New Tibetan 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 HIGHLAND MOMO, first seen 12 months ago.
Parkdale (sometimes called Little Tibet) is the heart of the scene - momos, thukpa, butter tea. Toronto is said to hold the largest Tibetan community in North America.
A momo is a hand-folded steamed dumpling — Tibet's answer to Chinese jiaozi, but with a thicker, chewier wrapper and fillings that lean heavily on ginger, garlic, and either yak meat (outside Tibet: beef or buffalo) or spiced vegetables. They're served with a fiery tomato-sesame dipping sauce called sipaak that's nothing like the soy sauce you'd expect. Highland Momo on Islington Ave. in Etobicoke is built around exactly this: hand-folded momos rooted in Himalayan kitchen tradition.
All three cuisines share momos and noodle soups, but Tibetan cooking is blunter and more austere — shaped by high-altitude scarcity rather than spice-trade abundance. Where Nepali food leans on lentil-heavy dal-bhat and heavy spicing from the Indian border, and Chinese food ranges from delicate to intensely seasoned, Tibetan dishes use fewer aromatics and more tsampa (roasted barley flour), yak-derived dairy, and warming staples like thukpa (noodle broth) and sha phaley (fried bread stuffed with meat). Butter tea — salted, made with yak butter — is the most immediately foreign thing to a first-time diner.
Toronto's Tibetan dining scene is small but real. The historically rooted area is Parkdale, long known informally as Little Tibet and home to one of the largest Tibetan communities in North America. For a newly licensed spot, Highland Momo at 2267 Islington Ave. in Etobicoke has been open since mid-2025, specializing in hand-made momos and laphing. NowServingTO tracks newly licensed Tibetan restaurants city-wide as they open.
More so than you'd expect. The high-altitude pastoral economy historically centred on meat and dairy, but Toronto's Tibetan restaurants routinely offer full vegetarian momo fillings — typically spiced cabbage, tofu, or mixed vegetables — alongside the beef and pork versions. Laphing, a cold spiced mung-bean noodle dish that originated in Lhasa, is naturally vegan and one of the most distinct things on any Tibetan menu. Gluten-free is harder: momos use wheat flour wrappers and thukpa is a wheat-noodle soup, so options are limited for wheat-avoiders.
Start with a mixed plate of steamed momos — half meat, half vegetable — to benchmark the kitchen, then order a bowl of thukpa (hand-pulled noodle soup with broth, greens, and meat) as the main. If laphing is on the menu, get it: the cold, slippery mung-bean noodles dressed in chili oil and vinegar are unlike anything else in the city. Skip butter tea on the first visit unless you're committed — it's an acquired taste that lands between soup and a hot drink.
"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 ›
Highland Momo is a Tibetan Momo counter on Islington Ave in Etobicoke, specializing in hand-folded dumplings rooted in Himalayan kitchen tradition.
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