SCHOOL Restaurant

A+ Food. No Homework. SCHOOL puts its whole premise on the homepage in four words, and the kitchen spends the rest of the menu keeping that promise. This is all-day brunch in Liberty Village, the comfort-food kind, served seven days a week without ceremony. The schoolhouse conceit never stays confined to the décor — it runs straight onto the plates, where the wrap is The Breakfast Club, the Caesar is a High School Dropout, and the eggs Benny earn an A+. Weekday and weekend menus run separately, which makes brunch here a daily plan rather than a weekend-only event, and a table can read it as a casual Tuesday or a Saturday occasion.

Read the menu closely and the theme turns out to be doing real work. Buttermilk Fried Chicken & Waffles is the clearest version of the comfort-brunch lane, the fried chicken and waffles pulled together with a house hot honey sauce and brown sugar butter. The Breakfast Club Wrap is the savoury anchor, folding soft scrambled eggs, house-made maple sausage, twice-cooked potatoes, pico de gallo, cheddar, and chipotle crema into a single handheld that works when pancakes would be too sweet. For a more classic centre, the A+ Avo Eggs Benny arrives on a cheddar-chive biscuit under avocado, poached eggs, hollandaise, and a scatter of chili crisp and microgreens. The sweet plates keep their own house detail: Black n' Blue Flapjacks beneath a black-and-blueberry sauce with maple syrup and brown sugar butter, and Krispy Krunchy French Toast in a snap-crackle-pop coating with peach-raspberry compote. Mac and cheese and a burger round out the heavier end.

What holds the list together is a kitchen that took its own joke seriously. The classroom names — The Hall Monitor, the Extra Credit sides, the A+ prefix that keeps recurring — turn an ordinary brunch lineup into a coherent house language instead of a gag painted on a wall. The same menu that runs to fried chicken and a burger also leaves a credible route for non-meat diners: a Kail! Caesar in a vegan lemon-garlic dressing with crispy capers and fried polenta croutons, a Warm Cauliflower Bowl with crispy chickpeas, pickled cabbage, seasoned rice, and tahini vinaigrette, a Health 101 Bowl for the lighter order. The breadth is deliberate, and it is the practical reason a mixed table tends to land here — almost everyone finds a plate without anyone having to negotiate.

SCHOOL belongs to an earlier wave of Liberty Village brunch, the kind that helped turn the neighbourhood into a weekend-morning destination before the condominium towers filled in around it. Local reporting from those years tied the kitchen to the city's brunch boom, and the format has held its shape since: a sit-down brunch built for groups, with reservations open on Resy as much as two weeks ahead. Prices sit in the comfortable mid-range, and most of the value comes from large-format plates and shareable sides rather than bargains. The one thing the kitchen is upfront about is size — tables larger than six are not taken during weekend and holiday brunch, which makes a weekday visit the cleaner plan for a bigger party.

The week has its own rhythm at the bar. A different drink goes on special each day: two dollars off the tallboys on Mondays and the cider on Tuesdays, off house wines on Wednesdays, off Muskoka on tap on Thursdays, and five dollars off the cocktail flasks on Fridays, the deepest cut of the week. Even the discounts stay in character, with the Saturday deal on a High School Dropout Caesar and the Sunday one on a Juicy Lunch Lady. A rotating drink board is a small thing, but it is the kind of detail that tells a regular the calendar matters here as much as it does to the table sitting down. A+ food, no homework, and a different reason to show up every day of the week.