The Best Fries in Toronto.
Fries are the easiest thing on a menu to overlook and one of the hardest to actually get right. In Toronto, as everywhere else, restaurant fries are a different project from the drive-thru version: no freezer bag, no par-fried supply chain, just potatoes, patience and a cook willing to spend three days on a side dish. The kitchens below blanch, soak, chill and fry twice or three times before anything reaches the table, and you can taste every one of those steps.
Consider this the opening chapter rather than the final word. Seven spots, all of them restaurants, all serving fries we would happily order on their own with nothing else on the table. We know the city is hiding more. Send us yours and we will keep growing the list.
Tell us what we missed
This is the beginning of the list, not the end of it. If your favourite restaurant fries are not here, we want to know: the neighbourhood spot doing something quietly excellent, the kitchen that changed its oil, the plate you order every single time. Write to us through the suggestion form and we will eat our way through every one of them before the next update.
Union
Teo Paul has been cooking seasonal Ontario produce on Ossington since 2009, and his steak frites is the closest thing Union has to a permanent fixture on a menu that changes daily. The fries arrive seasoned rather than plain, with a sherry vinegar aioli that cuts through the beef fat and butter of whatever cut landed on the plate that night. Sit at the horseshoe bar, order them alongside the strip loin, and you will understand why the dish has outlasted every other item on the board.
Toronto
Ferdi's
Theo Dalton-Maag makes what may be the most labour-intensive chips in the city, and he makes them out of a laneway behind Mattachioni. Each batch takes three days: blanched, soaked, boiled, left overnight in cold water to leach the starch, then pre-fried before the final fry on service day. The result is a shell that shatters and an interior closer to mashed potato. Order them inside the chip butty, buttered and doused in vinegar, if you want the full Swiss-English argument for carbohydrates. Fridays and Saturdays, noon until sold out.
Toronto
Bernhardt's
The rotisserie chicken gets the attention at this converted Edwardian house on Dovercourt, but the potato programme is where the kitchen shows off. The fries are triple-cooked, and the alternative, roasted garlic potatoes that sit beneath the birds catching drippings all service, is arguably the better order. Get the half-and-half if you cannot decide. Either way, the gravy boat of Québécois-style sauce that comes with the chicken was clearly designed with dipping in mind.
Toronto
Dotty's
Jay Carter spent years doing intricate work at Dandylion, then opened a corner diner and put a plate of fries on the menu that people now plan evenings around. They are hand-cut russets, soaked overnight in a vinegar solution, then fried twice until the outside turns properly golden and the inside stays soft. Malt vinegar aioli on the side, Heinz if you insist.
Toronto
General Public Restaurant
Jen Agg’s Geary Avenue project reads as an English pub crossed with an American brasserie, and the fries land firmly on the English side. They come dusted with malt, which is the kind of small, deliberate choice that tells you how the rest of the kitchen thinks. Order them with the oysters and a martini at the bar for a version of a pub lunch that no pub has ever actually served.
Toronto
Linny’s
David Schwartz built Linny’s as a tribute to his mother Linda, half old-school steakhouse and half Jewish deli, with terrazzo floors and corduroy booths to match. The french fries are thrice-cooked and priced as a side, which undersells them considerably. They belong next to the bone-in ribeye or the hand-sliced pastrami, and they hold their crunch long enough to survive a table that keeps reaching over for one more.
Toronto
Aloette Restaurant
Patrick Kriss put a diner beneath Alo and gave it a burger that Toronto has been arguing about ever since. The fries that come with it are triple-cooked in beef fat, a two-day process for something most kitchens treat as an afterthought. They are thin, aggressively salted and structurally sound to the last one in the basket. A vegan version exists if you ask, and the cheese sauce and spicy relish treatment is worth doing at least once.
Toronto
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