secretly, truly meant to be.
Everything else about the tiny eatery (the name translates, roughly, to “hole in the wall”) is classic rough-around-the-edges Italian. Sepia-toned snaps of relatives are pinned up over a paint-splattered wall, and D’urzo family members flow in and out from behind the counter while Francesco hollers back and forth with patrons from his station in the kitchen. By my second visit, he was joking about enlisting me for tomato-sauce-stirring duty.
The choice to open here, as D’urzo says, “was a decision made [due to a] lack of authenticity in Liberty Village. There were a lot of corporate restaurants, but nothing that’s actually homemade food. It’s how my nonna used to cook, how she taught my mom. Nothing extravagant.”
Pop in early in the day and you can grab a croissant and an espresso – a standard breakfast for both my countrymen and the Liberty office crowd. But their weekday breakfast options, available all day long, recast sliced mortadella and ‘nduja as breakfast sandwich fillings (the former with provolone, the latter with a layer of ricotta, both served on your choice of ciabatta or a sweet brioche). The perfectly fluffy frittatas are also popular: Get yours in a slice, if you’re in a hurry, or chopped up and piled into a ricotta-smeared sandwich.
Weekends will soon see the D’urzos stretch their definition of Italian brunch even further to include pan-fried veal with eggs and home fries, frittelle doughnuts with apple or chocolate chips, crostata “pies” with cookie-like crusts and house-made jam, and even affogatos. Does throwing espresso on a scoop of gelato make it breakfast? I know my seven-year-old self would approve.
Don’t miss: We’re still waffling on these brunch spots
