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This airy-feeling, innovative urban brewery and restaurant in the East end serves up delicious, local fare, with a side of conscientious initiatives.
Restaurant: Avling at 1042 Queen Street East, Toronto, ON, M4M 1K4; (416) 469-1010
Price Point for two: $110 plus tax and tip (included two drinks, two apps, two mains).
When I think of breweries I’ve been to, they’re typically sporty or industrial-chic when it comes to the overall vibe. So when I walked into the airy and elegant dining room at Avling, it completely caught me off guard. I’m greeted by pale wooden chairs and the circular bar that holds court in the centre of the room, and there are touches of light pink on the wooden beams overhead. The space feels elegant and contemporary. There’s even a pretty mural that looks like colourful sheets of paper fluttering across the walls. It’s not the kind of brewpub where you’re going to get rowdy and catch the game. This is a place you can sit back and catch up over great conversation as you enjoy local craft beer and dive into a great meal, whether on a date or out with your best friends.
With its rooftop farm that’s upwards of 4,000 square feet, we love the idea of trying dishes and beverages that feature ingredients grown and crafted in house.
And despite being a brewery, it’s not just a place for beer drinkers either. We found wines and handcrafted cocktails to choose from on the menu and a solid range of food choices, including plenty of dishes that celebrate vegetables. We settled on sharing two appetizers followed by the grilled pork chop and dry-aged beef burger for our mains.
The vegetarian starters truly shone; they were full of flavour and a great mix of textures.The first appetizer was rich-tasting carrots roasted in brown butter and served with a labneh that includes black garlic grown on the restaurant’s rooftop farm. The second was a dish of crispy brussels sprouts and broccoli, the combination of which hit sweet and savoury notes thanks to maple miso, fermented chili oil, pickled ginger, and pietro peppers.
And our entrees? The pork chop was juicy and slightly sweet (the dish includes an apple soubise) and the burger, served on a pillowy housemade sesame milk bun with a beer-battered onion ring, hit the spot alongside our choice of house-brewed sour beer.
We were out of room for dessert, but sweet-toothed diners will have a hard time resisting the two classics on the dessert menu — sticky toffee pudding and warm chocolate chunk cookies.
Eating (and drinking!) local:
With its rooftop farm (which is a certified wildlife habitat sanctuary) that’s upwards of 4,000 square feet, we love the idea of trying dishes and beverages that feature ingredients grown and crafted in house. Although this is admittedly more limited during the winter months, throughout most of the year, you can identify items on the menu that use ingredients from the rooftop farm as they’re marked with the letters AV. The sticky toffee pudding, for example, is made with a flour made from the spent grain from the brewery (which is also used in the pizza dough and lavash). Chef Laura Maxwell reduces the wort from the brewery to a sweet syrup, which you’ll then find in candied bacon that’s used in some dishes and for a caramel sauce.
We also love that Avling produces some all-Ontario beers, that is beer that is brewed using only ingredients from Ontario. They include fruit from Ontario that doesn’t meet aesthetic standards to be on grocery shelves but is perfectly good in season. They produce it in season when the fruit is at its peak, with the beers available the following season.
Plus, you can also enjoy the beer in other formats. For example, Avling turns some beers into vinegars, which you may find alongside your beer-battered fish and chips.
Other sustainability features:
When owner Max Meighan opened Avling in 2019, the concept was centred on circularity. “We tried to think of ways the restaurant and brewery could fit within the broader food system in Southern Ontario,” says Meighan. And not just in terms of using less, but doing what they could to help improve soil quality, for example, and supporting people doing things the right way when it comes to growing practices, he says. For example, they worked with farmers and their winter cover crops — crops not grown by farmers for their yield but rather to essentially hold the soil in place through the cold season. Avling worked with farmers to plant molting varieties of barley, which they then used in producing beer.
When it comes to building out the restaurant and brewery initially, in addition to installing new windows, insulation, and HVAC to make Avling more efficient, Meighan also installed the green roof to ease heating and cooling of the building while also providing the kitchen access to a rooftop farm.
Given the volume of fresh produce a restaurant of Avling’s size requires, the restaurant relies greatly on ingredients from local farms and suppliers (including Enright Cattle Company, Cookstown Greens, and 100Km Foods). And the kitchen team, as part of its mise en place, heads up to the roof to harvest, primarily garnishes: everything from herb, nasturtium, and borage to the sage used in the brunch sausage they make in house with heritage pork from Perth. In the winter months, some items such as cilantro, mustard, and radish are grown indoors. “So they travel 20 metres to hit the plate instead of being dropped off in plastic clamshells by suppliers, having travelled from afar.
The team collects uneaten food and the ashes from the live fire grill for the rooftop garden, putting the waste to good use. “This is great for the soil on the rooftop farm,” says Avling’s farmer, Steph Goodyear (who during the winter months works the bar and front of house). For the rooftop space, she focuses on using ecological growing practices, including cover cropping, crop rotation, low tillage, with no pesticide or synthetic fertilizer use. “We only use natural inputs like manure, cricket frass, and our own compost,” she says.
And for any additional compost collection, plus garbage and recycling oil waste, the restaurant and brewery uses Rethink Resource, a waste diversion provider. While this is a more expensive option when it comes to waste management, Maxwell says they feel it’s the best way to offset Avling’s carbon footprint, in particular given the volume of spent grain (which Rethink converts to animal feed) produced by the brewery.
The restaurant has had to pivot on some of its initiatives as it worked on establishing itself as a business over the past six years. Case in point: Avling used to use waste water from the brewery to water the rooftop farm, but because space limitations for treating large volumes of water on site made this unfeasible, they do this in a more limited capacity now. While it’s not an initiative they can pursue at this time, Meighan — who secured grants for the wastewater project and then worked with a college outside of Cornwall, Ont., on the initial trials — notes that he believes it was both exciting and worthwhile. “I hope that more breweries with more space to work with might look into this option as well.”
Read Karen’s review of another sustainably minded Toronto restaurant to try, 1 Kitchen.
