Soos

A plate of Kapitan Chicken Tacos is the fastest way to understand what the Soo family is doing on Ossington. Lemongrass and lime-leaf chicken is cooked down in coconut milk, then folded into soft crepes that stand in for roti jala, with shredded vegetables and a cool swipe of tzatziki to finish. The reference is Malaysian chicken kapitan; the format is built for a table to pass around. Soos works that kind of translation across a compact Malay and Nyonya menu — street-food cooking reset as Ossington small plates, without the pan-Asian blur that so many small-plate menus drift toward.

The menu rewards ordering across it. Char Kway Teow is the clearest first order — rice noodles wok-charred with tiger prawns, chives, sambal, beansprout and egg, the kind of dish that carries the kitchen in a single bite. Around it sit Rendang Braised Beef, a coconut-galangal curry over jasmine rice; Banana Leaf Fish, grilled steelhead trout with tamarind sambal and market vegetables; and a Hokkaido scallop crudo dressed with sambal ebi, ginger scallion, garlic chips and a scallion hot oil. The vegetable cooking is not an afterthought. Prosperity Tossed Slaw, a twenty-ingredient salad with yuzu-plum dressing, toasted peanut and sesame, is the brightest thing on the list, and it ties back to the lo hei prosperity salads tossed for Lunar New Year.

What the menu makes clear is that this is a family kitchen, not a concept borrowed and dressed up. Dishes like the Kari Puff, the Murtabak and Dhal & Roti read as home cooking scaled up to a dinner service rather than invented for one. The Malaysian references stay specific — Sarawak peppercorn on the grilled prawns, gula melaka and pandan in the Sago Sago, a pulled-coffee Milo dust over a tiramisu — the small, particular choices a family cooks by rather than a menu writes for effect.

The restaurant belongs to the Soos. Zenn and Tricia Soo opened the Ossington storefront in 2013, with Lauren and Zachary Soo in the business, Tricia as head chef and Zachary working alongside her in the kitchen. According to local reporting, the family's cooking reaches back through Kuala Lumpur and an earlier Toronto restaurant, Matahari Grill, which gives Soos a longer Malaysian-food lineage than its opening date alone would suggest. That history is why the menu can move from a wok noodle to a raw scallop without losing its centre of gravity.

Soos is built for a shared dinner more than a solo one. The Feed Me sharing format hands the ordering over to the kitchen, groups of six and up use it by default, and a Malacca-inspired private dining room seating ten to fourteen gives a larger party its own corner. Plant-based diners get real range rather than a single token plate: several dishes are marked vegan-friendly, and the kitchen's Fat Choi menu is available every day. Booking runs through the restaurant's own reservation page, which sets the party-size rules and the seating times before a table arrives, and same-day takeout is available by phone in the evening for anyone skipping the dining room.

The sweets keep the same logic to the end — a five-spice pineapple pie with vanilla ice cream, that Kopi Tarik tiramisu built on Malay pulled coffee, tapioca-pearl Sago Sago under gula melaka and pandan coconut milk. None of it strays far from the family's own reference points. Approached the way it wants to be — a spread across the table, a drink from the full bar, the kitchen given room to lead — Soos reads less like an Ossington small-plate stop and more like a Malaysian dinner at the Soos'.