Where to eat Caribbean food in Toronto
Twenty-seven Caribbean kitchens across the six boroughs, what each part of the city is known for, and how to tell a good roti shop from a bad one before you order.
Toronto has been eating Caribbean food for sixty years and arguing about it for just as long. The arguments are worth having. A patty in Scarborough is not the same object as a patty on Eglinton, and the people who tell you otherwise have usually only eaten one of them.
This is a guide to finding the good ones, written from a directory of 27 Caribbean kitchens with a working phone number each.
Know what you are ordering
Four things account for most of what gets sold, and knowing them makes ordering much less stressful.
- Roti is the bread, not the dish. What you want to say is "chicken roti" or "goat roti". A buss-up-shut is a paratha torn into pieces, it looks like a ripped-up shirt, hence the name, served next to the curry rather than wrapped around it. Order it if you like to build your own bites.
- Doubles are two pieces of fried bara around curried chickpeas. They are a breakfast food, they cost a few dollars, and a place that makes good ones is almost always worth trusting on everything else.
- Jerk is a marinade and a method, not a sauce poured over at the end. If the chicken arrives wet and orange with no char on it, somebody has taken a shortcut.
- Patties are the test. They are cheap, they are made in volume, and a shop that cannot be bothered to get the pastry right is telling you something.
Where to start
Old Toronto and the west end
The stretch through the west end is the oldest Caribbean food geography in the city, and it is where you find the shops that have been in the same unit for twenty years. Expect narrow rooms, a counter rather than a dining room, and a lunch rush that clears out by two.
Scarborough
Scarborough is where the newer kitchens are, and where portions are largest for the money. It is also the part of the city where you are most likely to find Guyanese and Trinidadian cooking side by side rather than under one flag.
If Scarborough is where you are headed, we have a closer look at Caribbean food in Scarborough, with what to order at each counter and the phone number for every one.
Etobicoke and North York
Fewer places, and more of them are takeaway counters attached to a grocery. That is not a downgrade. Some of the best doubles in the city are sold from a hatch next to the plantain.
Four things worth doing before you go
- Ring first. Almost every kitchen on this list is small, and small kitchens sell out. A two-minute phone call saves a forty-minute drive.
- Go early for doubles, late for jerk. Doubles are made in the morning and are best within a few hours. Jerk that has been on the drum since eleven is better at six than it was at noon.
- Ask what is good today. Not what is popular, what is good today. The answer tells you whether the person behind the counter is paying attention.
- Bring cash. Plenty of these places take cards now. Plenty still have a minimum, and the sign about it is usually smaller than the queue behind you.
A note on how this list is put together
Every business named here is in our directory with its own address and its own phone number. We do not take bookings, we do not take a commission, and nobody paid to be named in this guide, the ordering is simply which listings we have a photograph for, then alphabetical. Where a business has paid for featured placement anywhere on this site, it is labelled as promotion on the card itself.
Written by See The Six · kept current from the directory, last checked 2026-08-24
