Linny’s : An Incredible Steakhouse on Ossington

On Ossington Avenue, the fourth restaurant from Big Hug Hospitality (co-owned by David Schwartz and Brandon Marek) is the most personal in the group. Linny’s is named after Linda, David‘s late mother, and the room reads like a love letter to two food cultures David always thought belonged together: the Jewish deli and the steakhouse.

David grew up loving Chinese food, deli food and steakhouse food in roughly equal measure. The deli and the steakhouse, in his telling, always felt like cousins. Both are built around quality meat. Both quietly lean on their sides to make the meal sing. Combining them into a single restaurant was the easy part of the brief. Naming it after his mother made it inevitable.

Why a Deli Belongs Next to a Steakhouse

The two traditions share more than meat. They share a way of cooking. Linny’s took the long route on purpose, and the menu shows it. The kitchen highlights Canadian farmers through its beef program, and it deliberately reaches past prime cuts. Roasted lamb neck sits next to the steaks. Tripe schnitzel is on the menu without apology. The pastrami carries the same weight, in price and prestige, as a prime rib.

The restaurant works with co-chef Ethan Rogers alongside David. Together they have built a kitchen that does its own everything: pickles fermented on site, bread and babka baked daily, fish cured and smoked in house, sausages and salamis made by hand, knishes hand-rolled, pasta made from scratch. The pastrami sits in cure for days and then in the smoker for twelve hours. The result is the kind of menu where every line on the page was earned somewhere upstream.

More Than Meat

For a restaurant with a steakhouse spine, Linny’s puts unusual care into its vegetables and its seafood. The kitchen works with local farms, and a guest who comes wanting to avoid the centre of the menu will not feel demoted. The same hands cure the fish, brine the pastrami and roast the lamb neck. Vegetables get the same time and attention as the beef program.

Mid-Century, Made Yesterday

The room was designed by Jack Lipson of Ipso Studio. The aesthetic leans hard into mid-century modern, but the intent is not nostalgia. The brief was for a room that could just as easily have been built yesterday as seventy years ago. The result is a space that holds its own without trying to look like a period piece, and that suits the way the kitchen cooks.

Service at Linny’s is led by Anthony Young, the group’s director of operations, and general manager Chanelle Amey. The thread that runs through every Big Hug address is at its most polished here: warm, precise, never overbearing. There is no upselling and no choreography that a guest can spot from across the room. The work is in making the table comfortable.

Geoffrey Fleming, the wine director for the group, builds the list. The selection is shaped for a steakhouse without falling into checklist clichés. The cocktail menu is small and confident, designed to share the table with the food rather than compete with it.

Asked what he is proudest of at Linny’s, as at Mimi and Sunny’s, David points to the team and the culture inside the kitchen and the dining room. That internal culture is what guests feel without being able to name it: the sense that the room runs because the people in it want to be there.

Written by Fabie Lubin
Photography by Daniel Neuhaus

Updated on May 13, 2026

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