New Spanish 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 CHURRERIA CALDERON INC, first seen 6 months ago.
Tapas bars, paella spots, pintxos counters. Smaller than the Portuguese scene that often shares the same streets - newer Spanish openings in Toronto lean Basque-influenced.
A churrería is a shop dedicated to churros — the long, ridged fried-dough sticks eaten hot with thick drinking chocolate or café con leche. Spanish churros are made from a simple unsweetened dough piped through a star-shaped die, fried crisp, and served plain or dusted with fine sugar; they are not the cinnamon-sugar coated variety common at North American fairs, which borrow the shape but not the tradition. Churrería Calderón at 181 Baldwin St in Kensington Market uses a family Catalan recipe and makes their churros by hand daily — one of the only spots in Toronto doing it this way.
The two cuisines share Iberian roots but diverge sharply in technique and flavour. Portuguese cooking relies heavily on salt cod (bacalhau), grilled sardines, and piri piri heat, with a cuisine shaped by Atlantic fishing and former colonies in Brazil and West Africa. Spanish cooking is more regionally fractured — Basque pintxos, Catalan tomato bread, Valencian paella, and Andalusian gazpacho are barely related dishes from the same country. Toronto has a much larger Portuguese restaurant scene centred in Dundas West; Spanish openings are fewer and tend to lean Catalan or Basque rather than Castilian.
The newest verified Spanish opening in Toronto is Churrería Calderón at 181 Baldwin St in Kensington Market — a Catalan churro shop that opened in late 2025, serving hand-made churros from a family recipe. Toronto's Spanish restaurant count is small compared to Portuguese or Italian; the handful of established tapas bars are concentrated in the Entertainment District and Annex, but NowServingTO tracks only newly licensed spots, so Churrería Calderón is the current entry point for freshly opened Spanish food in the city.
The anchors of a Spanish meal are patatas bravas (fried potatoes with spicy tomato sauce and aioli), jamón ibérico (cured acorn-fed ham, eaten as thin slices), and tortilla española — a thick egg-and-potato omelette served at room temperature. Pintxos bars (Basque-style) load small slices of bread with anchovy, Manchego, or chorizo. Paella — rice cooked in a wide flat pan with saffron, seafood, or rabbit — is the most recognized Spanish dish internationally, though in Spain it is strictly a weekend lunch, not a dinner staple.
Traditional Spanish cooking is heavily pork-forward — jamón, chorizo, and morcilla (blood sausage) appear throughout the menu, and many dishes use lard or are finished with cured pork products. Halal Spanish restaurants are rare; most jamón and embutidos are explicitly pork. Vegetarians can usually find tortilla española, gazpacho, pan con tomate, and padron peppers, but should ask whether stocks or cooking fats contain meat. Churros are typically dairy-free and egg-free, making Churrería Calderón one of the more accommodating options in Toronto's current Spanish listings.
"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 ›
Churreria Calderon is a Catalan churro shop on Baldwin St in Downtown Toronto's Kensington Market, specializing in hand-made churros prepared daily from a family recipe.
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