Ontario Food & Traditional Cuisine

Ontario’s food story is mostly the story of who moved here.

Toronto eats better and more widely than almost anywhere, because the communities that cook are large enough to sustain proper restaurants rather than approximations: Sri Lankan and Tamil food in Scarborough, Portuguese grills on Dundas, Jamaican patties and jerk across the west end, Hakka Chinese, Ethiopian, Filipino, Persian and a great deal more, generally at modest prices.

Underneath that, there is an older Ontario country cooking — maple, corn, apples, freshwater fish, pork and preserving — that shows up in farm markets and diners.

Maple syrup is a genuine regional product, tapped in early spring when nights freeze and days thaw.

And the province grows a surprising amount: Niagara fruit, Holland Marsh vegetables, Prince Edward County cheese and wine.

Butter tarts are Ontario’s own: a short pastry shell filled with butter, sugar, syrup and egg, baked until the filling is somewhere between set and molten. Whether they should contain raisins is a real and unresolved dispute, and there is a butter tart trail through the Kawarthas for people who want to take a position.

Peameal bacon on a bun, a Toronto institution from the St Lawrence Market: brined boneless pork loin rolled in cornmeal, sliced thick and griddled.

Jamaican patties, so thoroughly naturalised that they are sold in every corner shop and subway station.

Poutine, Quebec’s gift, eaten here without ceremony and usually after midnight.

Maple syrup on everything in March, and taffy poured on snow at the sugar bush.

Also: pickerel and whitefish from the lakes; Niagara peaches in August; Nanaimo bars; and the Hakka-Chinese chilli chicken that Scarborough does particularly well.

St Lawrence Market in Toronto has been trading since 1803 and remains a working food market rather than a heritage exhibit; Kensington Market, a few streets away, is a neighbourhood of Caribbean, Latin American and Middle Eastern grocers, cheese shops and cafes.

Farmers’ markets run through the summer in nearly every town, and the pick-your-own farms around Niagara and the southwest are a weekend fixture from strawberries in June to apples in September.

Sugar shacks operate for a few weeks in late winter, serving pancakes and taffy poured onto snow.

Tipping is expected: 15 to 20 per cent in restaurants, and card machines prompt for it.

Sales tax is added at the till, so the shelf price is not the price.

Ontario is Canada’s largest wine region, and its signature product is one almost nowhere else can make in quantity.

Icewine is made from grapes left on the vine until they freeze naturally at around minus 8°C or colder, then pressed while still frozen so that the water stays behind as ice and only a small amount of intensely concentrated juice runs out. Ontario’s winters are reliably cold enough to guarantee a harvest most years, which is why it produces more icewine than any other region in the world. Vidal and Riesling are the usual grapes, and the results are sweet, high in acid and expensive for good reason — a vine yields a fraction of its normal volume.

The table wines are serious too. Niagara-on-the-Lake and the Beamsville Bench on the escarpment make fine Riesling, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, helped by the lake moderating both the spring frosts and the autumn cold. Prince Edward County, on limestone further east, has become a destination of its own.

Ontario also has a strong craft beer and cider scene, and distilleries making rye whisky, which Canada largely invented.