Koreatown on Bloor: where to eat Korean BBQ, fried chicken and tofu stew
Toronto's Koreatown on Bloor Street West, how to order at a barbecue table versus a stew house, and the phone number for every kitchen.
Koreatown runs along Bloor Street West, roughly from Bathurst to Christie. It is a compact strip and it stays open late, which is half of why students and night-shift crowds have kept it alive while other food districts thinned out. The other half is that the cooking is good and it is not trying to be fancy.
There are three things the strip does, and knowing which room you want saves you ordering wrong.
The three kinds of Korean room
- Barbecue is the one with grills in the tables. You cook the meat yourself, wrap it in lettuce with garlic, ssamjang and rice, and the banchan (the little side dishes) keep coming free. Go with a group, order at least two meats, and do not overload the grill.
- Stew and rice houses are for one-bowl meals: soondubu (soft tofu stew that arrives bubbling), bibimbap, kimchi jjigae, bulgogi over rice. This is the solo lunch and the fast dinner.
- Fried chicken and beer rooms, the ones Koreans call chimaek, are a night out on their own. Korean fried chicken is double-fried and lacquered, soy-garlic or the red yangnyeom sauce. Order half and half.
A word on banchan: it is refillable and it is a tell. A place that brings a generous, varied spread is telling you it cares. A mean plate of two things is telling you the opposite.
The kitchens
These are the Korean restaurants in the directory, most on or just off Bloor.
Before you go
Ring first if you are a group wanting a barbecue table, because the good ones fill on weekend nights and the grills are limited. The strip runs late, later than most of the city, but the kitchens still close on their own clock. The number on each page is the restaurant's own.
Written by See The Six · kept current from the directory, last checked 2026-08-24
