Toronto’s Woodlyns Puts Chinese Cooking and Jewish Comfort Food at the Same Table

Woodlyns opened on October 16 at 947 Eglinton Avenue West, a short walk from Bathurst in Humewood-Cedarvale. Jeff Goldstein, a lawyer who grew up on the strip, brought in Nick Liu as culinary director and Josh Ling as head chef and partner. Liu runs DaiLo and Café Renée. Ling cooked beside him at both, and earlier at Vela and at Vicky Cheng’s Michelin-starred VEA in Hong Kong. Toronto Life and blogTO have followed the opening closely. What they keep coming back to is the menu: Chinese cooking and Jewish comfort food, ordered for the same table.

Goldstein told Toronto Life he missed the College Street energy he knew from Little Italy, and he wanted some of that life back on Eglinton after years of LRT construction quieted the block. He went to Liu as a DaiLo regular. Liu, talking to Streets of Toronto, pointed at the neighborhood itself. It already eats Jewish food at home, and it has long lined up at Chinese restaurants too. “Throughout history, what have Jewish people liked to eat besides their own cuisine?” he asked Toronto Life in September. “The answer was obvious: Chinese food.” Ling and Liu sat down with a stack of Jewish cookbooks. Schmaltz was the hinge Ling described to Erin Hershberg. Chinese kitchens save lard the way Ashkenazi kitchens save chicken fat, the kind of scrap both traditions refuse to waste.

Start with the matzo ball wonton soup. The dinner menu and OpenTable price it at $10: chicken wontons and fluffy matzo balls in a ginger chicken consommé with bok choy, plus a little dish of schmaltz chili crunch on the side. Toronto Life says the stock is whole chicken with ginger and thyme, built more like a Jewish soup pot than a dried-fish wonton broth. The crispy gefilte fish cake ($22) begins as smoked branzino mousse, gets steamed, then fried in panko and finished with horseradish, pickled beet, fennel, schmaltz mayo, and chili oil. A Reuben spring roll ($10) wraps house pastrami, Swiss, sauerkraut, and mustard aioli. Five-spice chicken liver toast ($16) lands on challah with cured duck egg and goji jam.

The pastrami sandwich takes the most time. According to Toronto Life, the brisket brines for five or six days, then gets a crust of white, black, green, and Sichuan peppercorns with brown sugar and dehydrated kombu before a fourteen-hour smoke. Thin slices go on Harbord Bakery milk bread toasted in caraway butter, with a Kozlik’s mustard that carries caraway and miso, house pickles, and sauerkraut, for $30. The same pastrami returns as a $36 plate and as $21 fried rice with egg, vegetables, gribenes, and crispy chili schmaltz. For a bigger table, blogTO points to the whole steamed branzino ($55), finished with ginger, scallion, goji berry, and a sauce of Shaoxing wine and schmaltz. The chicken shawarma platter ($42) comes with mala hummus and tofu tzatziki. Dessert stays in the same room: baked tapioca pudding with red bean for $12, sticky rice ice cream with pomegranate molasses for $8.

Toronto already knows this dinner. Ginsberg and Wong opened at Village by the Grange in 1979 with deli sandwiches and wok plates under one roof, and it lasted into the 1990s. Jamie Bradburn’s old Toronto Star ads still circulate, and a 2025 Fat Pasha pop-up brought the name back for a night. Farther up Bathurst, Sea-Hi Famous Chinese Food fed North York’s Jewish neighborhood for decades, Christmas Day included, until it closed in 2020. The Globe and Mail has written about Spadina and the Ward as shared Jewish and Chinese maps, and about Chinese food on Christmas as a North American Jewish habit. Woodlyns picks that habit up on Eglinton West. Liu told Toronto Life he wants to do for this strip what DaiLo did for College. Ling told blogTO he wants a place the neighborhood comes back to. Book through the restaurant site or OpenTable. The kitchen lists Wednesday and Sunday from 4:30 to 10 p.m., later hours Thursday through Saturday, and a Monday-Tuesday close. Check the sitting when you reserve.