Two Very Different North Yorks Are Eating Well This Labour Day Weekend

"It's my dad's sauce and my dad's dough," says Chris Dessilas, standing behind the counter of Spano's Diner on Hafis Road. He's not talking about a downtown restaurant row or a mall food court. He's talking about a stretch of pavement in North York's west end that also happens to be home to a mechanical and collision repair shop, a roofing company, and an electronics surplus outlet. Dessilas has been making this pizza since 1986, when he started as a delivery driver for Pizza Spano in Montreal, carrying a recipe his father lit in the 1960s. This year, that recipe landed a few doors down from Bellwoods Brewery's North York taproom, on a street most people only drive through to get somewhere else.

Across the neighborhood and several floors up, a different kind of food story is playing out inside the towers and malls along Yonge Street. Both versions of North York are true this weekend. Neither one is the whole picture on its own.

The square that's doing two jobs this week

Start with Mel Lastman Square, because it's the one place in North York asked to be two things at once every single September.

On Thursday, September 3, the North York Farmers' Market sets up its tents for what organizers are calling its 32nd year at the square, a run that traces back to 1994 when founder Marlene McKay of Willowtree Farm first brought growers and artisans together at 5100 Yonge Street. The market runs every Thursday from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. through October 8, which means the produce table you walk past on your way to the subway has been a fixture here since before most of the condo towers on Yonge Street existed.

The very next day, the same square turns into a stage. T.U. Jazz Fest returns for its 12th annual edition, running Friday through Sunday, September 4 to 6, with more than 130 musicians from Canada, the United States, and Romania. The lineup includes Grammy-winning bassist and producer Justin Gray, who leads a masterclass and performs as a special guest, alongside JUNO-nominated keyboardist Jonny Tobin and the Romanian trio Amphitrio, named this year's Band of the Year. It's free, and it runs across two stages with a schedule tight enough to plan a whole weekend around:

A market that predates the towers and a festival that's still finding its footing after twelve years share the same twenty thousand square feet within twenty-four hours of each other. That overlap isn't an accident of scheduling. It's a sign the square has become the one place in North York where old civic habits and new cultural programming are forced to coexist, whether or not they were designed to.

The pocket the towers don't reach

Now go west, off the Yonge corridor entirely, to where Hafis Road sits southeast of Lawrence and Keele. This isn't a retail strip. Search results for what's nearby turn up Auto Illusions Mechanical & Collision Repair, Roofing Monkeys, and Yummy Catering before they turn up anything you'd call a destination.

That's exactly where Spano's Diner opened in March 2026, a few steps from Bellwoods Brewery's North York location, which has operated its second brewery and bottle shop from 20 Hafis Road since 2016. Spano's serves Montreal smoked meat and all-dressed pizza alongside Greek deli staples, the kind of menu that only makes sense if you understand it as one family's history rather than a concept someone workshopped for the neighborhood. Dessilas isn't opening a restaurant so much as relocating one, sauce and dough intact, into a pocket of the city that has nothing to do with foot traffic or sightlines.

It's worked because Bellwoods was already pulling people to that exact corner for craft beer. Now there's a reason to make a day of it: a pint from the taproom, a sub from Spano's, and a walk past a roofing company on your way back to the car. That combination doesn't happen on Yonge Street, where every new restaurant opens with a mall or a tower already built around it.

Meanwhile, Yonge Street keeps building inside its towers

The other half of North York's food story is happening exactly where you'd expect it to: inside the retail podiums of Yonge Street's residential towers and shopping centres. What's changed is the caliber of what's moving in.

• Ju-Raku, tucked into Bayview Village mall, runs dual omakase and teppanyaki concepts in a 120-seat space, filling a gap in upscale Japanese dining that even downtown Toronto hasn't matched.
• Som Tum Jinda, inside the Fairview Mall food court, holds a Michelin Bib Gourmand for 2025 and 2026 and opened a second, downtown location in May 2026, meaning a mall food court in North York effectively launched one of the city's most talked-about Thai kitchens.
• Konjiki Ramen on Yonge Street brought its Tokyo-honed clam shoyu broth north, drawing lines that form before the doors open at 11:30 a.m.
• Daldongnae runs an all-you-can-eat Korean barbecue format on the Yonge corridor with a charcoal grill and an extensive banchan spread.
• Sang-Ji Fried Bao serves pan-fried soup buns that have built a following well beyond the neighborhood.

Every one of these openings sits inside a mall or a mixed-use tower, the same real estate model that's defined the Yonge-Sheppard stretch for two decades. The food has gotten more ambitious. The geography hasn't changed at all.

What this actually tells you

Put the two stories side by side and a pattern shows up that neither one reveals on its own. North York's most polished new restaurants keep landing inside the retail podiums of towers that were already planned to hold them. Its most personal new opening this year landed on an industrial side street with no retail plan at all, next to a business that's been quietly building its own following since 2016.

That split matters if you actually live here, because it means the neighborhood rewards two completely different kinds of attention. Following the towers gets you the Michelin nods and the viral ramen lines. Following the side streets gets you a diner that's carrying a family recipe forward from 1960s Montreal, sitting where nobody planned for a destination to be. Neither list is complete without the other, and this particular week, with a 32-year-old farmers market handing the square off to a jazz festival less than a day later, North York is proving it can hold both versions of itself at once.

If you're the kind of person who tracks what opens where in this neighborhood, that's worth knowing before the next wave of towers or storefronts changes the math again. That's the kind of read on North York that Do It With Sam keeps close, week to week, long before it shows up in a market report. If you want it in your inbox as it happens, get the latest listings first.