Lyla Toronto

Lyla is what happens when the team behind Cano stops drawing the border at Italy. The kitchen keeps an Italian footing — hand-filled agnolotti, a paccheri in San Marzano rosé, braised short rib folded into rigatoni — then works outward across the Mediterranean until a Greek salad under olive tapenade, Spanish croquettes bound with jamón ibérico béchamel, French steak au poivre, and a full raw bar all belong on the same page. It opened in 2024 on Sudbury Street, a quieter block just off West Queen West, with that breadth built in on purpose. A table almost never has to agree on one cuisine to agree on dinner here.

The raw bar is where the kitchen shows its hand first. The Grand & Petit Plateau lays out rotating oysters, scallop crudo, bluefin tuna carpaccio, madai ceviche, and hamachi crudo on a single tower; ordered on its own, the hamachi arrives with caviar, plum-wine jelly, pomegranate, and ponzu. Oysters come by the three, six, or twelve, and a Caspian caviar service runs from baerri up to beluga for the table inclined to spend. The seafood keeps going past the ice: a whole branzino deboned, butterflied, and grilled under lemon-caper ponzu; a butter-poached Atlantic lobster woven through Linguine All'Aragosta in a VSOP bisque, offered by the half or the whole.

Away from the water, the menu is just as busy. Octopus Bravas sits over potato with salmoriglio, salsa brava, and smoked aioli. Flatbreads run from a mushroom version with ricotta, honey, and gruyère to a short-rib one finished with pickled onion. Agnolotti di Ricotta arrive in yuzu butter with mixed mushrooms and a pecorino crisp; the pasta list also carries a pork-cheek paccheri and a short-rib rigatoni under ricotta espuma. Starters wander just as freely — beef tartare with sous-vide yolk and pecorino, seared scallops with white asparagus, crispy squid with chili aioli, cauliflower over hummus with pomegranate and honey. For the table that came to eat big, there are dry-aged steaks — a twenty-one-day striploin au poivre, a twenty-six-ounce prime ribeye with bone marrow and confit garlic — and grilled Australian lamb chops with tzatziki.

The range never scatters. Plenty of Mediterranean kitchens pick a single lane — a trattoria, a meze bar, a fish house — and stay in it. Lyla runs the raw bar, the pasta station, the flatbread oven, and the grill at once, then trusts diners to assemble the night they came for: a dozen oysters and a bottle for two, a lobster-pasta anniversary, a sprawl of croquettes and octopus for a group that can't settle on one thing. The sensibility stays Mediterranean, but loose enough to carry yuzu butter and a gochujang-dressed ceviche without losing its footing.

The kitchen behind that reach is led by chef Daniel Kim, with Seugho Jeon as sous chef. Lyla is the second act for a group that made its name with Cano, the Italian restaurant whose success gave owners Daniel van Welie and Amen Habtemariam — described in local reporting as longtime friends in the trade — the footing to open something wider. The Cano lineage is legible in the pasta work. But Lyla reads less as a spin-off than as a licence to cook the whole region instead of one country's corner of it.

For all the caviar and lobster, Lyla keeps a lower rung in reach. Monday through Friday from four to six, Golden Hours drops oysters, flatbreads, wine, classic cocktails, and beer to a graze-and-go register; a weekday lunch prix fixe and a weekend brunch open the same kitchen without a full dinner tab, and a patio and private dining widen the options past that. The Sudbury Street address keeps Lyla a step off the West Queen West rush — close enough to belong to the neighbourhood, far enough to land a table on a night the busier blocks are full.