Arbequina Restaurant

Arbequina pours no wine, and it treats that absence as a discipline rather than a gap. This is a full-service modern Arabic dinner restaurant on Roncesvalles, where the beverage list — built entirely without alcohol — gets the same care as the food. Chef and owner Moeen Abuzaid cooks a Levantine menu that reads as familiar and lands composed: za'atar, sumac and freekeh on one side, live fire and careful plating on the other. Independently owned, it pulls diners from across Toronto to a small Roncesvalles dining room. Arbequina serves dinner only, and builds each meal to be paced across courses instead of rushed through.

The meal opens with Za'atar Bread, warm and set out with house labneh, dried tomato and olives — a direct read on the kitchen's pantry before the larger plates arrive. The opening plates range wide: Baby Gem with pistachios, bulgur and herbs; Steak Tartare with potato and walnuts; Angus Beef Shawarma with tahini and roasted salsa. Then the centre-table dishes take over — Manti, beef dumplings under jameed yogurt with Aleppo pepper and browned butter; Smoked Lamb with yogurt, honey, cucumber and mint; Butter Beans Hummus finished with striploin and pine nuts; Truffle and Mushroom Mutabbaq folded around kashkaval cheese. None of it asks to be hoarded on one plate.

The mains hold their own weight. Sea Bass arrives with red tatbileh and mussels, Red Ruby Shrimp with spiced tomatoes and cilantro, Angus Short Ribs with flaky saj, and an AAA striploin comes in eight-ounce or fourteen-ounce cuts with market vegetables. The vegetable plates are not an afterthought: Cauliflower with burrata, green olives and hazelnut; Freekeh with Jerusalem artichoke, spring onion and almonds; Eggplant Ganoush brightened with pomegranate and lentils. Dessert stays Middle Eastern — Milk Cake with booza, pistachio and kataifi, or Apple Sticky Toffee scented with cinnamon and Arabic coffee.

What holds the menu together is a habit of taking a Levantine staple and rebuilding it with technique. Spring Falafel arrives with garden peas, ramps and lemon aioli; hummus becomes a plate for striploin rather than a dip; Chicken Two-Ways pairs shish tawouk with a stuffed bird over rice pilaf, sized by appetite. The pantry stays legible — nothing is buried under the reinvention — but the plates are composed for a knife and fork, not a takeout box. Diners get two ways in: a substantial à-la-carte order they build themselves, or a $125 chef's prix-fixe that runs the evening as a fixed sequence.

Abuzaid runs the kitchen he owns, a restaurant he built with his wife. The cooking answers to one kitchen, not a group's template. His path runs from Amman through New York to Toronto, and the menu shows it, matching an Arabic pantry to international method and Ontario produce that shifts with the season. He works with an eye on waste, cooking around what the markets bring in. National culinary coverage featured the restaurant for a Ramadan tasting, the sort of attention that follows a chef-owner with a clear point of view rather than a trend to chase.

The whole operation runs at a deliberately small scale: about fifty-four seats in the main dining space and a private room for roughly twenty, dinner served by reservation. That scale is why the zero-proof program matters as much as it does — it lets an observant diner, a designated driver, or anyone skipping alcohol build a full pairing alongside the food instead of settling for an afterthought. Book ahead, start with the bread, and let Manti hold the middle of the table. The olives on that first plate are the tell: Arbequina is a Middle Eastern kitchen cooking at a dinner-party register, and it wants the evening to last.