Florette

A plate of Manila clams at Florette carries three cuisines at once. The BC clams arrive in nduja butter under a scatter of fried curry leaves — Italy in the cured pork, southern India in the leaves, the Canadian coast in the shellfish — and none of it reads as a stunt. That one plate is the clearest way into Mann Bijlani's cooking, and into what Florette is: a West Queen West dining room built around funky food, wine, and cocktails, described by the restaurant as inspired by home. The cooking is contemporary Canadian in the useful sense — Toronto ingredients and dining-room instincts, with Indian and Italian references surfacing through specific dishes rather than a stated theme.

The June menu is compact and moves with the seasons. Hamachi crudo starts in the raw-bar lane, then turns sideways with Thai green curry, green apple, basil oil, pickled banana peppers, and fried rice noodle. A scallop comes with turnip, salsa criolla, and green garlic; charcoal-grilled pork coppa is set against red kuri squash and smoked apple. Vegetables are given real thought — roasted cabbage with tonnato, capers, and rosemary, treated with the care usually reserved for a meat course, and charred Swiss chard with pear and white anchovy. Rigatoni comes in vodka sauce with peperonata, parmesan, and basil. For the table that wants weight, there is a sixteen-ounce bone-in ribeye finished with truffle demi-glace and black garlic bone marrow butter, and a ten-ounce striploin over charcoal with sorrel sauce and home fries. Dessert holds its own: a chocolate tart on a spelt crust, its caramelized white chocolate mousse aerated to something nearly flan-like.

What ties the menu together is a habit of taking a familiar format and bending it a few degrees. A vegetable is never filler; bread and butter means Forno Cultura semolina sourdough with grass-fed butter; marinated mushrooms lean on lemon zest and house spice. Each dish stays recognizable, then gets the one move that makes it Bijlani's. Beer, wine, and cocktails all sit at the food's register, close enough that a drink can stand in for a course, and a Chef's Choice menu waits for anyone who would rather hand the evening to the kitchen than assemble it plate by plate.

Florette is the work of founder Jerry Zhang, who spent the early pandemic searching for the right collaborators before the restaurant took shape, and whose background in music carries into the design. The concept is a character imagined into a home — a cool aunt, Aunt Fern — rendered as a residential dining room under a floral ceiling, behind a mauve storefront, with jars of pickled things and a warmth that reads as lived-in rather than staged. Bijlani runs the kitchen along the India, Italy, and Canada through-line his plates keep returning to, and the bar, led by Matt Allinson, is set up to speak the food's language. According to local reporting, the design and the menu were meant to point in the same direction from the start.

Florette serves dinner only, Tuesday through Saturday, from five o'clock, with a heated back patio in the warmer months and walk-ins saved for anyone who arrives without a booking. There is no lunch and no brunch — a single evening service, done with intent. It rewards a table that treats the bar as part of the meal and orders widely — a few small plates, something raw, a pasta, a steak to share, and the chocolate tart to finish. On a mauve stretch of Queen West, the pickled jars and the floral ceiling do their quiet work, but it is the clams landing in curry-leaf butter that tell you exactly where you are.