A few weeks back, at a suitably festive celebration at the Sheraton Hotel in New Orleans, William Reed’s 50 Best announced the sophomore list of its North America iteration.
The second edition saw a shake-up of the 2025 results, with a host of shifts across the board. While Smyth in Chicago clinched the top spot, the room was abuzz about Canada’s dominance of the list, with five of the top 10 spots going to the land of maple:
- Calgary’s Eight blazed onto the list after not featuring at all on the 2025 list, landing the No 2 spot along with the Highest New Entry award;
- Jordan Station’s Restaurant Pearl Morissette held fast at its prior year position at No 3, in addition to receiving the Art of Hospitality award;
- Montreal’s Mon Lapin followed at No 5;
- Toronto’s Quetzal at No 8; and
- Quebec City’s Tanière³ at No 9.
A recent trip north showed that all this attention is entirely earned.
Quetzal | Toronto
Helmed by chef Steven Molnar, Quetzal brings modern Mexican dishes to Toronto’s College Street.
The first thing you notice is the design: an undulating ceiling that evokes the tarps of a Mexican market, a wood-fired grill running the length of the restaurant, and minimalist interpretations of Mexico scattered throughout, creating the most stylish of dining rooms.
Then the scent of smoke draws you further into the room, for everything here is cooked over fire.
The highlights are plenty. There’s the empanada oaxaqueña, a maize-tortilla turnover stuffed with hearty braised lamb barbacoa and served with a chunky, smoky salsa molcajete, and Newfoundland scallops with green-garlic butter topped with a zesty Tajín-popcorn crumble for texture.
There’s also gloriously sizzling bone marrow, served alongside wild Argentinian shrimp and meant to be mopped up with tacos.
For dessert, a dish that’s been on the menu since day one: a coconut nicuatole, a silky whipped custard made from coconut milk, coconut cream and masa leftover from mains, with pineapple compressed in hibiscus syrup and textures of mezcal, meringue and mint to balance out the richness.
Tanière³ | Quebec City
In the stone vaults beneath a 17th-century building in Old Quebec, chef François-Emmanuel Nicol and dining room director Roxan Bourdelais run this incredible restaurant.
The ever-changing tasting menu has 12 to 18 courses, moving guests through a sequence of underground rooms that once served as storage for a fur merchant.
“Wild Spring” is a seemingly simple yet beautifully complex salad of stonecrop, yarrow, wild chervil, and cattail hearts, plated around a light, creamy dressing of ash-grey walnut milk with a punch of wild-garlic vine oil.
The signature dish, a scallop veiled in beurre blanc with Île d’Orléans potatoes and sturgeon caviar from Lac-Saint-Pierre, has held its place on the menu since the restaurant’s current incarnation opened — and it’s no surprise why. It’s sweet, buttery and decadent, with the caviar cutting adding a glorious salinity. This is the type of dish — rich and warm — that should be enjoyed at the corner booth in an opulent vault below the city.
And while luxury ingredients appear throughout the menu, every course comes with the same conviction: that Quebec’s own land is the real treasure here.
Eight | Calgary
Hidden behind a door inside NUPO, in the lobby of Calgary’s Alt Hotel East Village, chef Darren MacLean oversees a dining room with eight seats. The whole meal is built around the question of what Canadian food actually means and to this chef it’s a question that has multiple answers.
The menu interprets the question through the food of the country’s different migrants and immigrants, which, in the chef’s opinion, have formed the backbone of the country’s culinary identity.
A gorgeous dim sum course arrives as a dumpling made from lobster-roe dough filled with lobster knuckle and claw, a nod to one of the chef’s first kitchen jobs in a Chinese restaurant.
Then there’s the agnolotti del plin – wild hare-filled pasta with marsala and sage, which MacLean sees as a French Canadian riff on a Piedmontese staple, inspired by Montreal’s history of Italian immigration.
By the time dessert arrives, you’ve eaten your way through what feels like half the country’s history and have a deeper understanding of the multi-faceted culinary culture of both the chef and the region.
Restaurant Pearl Morissette | Jordan Station
Chefs Eric Robertson and Daniel Hadida run this restaurant on the Pearl Morissette wine estate and farm in Jordan Station, Ontario, from a dining room on the top floor of the winery, set within a black barn with floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the vegetable gardens and vineyard rows below.
Ingredients are sourced entirely from Canadian soil and waters, much of it from small-scale farms across the wider Niagara Escarpment. The menu changes with the seasons, driven largely by the restaurant’s own gardens.
The sweet scallop, dressed with French sorrel and lemon gem and finished with blackcurrant wood oil, icicle radish, and pumpkin seeds, is a dish built on layered textures and freshness. The Tamarack Farms lamb arrives with a deep leek jus, celeriac purée, and garden greens.
And to close, an apple and rhubarb tart, its pastry rolled paper thin, is served with a fragrant rose-thyme Chantilly and a rhubarb reduction.
Each course is built with ingredients sourced at their absolute prime and a grand showcase of what this stretch of Canada can produce.
From the August issue of Wanted, 2026.
