The Best Chinese Restaurants in Toronto.
Chinese food in Toronto isn’t one cuisine, and pretending otherwise means missing most of it. Walk into a Chinatown room on Spadina and you’ll get black bean beef ho fun with real wok hei at one in the morning. Drive out to Finch and Kennedy and you’ll be pointing at a live tank, choosing the lobster that’s about to arrive at your table stacked into a tower under a blanket of fried garlic. Up in Markham, a Hong Kong bing sutt is pouring milk tea and baking pork chops over rice the way it’s been done since the sixties. Cantonese banquet halls, siu mei counters, wonton noodle specialists, dim sum houses that run on order sheets instead of carts — the depth is the point.
We scoured Toronto, from Dundas and Spadina through Scarborough and up into Markham and Richmond Hill to land on these spots. Some are counters where the roast duck is hanging in the window and you’re out in four minutes. Others are rooms built for a table of twelve and a bill to match. All of them are worth the drive.
Wonton Hut Noodle Bar
Chef Eddie Yeung left Hong Kong in 1993 and opened this Markham noodle shop around 2009, and the wontons have been wrapped by hand every morning since. They’re plump, filled with a whole tiger shrimp and pork, and they sit in a clear, restrained broth under thin noodles with the alkaline snap that defines the Hong Kong style. Order the wonton noodle soup first to see if the kitchen is serious, then come back for the beef brisket — marinated in a house blend and simmered around six hours until it gives way completely.
Markham
Fishman Lobster Clubhouse Restaurant
The Scarborough room that made the lobster tower famous, and still the reason people book a table of ten for a Tuesday. Live tanks line three of the four walls — king crab, giant lobster, whole fish — and what you choose comes back chopped, deep-fried typhoon-shelter style, and stacked into a mountain buried under crisp fried garlic, dried chilies and whitebait. Eat the garlic with the meat, order the lobster roe fried rice, and know that the portions are sized for more people than you brought. It landed at No. 16 on the Chinese Restaurant Awards’ inaugural Elite 30 Canada list in 2025.
Toronto
Jumbo Lobster Restaurant
Fishman’s younger sibling, opened in 2022 and considerably more polished — Victorian-leaning decor, private rooms, wine racks, and dry-aging fridges you can see from the table. The typhoon-shelter lobster tower carries over, but so does a full dim sum service and a 48 oz dry-aged ribeye that holds up on its own terms, not just as a curiosity. Try the lobster baked in supreme soup, which keeps the meat juicy where the dry-garlic version runs salty, and add the roast suckling pig for the crackling. It ranked No. 7 on the 2025 Elite 30 Canada list, nine spots above the original.
Richmond Hill
Yu Seafood
Ten thousand square feet on two floors inside Yorkdale, with a sashimi bar, a wine bar, a pastry counter and gold-leafed steel fish suspended overhead — the room won a LOOP Design Award and it shows. The crispy fried garlic lobster is the house signature, and lobster is offered close to eleven ways, but the dim sum is where the kitchen’s precision comes through: silky shrimp cheung fun, baked barbecue pork buns with a flaky crust, and a jet-black bamboo charcoal bun with molten salted egg yolk inside. Come for a long lunch rather than a quick one. The original Richmond Hill location has nine private rooms and its own fish market attached.
Richmond Hill
Starchiva Cuisine
A private-kitchen style banquet room in the Beaver Creek business park, where the set menus are the reason to go and the value is hard to argue with. A recent one built around a five-pound lobster served three ways — stir-fried with Maggi sauce, steamed over vermicelli, and folded into egg custard — alongside Hokkaido scallops and tiger prawns in XO sauce, braised five-spice duck, and wok-seared beef filet finished with French mustard. Tables are spaced unusually generously for a dim sum room, which makes it a rare Cantonese banquet hall where you can hear the person across from you. Book ahead on weekends and get there early for parking.
Richmond Hill
Hong Kong Bistro Cafe
Up a staircase off Dundas near Spadina, this second-floor cha chaan teng has been feeding Chinatown and half of OCAD on handwritten daily specials taped to the wall. The baked pork chop rice is the order — tomato sauce, rice, cheese, straight from the oven — with the stir-fried spaghetti and beef running a close second. Get the signature iced coffee, roasted and bracing in the Hong Kong way, or the milk tea if you want the softer version. Bring cash or debit; the credit card stays in your pocket.
Toronto
Swatow Restaurant
The Spadina room that has been settling arguments and soaking up late nights since the 1980s, open until two in the morning, seven days a week. The black bean beef fried noodles are the benchmark dish — a crisp pan-fried noodle cake under garlicky fermented black bean sauce and tender beef, with the caramelized edge that only comes from a properly screaming wok. The fried clams in black bean are worth ordering alongside, and the beef brisket noodle soup is the one to get if you want something quieter. Tight tables, fast turnover, portions bigger than the prices suggest.
Toronto
East Court & Mike’s BBQ
Jack Tsoi is known in the trade as a siu mei sifu, and he earned it — he ran East Court out of the food court at Dragon Centre, Scarborough’s pioneering Chinese mall, before taking over Mike’s BBQ in 2014 and merging the two. The char siu is pork shoulder marinated in a house spice blend and honey-glazed until lacquered; ask for the fattier cut and the sauce on the side. The siu yuk crackles the way it’s supposed to, the roast duck is worth the half order, and whole roast pigs go out the door for Chinese and Filipino celebrations alike. It’s a takeout window, not a dining room. Closed Wednesdays.
Toronto
Top Choice Restaurant
A cramped, loud, dinner-only Cantonese room on Kennedy with strips of paper taped to the walls listing whatever came in that day — this is a kitchen cooking for its regulars, not for a review. Razor clams in black bean sauce are the house specialty, the deep-fried oysters are worth the order, and dishes like black bean eel and stir-fried sweet potato leaves tell you exactly who’s eating here. What ties it together is wok hei, consistent across the stir-fries in a way that plenty of bigger rooms can’t manage. Reserve — it fills up on weeknights too.
Markham
Cafe De Hong Kong 良心冰室
The Chinese name, 良心冰室, translates roughly as “conscience bing sutt,” a nod to the older Hong Kong café format that came before the cha chaan teng. Opened in late 2021 in a plaza behind First Markham Place, it built its lineup on the Hainanese chicken rice — poached, tender, served with dipping sauces, soup and tea — and on a fried chicken and avocado burger stuffed into a pineapple bun that requires a stack of napkins. The milk tea is creamy without tipping sweet, and there’s a bottled cold version if you want one for the drive. No reservations, so aim for after three on a weekend.
Markham
The ONE Fusion Cuisine
A bright, modern Cantonese banquet hall on Bayview where dim sum arrives on order sheets rather than carts, plated in small wooden presentation boxes. The baked barbecue pork bun comes in a flaky pastry shell with a honey and ginger glaze, the siu mai are unusually large and juicy, and the black steamed bun hides a liquid salted egg yolk centre. Pan-fried beef ribs in honey and lemon sauce and the crispy ginger pudding round out an order well. Mornings are walk-in only and the room opens at nine — treat that as a starting time, not a suggestion.
Richmond Hill
Sunnys Chinese
You get in through an indoor hallway in the Kensington mini-mall, past a purple neon psychic sign, into the old Cold Tea space — mint green and dusty rose walls, disco on the speakers. Sunny’s started as a takeout pop-up run out of Mimi’s kitchen and became its own room in August 2022, and the cooking has drifted chili-forward and charcoal-heavy since. The husband and wife beef is the order — tripe, shank and tendon marinated in chili oil — with the silver needle noodles, steamed then stir-fried until they char, and a skewer of grilled hispi cabbage under cumin. Finish with the Hong Kong French toast, black sesame jam and oolong condensed milk. Bib Gourmand in the Michelin Guide since 2023, and the room that won Schwartz the guide’s Toronto Young Chef Award that same year.
Toronto
Mimi Chinese
David Schwartz and Braden Chong opened this windowless Davenport room in the fall of 2021 with a menu that labels each dish by province — Canton, Hunan, Shaanxi, Sichuan, Shanghai — and it has been hard to book ever since. The four-foot belt noodle is still the reason most people come: a single continuous Shaanxi wheat noodle with braised beef and Sichuan peppercorn, cut at the table with scissors. Order the Hunan chili sea bass, built on chilies fermented for about a month, and the supreme fried rice with dried scallop, salted duck egg and lap cheong. It closed in January 2026 for its first renovation and reopened in February with white tablecloths and chrome detailing over the red booths, plus a charcoal grill, Canadian steaks served with Chinese sauces, and soup on the menu for the first time. Recommended in the Michelin Guide Toronto.
Toronto
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