The growing trend in Toronto’s restaurant industry are top chef’s who open smaller, community based, more affordable restaurants, bars and cafés.  Chef Jamie Kennedy was the first when he opened Gilead Café earlier this year.  Gilead is hidden down a small alleyway in a still rough, but slowly gentrifying, Toronto neighborhood, Corktown. Way cheaper than Kennedy’s successful ‘Jamie Kennedy Wine Bar’. The newest restaurant of this type is champion oyster shucker, Patrick McMurray’s, Irish local called The Ceili Cottage. McMurray took over an 1884 cottage in Leslieville and serves Irish bar/comfort food like oysters, mac n’ cheese and meat pies.

Other places recently opened by previously high-priced chefs are Petite Thuet and Black Hoof (the chef blogs about his homemade charcuterie).