TOAST

Order the French toast at TOAST and it can arrive crusted in Cinnamon Toast Crunch, glossed with vanilla icing, and piled with almond granola and whipped cream — breakfast pushed most of the way toward dessert. Order the Hungry Man Special and the same kitchen sends out three eggs, two strips of bacon, two sausages, ham, house potatoes, toast, and two pancakes, a plate built to outlast a morning's worth of hunger. TOAST lives in the distance between those two orders. It turns familiar morning comfort into something specific and a little theatrical, and it never pretends that brunch, for most of the tables here, isn't still meant to be a full meal.

The clearest version of that identity sits on the sweet specialties board. The Cinnamon Toast Crunch French toast takes thick slices, coats them in the cereal itself, and finishes with vanilla icing, almond granola, and whipped cream — childhood breakfast rebuilt as a brunch centrepiece. Red velvet pancakes arrive under a cream cheese glaze with fresh strawberries, chocolate sauce, and whipped cream. A Belgian waffle comes crowned with Louisiana-style boneless fried chicken, the sweet-and-savoury order the menu leans on hardest. These are not generic brunch labels; they are the plates that make TOAST easy to remember and easy to recommend.

The savoury side proves the kitchen can feed a real appetite. The breakfast poutine piles home fries with cheese curds, homemade gravy, bacon, and two eggs. Benedicts come on poached eggs and a signature hollandaise — a California build with avocado, bacon, and tomato, or a bruschetta version with spinach — each served with house potatoes. The skillets run Country, Western, and a Greek skillet with lamb gyro meat and feta, all of them heavy with potatoes and cheese. A breakfast burrito wraps the same eggs, bacon, peppers, and cheese to go. For lighter appetites there is avocado toast layered with bruschetta, pickled red onion, and poached eggs, or a pineapple half filled with Greek yogurt, granola, and fruit — the fresh counterweight to a menu that mostly trades in comfort.

That spread is deliberate. TOAST is built for mixed tables and for the long middle of the day when a table can't settle on breakfast or lunch — omelettes, salads, sandwiches, burgers, and wraps share the menu with the brunch plates, so a group can land anywhere along it and still eat together. The breadth is what keeps it from being a one-note brunch destination: enough on the menu that the same kitchen handles a quick weekday breakfast, a leisurely weekend table, and a party that wants everything from fruit and yogurt to a loaded skillet. It is an easy answer for a morning out, the kind of daytime stop a visitor can plan a Windsor trip around as readily as a regular drops in mid-week.

TOAST has worked this lane since 2016, on Erie Street East in the heart of Windsor's Little Italy — a strip better known for espresso bars and long Italian dinners than for breakfast. The hours commit to that niche. The kitchen runs a single shift, eight in the morning to three in the afternoon, Tuesday through Sunday, and stays dark on Mondays. There is no dinner service pulling the line in two directions; one stretch of the day gets the kitchen's full attention.

What that leaves is a clear role: the breakfast and brunch table for Erie Street and for the visitors who build a morning around it. The orders that travel — the cereal-crusted French toast, the chicken and waffle plate — are the ones that pull people in, while the skillets, the Benedicts, and the breakfast poutine are what turn a visit into a full meal. By three in the afternoon the lights are off and the kitchen is done, one service cooked the way the menu wants it before the door closes until tomorrow's breakfast.