Linny’s

Most steakhouses keep the deli at arm's length. Linny's brushes its steaks with pastrami tallow butter. The gesture is small and it tells you everything: at this Ossington dining room, the smoke-and-brine language of a Jewish deli and the white-linen confidence of a chophouse are not two menus sharing an address but one idea worked out plate by plate. David Schwartz opened Linny's in 2024 with Big Hug Hospitality, and he built the concept to be read rather than assembled — pastrami, challah, and chicken liver sit on the same list as dry-aged Ontario beef, and neither half apologizes for the other.

The pastrami is the point. Hand-sliced to order and served with mustard and pickles, the Linny's Cut comes off Bielak Farms beef and doubles as the clearest way into everything else. Around it the deli half keeps its own counter: chicken liver toast with cured egg, fried onion, and pickle; challah service with fresh cheese and jam; kasha and bows folded through spring onion and charred onion stock. The steaks answer in kind — a bone-in New York strip of dry-aged Speckle Park from JC Cattle Co, a forty-ounce Speckle Park porterhouse, and The Romanian, a hanger steak seared in the overfired broiler and finished with that same pastrami tallow butter. For a bigger night there is Kaluga Queen ossetra, served with crispy chicken skin and potato chips instead of the usual solemn garnish.

Between the two poles sits a house-specialties list where the kitchen shows its hand. Shake n' Bake chicken arrives glossed with honey, dill pickle powder, and hot sauce; roasted lamb neck comes with hakurei turnip and house horseradish; a tripe schnitzel is fried crisp under chicken gravy, chive, and lemon. Even the sides carry the deli through-line — a twice-baked potato loaded with pastrami and cheese sauce, fried green beans in dill ranch, a pickle plate that is exactly what it says. The playfulness is real, but it is disciplined; nothing on the list reads as a bit.

What holds it together is sourcing that refuses to sit in the background. The beef carries farm names the way other kitchens carry adjectives — Bielak, JC Cattle Co, Martin's Family Farms, a Prince Edward Island reserve for the wet-aged strip — and the chicken, lamb, and pastrami all trace back to Ontario growers. That specificity is the argument against gimmick: a deli-steakhouse could coast on nostalgia, but this one spends its effort on where the meat comes from and how the broiler treats it. The dining room makes the same case in another register, with jazz, corduroy booths, terrazzo, and burl wood that read as mid-century chophouse without tipping into costume, and a national restaurant guide named its design one of 2025's best.

The name is the personal part. Schwartz called the restaurant for Linda, his late mother, and the memory frame is not decoration — it is why the Ashkenazi vocabulary runs so deep instead of resting on top as a theme. He cooks with Ethan Rogers, and the food has the authored quality that comes from people making a specific argument rather than opening another chophouse. The references are the ones a deli accumulates over generations — horseradish, pickles, smoked and cured everything — and here they run through a kitchen finishing dry-aged strip loins on an overfired broiler.

Linny's sits at the top of its local price band, and it behaves accordingly: reservations lead the rhythm, the bar pours a full wine-and-cocktail list, and Sunday brings a prime rib service built around potato rosti, sour cream, creamed horseradish, caraway-braised sauerkraut, and warm au jus. None of it is cheap, and the value case is not the price — it is the authorship, the sense that someone decided what this restaurant would be down to the butter on the steak. The pastrami tallow butter brushed across a strip is the whole idea in one gesture: a chophouse that never forgot it came from a deli, named for the woman whose table it is still trying to set.