Restaurant Review: The French Kitchen – The Best French Meal in Toronto is Hiding in The Junction

The Junction has rarely offered an establishment quite like The French Kitchen. On a stretch of Dundas Street West better known for antique dealers and quirky shops, in a slender building that until recently dispensed vegan cupcakes as Bunner’s Bake Shop, a chef with some fifty-five years behind the stove has quietly installed twenty seats and begun cooking as though the rest of the city could wait its turn.

The chef is Didier Leroy, who was raised in Picardy in the north of France, and went to work in a professional kitchen at fifteen. He spent the better part of two decades in Paris, gathered every diploma the trade offers up to a master’s, and speaks of Paul Bocuse as his teacher without a flicker of modesty. France named him a chevalier of its Order of Agricultural Merit. He cooked for the French consulate here for years, opened the Arlington Estate in 2017, and most recently helped bring LSL to life, the wildly ambitious tasting-menu room where dinner climbed to a startling six hundred and eighty dollars.

He announced his departure from LSL late in 2025 with the stated intention of stepping off the line to mentor younger cooks. That plan lasted about as long as it takes a beurre blanc to break. A former LSL guest named Lucy, a woman with a real and abiding love of French cooking, had found a jewel-box space in the Junction and needed only one thing to fill it. She asked Leroy to lead. He said “oui”! The result carries the plainest name imaginable, The French Kitchen, and a five-course tasting menu priced at $148 per person (beverage pairings optional).

The room is intimate in the way a good secret is intimate. It is also, if we are being candid, a shade too intimate for its own ambitions. The tables sit close enough that you will learn a little about your neighbours’ anniversary whether you mean to or not, and the whole layout feels squeezed, as though the furniture were arranged to a plan drawn a size too large for the floor. More pressing is the matter of the early arrival. There is nowhere to land. No small bar, no bench, no perch by the door where a guest who turns up ahead of the reservation can shed a coat and gather themselves before the evening begins. You are either seated or you are standing in the way, and neither is quite the note on which a meal of this calibre should open.

What redeems this drawback is the warmth of the people running the place. Lucy and Matthieu Arteau, a maître d’ who followed Leroy over from LSL, co-lead the front of house, and they greet you as though you had wandered into their own dining room. Their generousity is the genuine article, and it buys the evening a great deal of goodwill before the first plate ever lands.

Every meal here opens with a glass of bubbles, poured at each table as a matter of ritual, and we had chosen to follow the chef’s wine pairings the whole way through.

Then the food, which is where The French Kitchen stops asking for goodwill and simply earns it. An amuse bouche set the terms early, precise and quietly confident, the work of a kitchen that has nothing left to prove and knows it. The first course offered a choice between a soupe vichycoise, chilled and silken and tasting cleanly of leek and potato and little else, and a salade waldorf that treated a fusty old warhorse with more respect than it usually receives, the apple crisp, the walnuts toasted to the edge of bitterness, the whole thing brighter than its reputation.

The second course is where Leroy’s technique announces itself in full. A gateau de sandre arrived under a beurre blanc so glossy and so exactly balanced between butter and acid that I found myself chasing the last of it around the plate. The alternative, St. Jacques de Bretagne served as a ceviche, was its cool-headed opposite, the scallops sweet and yielding, dressed with a restraint that let the shellfish speak for itself.

The third course is the heart of the menu and the clearest window into the man. There is a caille farcie aux escargots, the quail deboned by hand before every service, one bird at a time, the way Leroy learned to do it half a century ago, stuffed with snails and cooked with the sort of care that cannot be hurried. There is a beef tartare with pommes pont neuf, the potatoes thick and burnished, the beef seasoned by someone who understands that tartare is a dish of judgement rather than invention. And there is a lamb, served with a gratin dauphinois that alone would justify the trip, the cream and potato collapsing into one another the moment a fork touches them. Each of these was, in a word, exceptional. This is cooking of a rare and old-fashioned seriousness.

Dessert closes the circle. You may choose a trio de fromage or a clafoutis aux cerises, but the one to order is the riz au lait, a rice pudding Leroy makes with risotto rice and describes as the taste of his childhood in the north of France. He has said that if he had one last dish to cook, this would be it, and eating it, you understand exactly what he means. It makes the whole meal fall into place.

If the food reaches for Michelin, the service has not yet caught up to it, and this is the gap that keeps a superb evening from becoming a flawless one. Lucy and Matthieu keep the room warm and moving, but the junior team beneath them is willing and kind and unmistakably green. Plates were set down a touch out of sequence, glasses lingered empty, and the wine pairings in particular were described in the most rudimentary terms. A pairing at this level is a small piece of theatre and a smaller lesson, and it wants a server who can tell you why this glass and this dish belong together, in a sentence or two, with conviction. Here the descriptions arrived thin, occasionally uncertain, once or twice not at all.

None of it undoes the achievement. The French Kitchen is a serious restaurant hiding inside a modest one, run by lovely people, anchored by a chef cooking at the very top of a very long career. Polish the service and find somewhere to put the early guests, and this becomes one of the finest tables in the city. As it stands, it is very nearly that already, and worth every minute of the squeeze.

Bisous,

Mme M. xoxo

4/5 étoiles

La rubrique de Madame Marie
1 étoile –Run. Before you get the runs.
2 étoiles – Mediocre, but nothing you couldn’t make at home.
3 étoiles – C’est bon, with some standout qualities.
4 étoiles – Many memorable qualities and excellent execution. Compliments to the chef.
5 étoiles – Formidable! Michelin Star quality. Book a reservation