New Palestinian restaurants in Toronto: 1 have been licensed in the past year, tracked daily from the City of Toronto business-licence registry (chains excluded). The most recent is MAKANN, first seen 5 months ago.
Palestinian and Lebanese cooking share a Levantine pantry — olive oil, lemon, chickpeas, sumac, fresh herbs — but Palestinian cuisine has its own distinct signatures. Musakhan (roasted chicken piled onto taboon flatbread with caramelized onions, olive oil, and sumac) is the national dish and has no real Lebanese equivalent; maftoul, the hand-rolled Palestinian couscous served in chicken broth with chickpeas, is similarly specific. Lebanese cooking leans more toward mezze variety and raw kibbeh; Palestinian food tends to be heartier and more bread-forward, with taboon and ka'ak (sesame-seed ring bread) playing a central role. The emphasis on high-quality olive oil is higher in Palestinian cooking than almost anywhere else in the region.
Start with musakhan if it's on the menu — caramelized onions, sumac, and roasted chicken on taboon bread is the clearest expression of Palestinian cooking. Maftoul (hand-rolled couscous in chicken broth) is worth seeking out; it doesn't appear on generic Middle Eastern menus. For breakfast, the format MAKANN runs on Bathurst St, Palestinian egg-and-vegetable sandwiches on fresh bread are the everyday meal. If the kitchen does mansaf-style lamb with jameed yogurt sauce, that's a special-occasion dish worth ordering.
Yes — Palestinian cuisine is traditionally halal. Pork does not appear in the cooking, and meat is typically sourced halal. Alcohol is absent from the food itself, though individual restaurants may or may not serve it depending on ownership and licencing. For halal-conscious diners, Palestinian restaurants are a reliable choice without needing to ask about substitutions.
MAKANN at 866 Bathurst St is currently the only Palestinian-classified restaurant in our verified-open feed — a compact breakfast-sandwich counter in the Koreatown stretch of the Annex, first seen about four months ago. Palestinian food in Toronto has historically appeared inside Lebanese and broader Middle Eastern kitchens rather than standalone restaurants, so purpose-built spots like MAKANN are genuinely rare. The Palestinian-Canadian community is concentrated more in the northwest of the city (Lawrence West, Scarborough), so a Bathurst Street opening is notable.
Musakhan is the Palestinian national dish: slow-roasted chicken seasoned heavily with sumac, piled onto taboon flatbread that has been soaked in the cooking olive oil, and topped with deeply caramelized onions and toasted pine nuts. The dish was originally made to use freshly pressed olive oil at harvest time — the bread acts as a vessel that absorbs the oil completely. The result is intensely savory, tangy from the sumac, and sweet from the onions; it's meant to be eaten by tearing the bread by hand. It has no close equivalent in Lebanese or Syrian cooking and is the clearest marker of a specifically Palestinian kitchen.
"First seen" reflects when each restaurant first surfaced in our combined evidence — City permit, public-health inspection, social media — usually within a few weeks of opening, but a permit can lead actual opening by months. How we verify ›
Palestinian breakfast sandwiches are served from a compact counter on Bathurst in Downtown, steps from the heart of the King West corridor. · No website yet.
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