Best Restaurants Toronto: 13 MICHELIN Stars, No Two-Star and What People Actually Search For

MICHELIN star restaurants in Toronto: the 2026 count

The fifth edition of the MICHELIN Guide Toronto and Region was announced on September 22, 2026. It lists 111 restaurants: one with two stars, 14 with one star, 31 Bib Gourmands and 65 recommended addresses. Those are the totals Destination Toronto publishes, and they are the numbers you will see quoted everywhere. They describe a region. They do not describe the city.

Count by municipality and the picture changes. The single two-star is Restaurant Pearl Morissette, which is in Lincoln, in Niagara. One of the 14 one-stars, The Pine, is in Creemore. The addresses in CP24's list put the other 13 in Toronto. So: 13 restaurants, one star each.

Four Japanese counters, three Italian kitchens, three contemporary tasting menus, and one each of Mexican, Mediterranean and modern Asian. That is the shape of fine dining in Toronto in one line.

Three things about this list that most roundups get wrong.

• Toronto has no two-star restaurant. It had exactly one. Sushi Masaki Saito held two stars from the first guide in 2022 through 2024, and has held one since the 2025 edition. Plenty of pages still call it a two-star. The same 2025 ceremony promoted Restaurant Pearl Morissette to two stars, which is how the top of the Toronto guide moved to a farm in Niagara.
• Nothing new was starred in 2026. No promotions and no first stars. Across the region the starred total fell from 17 to 15, because one starred restaurant closed and another reopened as a different restaurant. The new names this year are all Bib Gourmands and recommended addresses.
• The guide is younger and wider than it sounds. It launched in September 2022 and was widened in 2024 to "Toronto and Region". A headline that says Toronto has 15 starred restaurants is counting two that are more than an hour's drive away.

The point: a star count is a fact with a date and a boundary on it. Check both before you repeat it. If you like this kind of arithmetic, we did it for the whole world in which city has the most MICHELIN stars.

Three juries, two restaurants at the top of all of them

MICHELIN is one jury. There are two others worth reading: Canada's 100 Best, a national panel, and North America's 50 Best, the continental list from the World's 50 Best organization, announced on May 28, 2026. Put the three side by side and Toronto does something unusual. The juries agree.

Canada's 100 Best puts Quetzal and Edulis fourth and fifth in the country, the two highest placings in the city. North America's 50 Best names three Toronto restaurants, and the top two are the same pair. Quetzal cooks regional Mexican food over a wood fire on College Street. Edulis is on Niagara Street and is run by Tobey Nemeth and Michael Caballo. Neither is the most famous restaurant in the city. Both are the answer when three independent panels are asked the same question.

Compare that with the other Canadian city we have counted. In Montreal, the star list and the 50 Best list had exactly one restaurant in common. In Toronto, two of the three 50 Best entries hold a star, and the third is the interesting one. Mhel, a Korean and Japanese restaurant on Havelock Street, is the 28th best restaurant in North America according to one jury and a Bib Gourmand according to another. A Bib Gourmand is MICHELIN's label for good cooking at a moderate price. It is not a consolation prize, and here it marks the best value on any of the three lists.

One more number from the national list. Its No. 1 for 2026 is Restaurant Pearl Morissette, the same Niagara restaurant that holds the guide's only two stars. Two juries, one conclusion: the best restaurant near Toronto is a day trip.

The Toronto restaurants people actually search for

Here is what most advice misses. The restaurants the juries rank and the restaurants people look up are mostly different restaurants. We counted 110 common search phrases about Toronto restaurants, worth about 78,000 searches a month between them. 61 of those phrases name a specific restaurant, and those 61 carry 62 percent of the volume. These are the eight names with the most searches, with every spelling of each name added together.

One of the eight holds a star. Across the whole file, only two starred restaurants show up by name at all, Alo and Edulis, and together they account for under 6 percent of the named-restaurant searches. The rest goes to places like a fried chicken restaurant on the waterfront, an Indian bistro in midtown, a Southern Italian room with two locations, a Thai kitchen, a prime rib house in Etobicoke and a revolving restaurant.

That is not a failure of taste. It is how people eat. A tasting menu is a once-a-year decision. Thai food near the theater is a Thursday. A guide that only lists the stars answers the rare question and ignores the common one.

Two of these deserve a note before you book.

• Canoe is a weekday restaurant. The most-searched dining room in the city sits on the 54th floor of the TD Bank Tower, and its own site lists lunch and dinner Monday to Friday, with a tasting menu at 170 Canadian dollars. It is in the Financial District and it keeps the Financial District's hours. Plan the Saturday anniversary somewhere else.
• 360 is a ticket with dinner attached. The restaurant at the CN Tower has a minimum spend of 75 Canadian dollars a person, which is the price of the two-course menu, and that spend includes the elevator and access to the observation levels. You do not buy a separate admission. Run the numbers that way and it is a different decision: you are paying for the tower, and lunch comes with it.

Closed, moved or changed: check before you go

A closed restaurant keeps its search volume for years. Nobody competes for the phrase, the old reviews stay online, and people keep typing the name. We checked the most-searched names in the data, and the ones that looked suspiciously easy to rank for, against the operator or a dated news report. Four findings.

• Three are closed, and have been for years. Konnichiwa on Baldwin Street was destroyed in a fire in June 2017. Lbs., the seafood restaurant at Yonge and Adelaide, served its last dinner on New Year's Eve 2018. Big Crow, the backyard barbecue, closed in June 2022. Between them they still draw about 1,280 searches a month.
• Lee moved, and the old street is still in the search box. Susur Lee's restaurant left King Street West at the end of 2022 and reopened in 2023 in the Waterworks building. The group's own site gives the address as 497 Richmond Street West. People still search for "Lee restaurant King Street Toronto" 390 times a month. Do not walk to King.
• Famiglia Baldassarre no longer serves lunch. The pasta maker on Geary Avenue was famous for a lunch-only counter with a line outside. Its founder announced that the last public lunch would be August 14, 2026, with the business continuing as a wholesale pasta producer. It is on a great many lists written before that date.
• One star left the list without a closure. Aburi Hana, the kaiseki restaurant in Yorkville, held a star in the 2025 guide. Per one account of the 2026 edition, it shut to renovate, reopened in September 2026 with a different format, and is no longer starred. A 2025 article will still send you there for the tasting menu.

The lesson: the internet has no expiry dates. A restaurant list is only as good as the last day someone checked it, so look for that day before you trust the list. For what it is worth, everything here was checked on October 4, 2026.

Where to eat in Toronto, and where Toronto stops

Toronto is bigger than visitors expect and smaller than search results imply. Both matter when you are deciding where to eat.

Bigger. In 1998 the old city merged with five neighbors, including North York, Scarborough and Etobicoke. They are Toronto. So when people search for "restaurants old Toronto", about 1,000 times a month, they mean the pre-1998 core, and when a starred kaiseki room gives its address as Sakura Way in North York, that is still a Toronto restaurant. Canadiana, in the table above, is in Etobicoke. It counts.

Smaller. Markham, Richmond Hill, Vaughan and Mississauga are separate cities. That matters most for one cluster of searches. People look up restaurants at the Toronto airport about 1,190 times a month, and most of Pearson, terminals included, is in Mississauga, about 20 kilometers from downtown. Nothing on a list of the best restaurants in Toronto is near your gate. Eat in the city, then go.

Inside the city, the verified addresses cluster in five places.

• Spadina and King West. Alo at 163 Spadina, Pai at 18 Duncan, Edulis on Niagara Street, Lee on Richmond. Four of the names in this guide, all on the west side of downtown.
• Yorkville. Sushi Masaki Saito and Osteria Giulia are both on Avenue Road, with Enigma a few blocks away on St. Thomas Street. Three starred rooms in one neighborhood, and prices to match the address.
• College Street. Quetzal at 419 and DaNico at 440, almost across the street from each other. If you only have one evening and want the room the juries agree on, this is the street.
• The Financial District and the old town. Canoe on the 54th floor, Restaurant 20 Victoria and aKin a few blocks east. Built for weekday business, so check the days before you go.
• Midtown. Kappo Sato at 575 Mount Pleasant Road holds a star. Marigold, at 552 on the same road, holds 4,800 searches a month. The two lists in this guide, on one stretch of sidewalk.

And then there is the sandwich. Peameal bacon is cured pork loin rolled in cornmeal, sliced thick and stacked on a soft bun. Carousel Bakery, on the upper level of St. Lawrence Market, has sold it for decades and calls it Toronto's signature dish. No jury ranks it. Have one anyway. The market's south building is open Tuesday to Sunday and closed on Mondays.

How to eat out in Toronto

• Pick the jury before the restaurant. Stars for the tasting menu, Bib Gourmands for the best value, the search table above for what the city actually eats on a weeknight. They are three different lists and you want a different one each night.
• Check the days, not just the hours. Canoe does not open on weekends. St. Lawrence Market does not open on Mondays. 7 Numbers, on its own site, serves dinner Tuesday to Sunday. The closed day is the one that ruins a plan.
• Book the stars early. Thirteen starred rooms serve a metro area of several million people, and several of them are counters with a handful of seats.
• Use the street address. Toronto neighborhood names overlap and guides disagree about where one ends. A street number does not move. Lee is the exception that proves it: the name stayed and the street changed.
• Tip. Unlike most of Europe or Japan, tipping is expected in Toronto restaurants. 18 to 20 percent is the usual range on the card machine.

Heading on to Quebec? The Montreal list is built the same way, and every other city is on the destinations page.

Best restaurants Toronto: common questions

What are the best restaurants in Toronto? The two that every major list agrees on are Quetzal and Edulis. Alo and Restaurant 20 Victoria are next. For value, Mhel, a Bib Gourmand ranked No. 28 in North America.

How many MICHELIN star restaurants are in Toronto? In the 2026 guide, 13 in the city, each with one star. The wider Toronto and Region guide has 15: those 13, The Pine in Creemore, and two-star Restaurant Pearl Morissette in Niagara.

Does Toronto have a two-star MICHELIN restaurant? Not inside the city. Sushi Masaki Saito held two stars from 2022 to 2024 and has held one since 2025. The only two-star in the guide is Restaurant Pearl Morissette, in Lincoln.

Is Canoe open on weekends? No. Its site lists lunch and dinner Monday to Friday only.

Did Lee restaurant move? Yes. Susur Lee's restaurant left King Street West at the end of 2022 and is now at 497 Richmond Street West.

Is the Toronto airport in Toronto? Mostly not. Pearson is largely in Mississauga, about 20 kilometers from downtown. Billy Bishop, the island airport, is in the city.