At Made-Rite, Kensington Market Gets the Corner-Store Counter It Was Missing

On the edge of Kensington Market, on a quiet corner of Wales Avenue near the hospital, Made-Rite has spent the past year doing something deceptively simple: a serious breakfast sandwich and a proper cup of coffee, served under one roof. It is one of six projects from Toronto restaurateur Leemo Han, the name behind Hanmoto, Seoul Shakers, Shaker’s Club, Pepper’s, and Oldeseoul Tavern and it is the most pared-back of the bunch.

Han grew up between Philadelphia, New Jersey and Toronto, and Made-Rite is his answer to something he missed. East-coast corner stores and bodegas, he found, did two things at once that Toronto rarely managed: a solid, working-person’s diner sandwich and coffee that could hold its own. “A lot of the spaces in Toronto, they’ll have great coffee, but they’ll only serve pastries, or they’ll have great bites, but then their coffee is not up to industry standards,” explains Kevin Birung, who runs the counter and the coffee program. Putting the two together, properly, was the whole point.

Birung joined six to eight months after the doors opened, taking over the espresso side from Sam, an early partner who had shaped the coffee, worked with Han at the now-closed Vietnamese fusion spot Pinky’s, and has since moved back to Asia. The coffee Birung pours is built to match the food rather than upstage it: balanced, neither aggressively fruity nor heavily roasted, sitting comfortably in the middle.

The food follows the same logic. “We try our best to serve an everyday sandwich that can really serve you bank for buck,” says Birung, and the kitchen leans into honest choices over premium flourishes. That includes the cheese. “We still use processed cheese, because there’s no other cheese that’ll really give you the cheese pull,” he says, untroubled by the lack of artisanal credentials. The goal, he repeats, is consistency and freshness, a lunch you could happily eat every day, which counts for something in a spot whose regulars include the hospital staff next door.

The breakfast sandwiches are the main event, none more than the sausage, egg and cheese, a steaming, ketchup-streaked number that disappears fast. At lunch, the namesake Made-Rite is Birung’s own favourite, a take on the New York chopped cheese with marinated loose ground beef crisped on the flat top, American cheese, pickles, onions, ketchup and mustard folded into a steamed bun. A roster of bodega-style sandwiches rounds out the board, alongside banana bread and cookies at the counter. Birung’s pick there is the strawberry banana, rarer and more surprising, he argues, than the crowd-favourite chocolate one.

What he is proudest of is not on the menu. “We have our own little corner of Toronto that doesn’t feel like any other space in the city,” he says, describing a steady crew and a growing set of regulars just outside Kensington. In a city where the everyday diner is a fading form, Made-Rite makes the quiet case that doing the basics right, sandwich and coffee both, is an ambition of its own.

Written by Daniel Neuhaus
Photography by Scott Usheroff

Updated on June 13, 2026

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