Press & Media Kit
A daily-fresh directory of restaurants newly licensed in Toronto — classified by cuisine, verified against Google Places and owner websites, sourced from the City of Toronto's open data registry.
By the numbers
Top cuisines by 12-month new-opening count
| Cuisine | Past 12 mo | Past 30 days |
|---|---|---|
| Indian | 65 | 3 |
| Chinese | 51 | 2 |
| Italian | 40 | 6 |
| Mexican | 37 | 3 |
| Vietnamese | 30 | 3 |
| Japanese | 29 | 2 |
| Korean | 20 | 0 |
| Thai | 13 | 0 |
| Turkish | 12 | 0 |
| Jamaican | 11 | 0 |
Page updates daily at ~1:17 AM Toronto time. Live directory · XML sitemap · Raw JSON feed (machine-readable, CC0-attributable).
How it works
Every night the pipeline pulls Toronto's business licence registry from the City's open-data CKAN portal (158k rows, refreshed daily), filters to restaurant categories issued in the last 365 days, deduplicates against OpenStreetMap and Wikidata chain databases, classifies each entry by cuisine via Claude Haiku with web-search verification, and matches against Google Places to confirm operational status. Only restaurants verified as currently open at the licensed address are shown.
Total daily Anthropic API spend: under USD $0.30. Zero ongoing Google Places spend. The pipeline is small enough that everything runs from a single $6/month DigitalOcean droplet.
Embeddable widget
Drop a fresh feed of newly licensed restaurants into any blog post or news article. The widget renders a small card with the 3–5 most recent licences for a cuisine or district, links each card to its restaurant page, and includes a footer attribution link back to NowServingTO. No iframe — the rendered links count for SEO.
Basic usage:
<div data-nsto-embed data-cuisine="vietnamese" data-count="5"></div> <script src="https://nowservingto.com/embed.js" async></script>
Supported attributes: data-cuisine (any of the ~50 cuisine keys), data-district (downtown, east-toronto, etobicoke, north-york, scarborough, west-toronto), data-count (1–10, default 5). Use both data-cuisine and data-district to get the intersection. Loads asynchronously, ~4 KB script, no jQuery.
Live preview:
Citation format
If you use our numbers or feed in a story, please credit us. Recommended language:
Plain HTML:
Source: <a href="https://nowservingto.com/">NowServingTO.com</a>, daily-tracked from the <a href="https://open.toronto.ca/dataset/municipal-licensing-and-standards-business-licences-and-permits/">City of Toronto business licence registry</a>.
For diaspora editors
We maintain dedicated weekly editorial briefs for select diaspora communities — live, auto-updating, designed to be lifted verbatim or used as research. Each brief carries the licensed-this-week count, the past-12-month total, a real Places photo of the most-recent opening, the full card grid of recent licences, and a district-density bar chart:
- Indian kitchens, region by region
- Chinese kitchens, regional and rising
- Italian kitchens, the licence registry
- Mexican kitchens, the wave
- Vietnamese kitchens, by the week
- Korean kitchens, K-town and beyond
- Filipino kitchens, this week in Toronto
- Jamaican kitchens, Eglinton West and beyond
- Tamil kitchens, Scarborough's everyday wave
If you edit a publication serving a diaspora community in Canada and want a custom feed (your cuisine, your region of Toronto, your cadence), email us — we'll wire it.
Contact
What we are not
- Not a review site. We surface registry data, not user reviews or ratings. Stars come from Google Places only.
- Not a directory of every Toronto restaurant. We only track those licensed in the past 365 days — the "newly opened" cohort.
- Not user-submitted. No tips, no claims, no self-tagged ethnicity. The data is the City's licensing registry plus web-search verification.
- Not affiliated with the City of Toronto, Google, or any restaurant listed.