Pennies Bellwoods

Pennies treats the slider as the whole point, not a bar snack tucked in beside the burgers. The menu is built from small sandwiches — a row of griddled burgers, fried-chicken builds, fish and shrimp — meant to be ordered a few at a time and stacked up with loaded tots and cheap drinks. The canary-yellow bar on Strachan Avenue, along the western edge of Trinity Bellwoods, has run that way since 2018, built for casual rounds rather than formal dinners, where the smartest order is assembled from a handful of small things instead of chosen off a single plate.

The slider list starts at the griddle. The Oklahoma Burger arrives with smashed onions, cheese, pickles and mustard; the Classic Hamburger keeps it to onion, pickles and the same two sauces; the Harlem Chopped Cheese Steak piles ground chuck with iceberg, tomato, onions and mayo. From there it fans out. Fried chicken runs three ways — Southern Honey with coleslaw and hot honey, Nashville Hot dunked spicy with pickles, and Korean with slaw, sesame and a house KFC sauce — before the list keeps going into a Baja fish taco with avocado crema, a Cajun shrimp po' boy, a sausage-and-jalapeño El Paso Melt under Carolina barbecue sauce, and a Beyond Meat veggie build for the table that needs one. Tots carry the sharing: poutine tots under Quebec curds and gravy, supreme tots loaded with queso, sour cream and pico de gallo. Almost nothing on the menu is large, which is the point — it is a list made for grazing.

What the format is really after is a table that keeps ordering. The menu sells in miniature and modular — a three-slider combo with tots, or six sliders for a group that wants to graze its way through the night — so an evening here runs more like a tab of small things than a single sit-down meal. Cheap drinks and long hours match it: the bar runs past midnight most nights and to two in the morning on weekends, with a patio that does as much work in summer as the counter inside. It reads as a bar that takes its sliders seriously, not a restaurant dressed down for a night out. Private-party bookings and the patio make it an easy default for a group that cannot agree on anything fancier.

The slider fixation has a backstory. Owner James Bateman opened Pennies in 2018, converting his earlier cowboy-themed Bronco's Slider Bar in the same Strachan Avenue building into the cheap-drinks slider bar it is today — a concept he has traced, by his own account in local reporting, to repeat visits to Detroit's Green Dot Stables. The kitchen's ambitions have stayed deliberately small and the format consistent ever since. The idea travelled, too: in the summer of 2025 he added a second Pennies on College Street.

The one move that rewards a calendar is the steamies. All day Wednesday, Pennies serves them all-you-can-eat, a standing reason to time a visit instead of just wandering in. On a stretch of Strachan Avenue beside Trinity Bellwoods that turns over fast, the bar has kept its corner by staying cheap and staying open late. Any other night the order is simpler still: a few sliders, a basket of poutine tots, a drink, and a table that can stay loud until the lights come up at one or two in the morning.