Starling Restaurant and Bar

The cocktails at Starling are named for birds. Order a Canary's Kiss, an Ironwood Perch, or a Hummingbird Sour, and the drinks menu tips its hand: the bar is not a supporting act here, it is half the reason to come. Starling works the ByWard Market as a contemporary Canadian bistro where the glass carries as much of the evening as the plate, and the conceit runs deep enough that even the non-alcoholic options — the Placebos — get folded into the same list. This is a restaurant built for the night out. A birthday, a first date, a table of friends in from out of town: those are the occasions the place is shaped around, and the drink list is the first thing it hands across to make the case.

The food is modern comfort with the corners sharpened. Bang Bang Shrimp arrives crisp and spicy under green onion and cilantro, the easiest first order when a table wants heat and crunch before it settles in. Beef Tartare comes with caper, shallot, gherkin, whole-grain mustard, and grilled focaccia; Hot Crab Dip leans on lump crab and Havarti under the same bread; Yellowfin Tuna Ceviche brightens with avocado emulsion, chili, and lime. The dinner mains hold the centre — Seared Duck Breast with summer citrus salad, beetroot puree, and toasted shaved almonds; Steak Frites built on a ten-ounce AAA striploin with shoestring fries and peppercorn sauce; Baked Rigatoni Alla Vodka with house-made pasta, nduja, Italian sausage, and fior di latte. The Starling Burger stacks a house-ground double smashed patty with bacon jam, American cheese, and cowboy candy, and Oishi Tempura Cauliflower gives the vegetable side of the table something with the same swagger. The kitchen frames all of it as dishes meant either for a single plate or for the middle of the table.

What the menu shows is range without drift. A list this broad — seared tuna on one line, a smashed double-patty burger the next, mushroom ravioli after that — could read as a kitchen trying to be everything to everyone. Starling keeps it in a single comfort lane instead, and lets a couple of dishes do the distinguishing. Bang Bang Shrimp and the Seared Duck Breast are the two most tables gravitate toward, the crisp-and-spicy opener and the polished main that together show what the kitchen is genuinely good at. There is civic texture in the smaller print, too: the Beef Tartare is tied to a local school breakfast program, the kind of quiet arrangement a restaurant makes when it means to stay part of its neighbourhood.

Starling opened in 2022 inside York on William, an 1875 ByWard Market building with a hospitality history longer than most of its block. The address has held restaurants before — the Fish Market, Coasters, Vineyards Wine Bar — and that lineage is part of what the dining room trades on now. Stone and age do work a new build cannot, and Starling leans into it rather than papering over it. The setting is the reason an evening here reads as an occasion and not simply a meal.

The week reshapes the place more than once. Weekend brunch runs Saturday and Sunday around the Starling Brekkie, Eggs Benedict, buttermilk pancakes, French toast, and a Shakshuka Skillet; Saturday is the quieter pick, when the food is the main event, and Sunday brings a live-music set that turns the mid-morning into something closer to a show. When the weather turns, the rooftop opens for a Sunday series that runs from late spring into early September. It adds up to less a single restaurant than a few of them stacked in one building — a cocktail bar after dark, a brunch table on the weekend, a patio in summer — and the smartest way to use Starling is to decide which one you came for before you book.