Lee

The Signature Singapore Style Slaw arrives tall: twenty-four ingredients raked into a crisp tower over salted plum dressing, built to be pulled apart and shared rather than eaten politely from one plate. It is the dish most first-time diners reach for at Lee, and it explains the place faster than any menu line could. This is Susur Lee's Toronto flagship, where the cooking runs classical French technique along a Southeast Asian spice route, and the slaw is where that idea turns physical — a vegan composition that still lands as theatre.

From there the menu fans out without losing the thread. Lobster Dragon Dumplings come with ginger pesto and a superior soya broth; Luckee Spicy Shrimp Cheung Fun folds courgette and scallion pesto into rice noodle. Wild Caramelized Black Cod sets miso mustard and Cantonese preserves against a dim sum daikon cake and crisp noodle fish, while the Char Siu BBQ Duck arrives as an assembly project — foie gras pate, maple mustard, cranberry compote, and steamed chun bing for wrapping at the table. Even the lighter swerves are specific: Burrata Cheeseburger Spring Rolls stack angus beef and aged cheddar inside a lettuce wrap. Dessert keeps the bilingual streak going with French and Chinese Tong Yuen, warm chocolate hazelnut-nougat rice dumplings under vanilla creme anglaise.

What holds all of this together is the discipline behind the variety. A menu that runs from Caribbean jerk pork ribs to Malaysian Penang vegetable curry to a half dozen East Coast oysters could read as a buffet of borrowed ideas; here it reads as one cook's accumulated references, each plate built on French technique and plated with intent. The reach rewards a curious table without tipping into chaos, because the method underneath stays consistent even when the flavours travel far. Lee asks to be eaten the way it is written — ordered widely, passed around, compared bite for bite.

Susur Lee opened the restaurant in 2004, by which point he had been cooking in Toronto for years and counted among the city's best-known chefs. The current Lee is a relocation: the flagship now sits at Richmond and Portland inside the Waterworks complex, a move local reporting framed as a return built around his signatures rather than nostalgia for the old address. The dishes that made his name came with him, and so did the habit of rewriting them, which is why the menu still reads like a working chef's notebook instead of a greatest-hits set under glass.

The breadth is also practical. A plant-forward table is not stranded here: the slaw is vegan, and Vegetarian Curry Puffs, Malaysian Penang vegetable curry with house paneer, and tofu Buddha Lettuce Cups give a meatless route real choices rather than a single token plate. The bar runs on its own logic too, with cocktails like La Hermosa, the Emerald Elixir, and a Shanghai 75 next to zero-proof sours, so the night has a rhythm whether or not anyone is drinking. It is the kind of menu a group can spread across — dumplings and cheung fun to open, a duck or the black cod to anchor, dessert to argue over — without anyone settling.

The Waterworks dining room is built for the kind of dinner meant to be the plan, not a stop before it. A covered terrace, woven textures, and private rooms give groups the evening to themselves. Priced like the occasion restaurant it is, Lee rewards a table that commits — one that books the night, orders across the menu, and lets the slaw set a pace the kitchen has been refining for more than twenty years. The signatures are the draw, but the throughline is plainer: a chef still cooking his own menu, in a city that has known his food a long time.