Sisters & Co

The three people behind Sisters & Co are not sisters. They are best friends, which is the more honest thing the name is reaching for. By the restaurant's own account, Hilary Lee, Michelle Ha, and Vivian Mac opened the original address on Dundas Street West, at the edge of Trinity Bellwoods, in 2019, and built it around a pan-Asian comfort-brunch menu drawn from family recipes and house sauces. The premise is specific: brunch that carries the ambition of a dinner cook, aimed at diners who want more than eggs and toast on a weekend morning. The result is broad without being scattered, wide enough to feed a whole table — from oxtail stew to Earl Grey pancakes.

The savoury side reads like Korean and pan-Asian comfort cooking dressed for the morning. Gochujang Chicken and Waffles arrives as fried chicken tossed in maple brown-butter gochujang, set on a golden waffle with cucumber kimchi and syrup. The Chicken Katsu Club stacks panko-fried chicken, bacon, tomato, and garlic aioli on milk bread, plated with garlic-aioli fries and a small salad. Benedicts take the same turn: bulgogi beef or pulled char siu pork laid over poached eggs and hollandaise on an English muffin, with home fries alongside. Even the plainest-sounding plate, the Girl Breakfast, comes dressed up — two sunny eggs with chilli oil, avocado, sour cream, and a tomato-onion salad on buttered sourdough. For the middle of the table there are Bulgogi Beef Fries under mozzarella and aioli, and ten crisp chicken wontons with sweet chilli sauce.

What holds the menu together is a refusal to let fusion go vague. Each plate keeps a clear anchor — the gochujang, the char siu, the katsu — instead of blurring into generic brunch. The kitchen is as serious at the sweet end as the savoury: Earl Grey Pancakes under house-made Earl Grey mascarpone and strawberry sauce, a Citrus Mascarpone Waffle carrying house citrus cream and blueberry compote, Cookie Butter Pancakes piled with Biscoff crumble and cookie-butter whipped cream. Even the avocado toast breaks from habit, finished with a honey-truffle chilli drizzle rather than the usual smear. The pancakes and waffles are not an afterthought bolted to a savoury list; they are half the reason a table lingers.

The origin has an edge to it. By local accounts, the founders opened in the summer of 2019 and then had to survive the hardest possible first chapter, with the pandemic arriving barely months into the restaurant's life. It did more than survive. The Dundas Street West location held on, and a second address later followed in Markham — an independent expansion built on the same short menu of oxtail, bulgogi, katsu, and pancakes rather than a reinvention. The Spicy Oxtail Stew that reads as the house signature — bone-in oxtail and beef ribs braised into a spicy tomato-and-herb base under melted mozzarella and a sunny-side-up egg, mopped up with buttered sourdough — came out of that same family-recipe instinct.

There is no reservation line and no online booking; you put your name down and wait, which suits a weekend brunch where the line is part of the morning. The doors open every day, weekday mornings straight through the weekend, which makes the place as much a Tuesday habit as a Sunday outing. A few things never leave the original corner — the Toronto-only pancakes, and a rotating sweet feature that changes with what the kitchen feels like baking — small rewards for showing up where it started rather than at the newer Markham table. Seven years on, the oxtail stew that anchors the menu is still made from the recipe it opened with. For a place three friends built without being sisters at all, that kind of constancy is the point.