New Taiwanese restaurants in Toronto: 2 have been licensed in the past year, tracked daily from the City of Toronto business-licence registry (chains excluded). The most recent is STAR GLOW BOBA & COFFEE, first seen 6 months ago.
Taiwanese cuisine has deep roots in Chinese cooking — particularly Hokkien and Hakka traditions from Fujian province — but it developed its own distinct identity over centuries of Japanese colonial influence, indigenous ingredients, and street-food culture. Dishes like lu rou fan (braised pork rice), oyster vermicelli, and scallion pancakes are Taiwanese originals that you won't find as the centrepiece of any Chinese regional cuisine. The flavour profile tends to be lighter and more savoury-sweet than Cantonese or Sichuanese cooking, with soy-braised preparations and fresh herb garnishes defining the register.
If you're at a full-service Taiwanese restaurant, start with lu rou fan (slow-braised fatty pork over rice — the national comfort dish), beef noodle soup (deep, spiced broth with hand-pulled noodles), and popcorn chicken (basil-fried crispy bites that are nothing like fast-food versions). For drinks, Taiwanese boba tea is the original — milk tea with tapioca pearls invented in Taichung in the 1980s. Both Star Glow Boba & Coffee on Bloor St W and Jo's Cha in Scarborough are newly licensed spots where you can start with the drinks side of the cuisine while Toronto's full-menu Taiwanese scene fills in.
It depends on the dish. Taiwanese street food leans heavily on pork — lu rou fan, sausage skewers, and oyster omelettes are the classics — so dedicated vegetarian menus are less common than at Indian or Vietnamese spots. That said, tofu preparations (especially silken tofu and braised firm tofu), pickled vegetables, and egg dishes mean vegetarians can usually eat well by ordering deliberately. Buddhist-style Taiwanese cooking, which avoids all meat and alliums, is a distinct sub-tradition with its own restaurants in larger Taiwanese diaspora cities.
Toronto's newest licensed Taiwanese spots are Star Glow Boba & Coffee at 880 Bloor St W in West Toronto — a hybrid boba and coffee café with bingsu (shaved ice) and banh mi — and Jo's Cha at 3276 Midland Ave in Scarborough, a fruit tea and matcha shop. The established Taiwanese dining scene in Toronto is concentrated in the Highway 7 corridor in Markham and Richmond Hill, just north of the city, where Din Tai Fung-style dumpling houses and beef noodle restaurants have operated for decades. The city proper has fewer full-menu Taiwanese restaurants, which makes new openings notable.
Bubble tea (boba, pearl milk tea) is a cold tea drink — most commonly black or green milk tea — blended with chewy tapioca pearls and served through a wide straw. It was invented in Taichung, Taiwan in the early 1980s and has since become one of the most globally recognised Taiwanese exports. The "bubbles" in the original name referred to the foam from shaking, not the pearls. Both Star Glow Boba & Coffee (Bloor St W) and Jo's Cha (Scarborough) are newly licensed Toronto spots built around this tradition, with Jo's Cha specialising in fresh-ingredient fruit teas and matcha builds.
"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 ›
Star Glow Boba & Coffee is a Taiwanese boba and coffee café on Bloor St W in West Toronto, newly licensed and operating with a hybrid Vietnamese-Taiwanese menu that moves…
Jo's Cha is a Taiwanese bubble tea shop on Midland Ave in Scarborough, specializing in fruit teas and matcha drinks made with fresh ingredients rather than syrups or powder mixes.
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