Pennies Bellwoods

Pennies treats the slider as the whole point, not a bar snack tucked in beside the burgers. The menu is built from small sandwiches — a row of griddled burgers, fried-chicken builds, fish and shrimp — meant to be ordered a few at a time and stacked up with loaded tots and cheap drinks. The canary-yellow bar on Strachan Avenue, along the western edge of Trinity Bellwoods, has run that way since 2018, built for casual rounds rather than formal dinners, where the smartest order is assembled from a handful of small things instead of chosen off a single plate.

The slider list starts at the griddle. The Oklahoma Burger arrives with smashed onions, cheese, pickles and mustard; the Classic Hamburger keeps it to onion, pickles and the same two sauces; the Harlem Chopped Cheese Steak piles ground chuck with iceberg, tomato, onions and mayo. From there it fans out. Fried chicken runs three ways — Southern Honey with coleslaw and hot honey, Nashville Hot dunked spicy with pickles, and Korean with slaw, sesame and a house KFC sauce — before the list keeps going into a Baja fish taco with avocado crema, a Cajun shrimp po' boy, a sausage-and-jalapeño El Paso Melt under Carolina barbecue sauce, and a Beyond Meat veggie build for the table that needs one. Tots carry the sharing: poutine tots under Quebec curds and gravy, supreme tots loaded with queso, sour cream and pico de gallo. Almost nothing on the menu is large, which is the point — it is a list made for grazing.