Richmond Station : Toronto’s bustling institution

There is a big circular window at the front of Richmond Station, and it looks a little like a stop on the London Underground. The team behind the restaurant didn’t love it at first. They could not afford to replace it either, so they leaned in, and that window ended up naming the place and shaping its whole identity. Fourteen years later, it remains one of the most dependable rooms in downtown Toronto : a busy, unpretentious restaurant where a quick burger and a seven-course tasting menu happen at neighboring tables.

There should be a Richmond Station at Richmond Street

The restaurant was almost called Richmond Tavern. Founder, owner and sommelier Ryan Donovan and chef-partner Hayden Johnston had set out to build a tavern, heavily influenced by Danny Meyer and Gramercy Tavern in Manhattan, a place Hayden and his partner Carl treat as a kind of mecca. But once they took over the space on Richmond Street, the tavern idea stopped feeling right. The circular window kept pulling them toward the image of a subway stop. “If you walk up Yonge Street from Union Station, you cross King Station at King Street, Queen Station at Queen Street and Dundas Station at Dundas Street,” Ryan explains. “We thought there should be a Richmond Station at Richmond Street.” The window they once wanted gone is now iconic for them, and they work to protect it.

Bustling like a train station

Ask Ryan to describe the room and he reaches for one word: bustling. “Richmond Station feels the best when the restaurant is full,” he says, and it usually is. The vibe is squarely neighborhood, the kind of local spot regulars treat as their own, which is exactly why visitors from out of town seek it out to see where Torontonians actually go. The staff talk about a “station vibe,” and they mean it literally. Guests often arrive with their luggage, squeezing in one last meal before a flight. Some settle in for hours over a long lunch; others keep their coats on, grab a burger and a pint in 45 minutes, and dash off to the game. “You don’t have to dress a certain way. You don’t have to have a certain amount of money. You don’t have to have a certain window of time,” Ryan says. “We want to take you however you are.”

Relaxed excellence, never casual

The service has a name too, borrowed from Danny Meyer: relaxed excellence. Ryan is careful to separate it from casual, a word he refuses to use for the room. “Casual sometimes can be rooted in not caring,” he says, recalling a meal in Paris where the service was too cool to bother checking in. Relaxed, for him, is the opposite: it comes out of deep preparation. He compares the floor team to great musicians, a Tom Petty or a Taylor Swift, who look at ease on stage precisely because of how much they rehearse. At Richmond Station, that ease is built on knowledge of the menu, the garnishes and the allergens, so a server can guide a guest with genuine confidence. There is also no tip line on the bill, a point worth its own section below.

One cow, one pig, every week

The kitchen starts with the ingredient and who raised it. “The foundation of our food comes from the ingredient and who raises it, where it comes from, how it’s grown,” Hayden says. What sets the place apart is a commitment to whole-animal butchery. Richmond Station does not put a steak on the menu, because serving strip far would mean buying hundreds of single cuts a week, and one cow yields only 40 or 50 strip fars. So the restaurant buys a whole cow a week, a whole pig a week, plus chickens, ducks and fish, all of it from Ontario farms the team has visited. Everything that follows from those carcasses is made in house, including the salamis, sausages and charcuterie.

The cooking is unapologetically seasonal. For six, seven, even eight months of the year that means root vegetables, cabbage, beets and rutabaga; then the first asparagus and wild leeks push up and, as Hayden admits with a laugh, go on nearly everything for the short window they last. Spring lamb is the next thing headed for the menu.

The burger and the chef’s menu

Two reputations precede Richmond Station, and Hayden loves that guests can have either, or both. There is the burger, ordered by the table that came in for a beer on the way to a game. And there is the chef’s menu: six to eight courses over roughly two and a half hours, changing every two weeks to track the season. It opens with a bite or two, moves through a cold vegetable or raw-seafood course and house charcuterie, then a small plate or salad, before turning to hot courses, a pasta or fish followed by beef, a game bird, duck or that spring lamb, and finally two desserts.

The best part, for Hayden, is watching the two worlds meet. A table deep into the tasting menu will catch sight of the burger landing beside them and quietly promise to come back for it; the burger table, seated next to all that careful cooking, books the chef’s menu for next time. “Nothing brings me more joy,” he says. That range is the point. Hayden has always wanted the restaurant to be as approachable as possible.

Ontario in every glass

Ryan’s wine list has a clear thesis: a restaurant in a wine region should pour that region’s wines. Every by-the-glass pour at Richmond Station is from Ontario. He points to State Bird and Provisions in San Francisco, a global city that could for anything yet fills its glasses from Sonoma and Napa, and argues Toronto should do the same with its own backyard. He treats Ontario as a serious wine region and Richmond Station as a busy neighborhood restaurant at the heart of it.

Visitors tend to be thrilled by this; one guest visiting from Germany told him she was relieved to finally drink the local wines after days of French and Italian lists elsewhere in town. The hardest crowd to convert, he says, is older Ontarians who remember the rough hybrid-grape wines of the late 1970s and early 1980s, long before the province’s bottles caught up. Drinkers 35 and under arrive already excited. The cocktail program follows the same logic: the rail vodka, whiskey and gin are all Ontario, while head bartender Atharva Bhilare, who draws on his Indian heritage and whatever is in season, keeps the list creative, inventive and constantly changing.

Hospitality included

Ask each of them what they are proudest of and Ryan does not hesitate: the hospitality-included model. Richmond Station accepts no gratuities, a rarity in Toronto and almost unheard of for an à la carte room. It is what lets the restaurant retain staff, stabilize their earnings, support their housing and offer health care, higher benefits and paid time off. “I’ve been in this industry since I was 18, and it was hard to reconcile how I would be a father and a homeowner and retire,” Ryan says. Solving that, for a team of 70-some people, is the impact he is most certain about.

Hayden lands somewhere adjacent: a culture of continuous improvement. With the restaurant turning 14 in September, many cooks and servers have been on the team for six, seven, eight, nine years, and retention runs high. “I don’t think we’ve seen the best version of Richmond Station yet,” he says, and that, more than anything, is what keeps him there.

The verdict

Richmond Station earns its status the unflashy way: by sourcing whole animals from Ontario farms, pouring a wine list that argues for its own province, and paying its people in a way most of its peers still do not. Come in your coat for a burger and a pint, or settle in for the chef’s menu and watch the kitchen work through the season. Either way, the room will be full, and that is the whole idea.

Written by Daniel Neuhaus
Photography by Richmond Station

Updated on June 08, 2026

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