Simpl Things

Parkdale After the Third Visit

There is a particular kind of bar that only reveals itself to people who return. The first visit is about orientation: the pastel walls, the neighbourhood's low-rise residential scale on Dunn Avenue, the menu that refuses to settle into a single culinary register. The second visit is about committing to something. The third is when Simpl Things makes sense as a place, not just as a concept.

Parkdale has always operated at a slight remove from Toronto's more competitive dining corridors. Queen West's density and Ossington's polish tend to pull first-time visitors, which has left Dunn Avenue to develop a quieter, more neighbourhood-specific character. Simpl Things fits that rhythm: it is not trying to announce itself to a transient audience. The regulars here are not drawn by novelty cycles. They return because the room changes around them across the course of a single day, and that flexibility is difficult to find at this price point anywhere in the city.

The Logic of a Three-Part Day

Bars that try to hold different identities across daytime and evening usually compromise one for the other. The lunch program becomes an afterthought once evening bookings pick up, or the cocktail list reads as ornamental against a kitchen with serious ambitions. The format at Simpl Things avoids that trade-off by treating each phase of the day as a complete program rather than a diluted version of the main event.

During daylight hours, chef Cody Wilkes runs a kitchen focused on panini and hand-rolled pasta with Italian sauces. This is not a gesture toward approachability. Hand-rolled pasta is labour-intensive work, and pairing it with panini creates a practical Italian cafe register that holds up as a standalone dining offer, not merely a vehicle to fill tables before evening service.

When the day shifts to evening, the kitchen pivots to Asian street snacks. The charcoal-grilled mushroom salad with a Burnbrae Farms egg-yolk-and-truffle vinaigrette is the kind of dish that marks the distance between a bar that serves food and a bar with a kitchen that has a point of view. Charcoal grilling applied to mushrooms is a technique with roots across Japanese, Korean, and Southeast Asian traditions; the vinaigrette, with its egg yolk richness and truffle depth, frames the result in a hybrid register that reflects how Toronto's mid-level restaurant culture has absorbed multiple influences without flattening them.

What makes this format work for regulars is that neither kitchen program feels defensive about the other. The pasta at lunch is not embarrassed to share a room with fish sauce by evening. The Asian street snacks do not feel imported into a space that was designed for something else. The room holds both without contradiction, and that is a harder thing to engineer than it looks.

The Cocktail Program as the Constant

If the kitchen programs create structure across the day, Evelyn Chick's cocktail work is the through-line. Regulars at Simpl Things tend to discuss the cocktail list the way bar loyalists at more conventional venues discuss a signature spirit program: not as a list of individual drinks, but as a set of principles that they have learned to read.

The make-your-own Martini service is the clearest expression of that relationship between bar and guest. Martini interactivity is not new as a format, but attaching optional caviar garnishes shifts the register. Caviar as a Martini garnish has enough established precedent in higher-end cocktail culture to read as a genuine option rather than a stunt, and offering it as a modular addition rather than a fixed presentation keeps the service from becoming performative. For regulars, this is a service that rewards repeat engagement: each iteration is slightly different, and the experience compounds across visits.

The Mint Condition, a rum highball built with fino sherry, amaro, mint, and eucalyptus, sits in a different register. Fizzy and fresh are accurate descriptors, but what the drink actually demonstrates is a working knowledge of how fino sherry functions in long drinks. Fino is dry and saline in a way that amplifies mint without competing with it, and the amaro adds bitterness that keeps the drink from reading as sweet despite the rum base. Eucalyptus is a volatile aromatic that dissipates quickly, which means the drink changes slightly as you move through it. That kind of structural complexity is why regulars tend to order it more than once across an evening rather than rotating through the list.

Within Toronto's cocktail bar scene, Simpl Things occupies a distinct position. Bar Raval operates at a higher volume with a Gaudi-inspired room and a Spanish-inflected food and drink program that draws significant foot traffic. Bar Pompette leans into natural wine as its organising principle. Bar Mordecai runs a cocktail-forward program with a different neighbourhood orientation. Civil Liberties has built its reputation on spirits depth and an encyclopedic whisky focus. Simpl Things is the one where the cocktail program and the kitchen program carry equal weight and where neither is designed to support the other as a secondary offering.

Across Canada's cocktail bar tier, the 2025 North America's Leading Bars ranking places Simpl Things at number 83, making it one of a small group of Canadian bars to appear on that list alongside properties like Atwater Cocktail Club in Montreal, Botanist Bar in Vancouver, and Humboldt Bar in Victoria. Further afield, the cohort extends to Missy's in Calgary, Bearfoot Bistro in Whistler, Grecos in Kingston, and internationally recognised programs like Bar Leather Apron in Honolulu. Placement at number 83 on that list, for a bar in a residential Parkdale pocket rather than a downtown hotel or a destination-dense strip, signals something about how the ranking responds to program quality over scale or location advantage.

The Google rating of 4.7 across 228 reviews reflects a consistent experience rather than a spike driven by a single moment of press attention. Bars that receive a surge of recognition and then struggle to maintain the room often see that figure soften over time. Holding 4.7 across a meaningful sample size suggests the day-to-day execution matches what brought people in.

Who Comes Back, and Why

The regulars at Simpl Things are not a homogeneous group. The daytime pasta crowd overlaps only partially with the evening cocktail crowd, and both overlap with the kind of neighbourhood resident who treats the bar as a reference point for where to take visitors from out of town. What unites them is a preference for a room that asks something of its guests: you need to engage with the menu rather than default to the familiar, and the cocktail list rewards curiosity rather than brand recognition.

For visitors to Toronto approaching the city's bar scene for the first time, the full guide to the city's drinking and dining is worth reviewing before building an itinerary. See our full Toronto restaurants guide for broader context on how Parkdale and its neighbouring corridors fit into the city's overall character.

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