Aloette Restaurant

A burger and a tall slice of lemon meringue pie are not what most diners expect from the group behind Alo, the tasting-menu flagship that anchors the same Spadina building. Aloette makes that gap its whole personality. It sits where Spadina Avenue meets Queen Street West and runs as the looser, more casual counterpart from the same kitchen — a neighbourhood bistro, in the group's own framing, rather than a scaled-down version of the flagship. It opened in 2017 and has held a steady place on the city's reservation lists since.

The menu opens like upscale bar food and keeps climbing. Snacks set the tone — Aloette cheese bread with roasted yeast butter, nduja-stuffed olive skewers with halloumi and chimichurri — alongside a raw bar pouring East Coast oysters by the half dozen. The starters turn technical from there: tuna tartare with apple, ginger, ponzu, and shiso; Hokkaido scallop crudo with green curry and a sambal sorbet; beef tataki in dashi and yuzu; octopus carpaccio with romesco and almond. It is the kind of small-plate run that would sit comfortably on a far more formal menu, ordered here without ceremony.

Then the mains pull back toward the familiar, and that is the point. The Aloette Burger arrives under Beaufort cheese with onion and lettuce, plain enough to read instantly and built cleanly enough to land beside triple cooked fries in pure gold potatoes or asparagus tempura under herb hollandaise. There is fried chicken with takuan, kimchi, and hot sauce; ricotta cappelletti with taleggio, mushroom, bacon, and truffle; a grilled sea bream over navy bean and anchovy; a grilled duo of lamb with dill yogurt and artichoke. For the table that wants to spend, a Black Truffle Burger layers taleggio, gruyere, and shaved truffle over the same idea. The lemon meringue pie closes it, tall and exact, with a strawberry shortcake sundae of brown butter cake, chantilly, and rum for anyone after something looser.

What ties the swing together is the kitchen's habit of taking a familiar shape and sharpening it. The wedge salad is the clearest tell: the steakhouse standby rebuilt with avocado, chive cream, and puffed wild rice, recognizable in one bite and specific to Aloette in the next. The fried chicken carries takuan and kimchi where a diner would expect slaw; the crudo runs green curry and sambal where a raw bar would stop at citrus. None of it tips into fussiness. The comfort-food frame holds, and the precision shows up inside it rather than on top of it.

The hand behind the cooking is Patrick Kriss, the chef who built the Alo Food Group, and the national restaurant guides name him here as well. They file Aloette as bistro-meets-diner rather than a casual spinoff — a distinction that holds up on the plate. The easy version of this restaurant would coast on the flagship's reputation and cook down to it. Aloette doesn't. The range, from crudo and cappelletti to burgers and brunch, is the argument that the group runs the bistro as its own project, not an afterthought attached to Alo upstairs.

It also runs in two modes, which is part of why it stays booked. Dinner is the full bistro spread; weekends fold the same sensibility into a brunch — Eggs Benedict on sourdough with brown butter hollandaise, French toast under Nutella and candied hazelnut, chicken and waffles with sambal and maple, a croque senor of pork milanese and gruyere under a fried egg. It takes reservations, and same-day seats still turn up for walk-ins who time it right. The pie ends most meals: diner pleasure at heart, built tall and precise enough to remind the table whose kitchen sent it out.