Has the downtown Toronto lunch rush returned? I ate at three popular spots to find out

Empty offices, commuting chaos, impossibly pricey real estate. Can the post-pandemic downtown be saved? In this ongoing series, we examine the fate of the ailing city core and what it will take to thrive again.

Toronto’s restaurant industry was hard hit by the pandemic, and even once takeout was allowed and dining rooms eventually reopened, food businesses that served the downtown lunch crowd continued to struggle. Without the lunchtime rush, some establishments pivoted to expanding catering options, some emphasized meals-to-go, and some shuttered permanently.

Now, as return-to-work policies ramp up and office towers slowly fill, the noontime crowd is coming back once again – at least a few days a week. The Star hung out at three downtown lunch spots, each with different vibes and customer bases, to see what things are like now and how food businesses are coping with the new normal.

The food court: RBC WaterPark Place, 88 Queens Quay W.

It’s a gloomy Friday in late March. Inside the spacious second-floor food court — one of the above-ground and newer additions to Toronto’s PATH system — it’s so eerily quiet that the only sounds are of squeaky shoes and jangly keys echoing throughout the place.

A woman, seated at one of the many (mostly empty) tables, is on a Zoom call without headphones. The small group of people populating the food court appear to be here more for the Wi-Fi access than for lunch.

Fast forward a week and a half to a Wednesday lunch hour and the food court has gone from giving dead mall vibes to resembling Madonna’s “Ray of Light” video. A lot has changed, of course. Namely, it’s light jacket weather and the Jays are back in action.

Office workers flood the food court — dressed casually in dark denim, sneakers and even a fuchsia blazer — and start queuing up at the stalls, each now set up with rope barriers.

“I’m almost there,” a woman standing in line at Jimmy the Greek told her co-worker. “The line usually goes around the corner, but they’re fast. What did you get?”

Her colleague holds up a brown paper box of avocado toast from the adjacent vegan stall, Kupfert & Kim.

Daniel Suss, director of Kupfert & Kim, which has eight locations in the city — most of them in the downtown core and the PATH system — said the company’s sales reflect downtown’s office occupancy rates.

“It’s looking optimistic. That said, I’m not sure we’ve hit the across-the-week average of 60 per cent (of pre-pandemic sales),” he said. “Each day of the week isn’t what it used to be. Tuesday to Thursday, we’re north of 75 per cent. Fridays is about a third and Monday is about half to two-thirds.”

Like they did pre-pandemic, the stalls in WaterPark close by 3 p.m. This is around the time office workers finish up and the people who remain are killing time before an event or just passing through.

Two men in suits – the older with a tie, the younger without – are discussing career goals as they gather up their things to head out.

“You didn’t go to the office today?” one said to the other.

“Nah, I woke up too late.”

The fine-dining restaurant: Jump Restaurant, 18 Wellington St. W.

Andrew Oliver tried getting a lunch reservation at Jump on a recent Tuesday. It was booked solid. Oliver, president and CEO of Oliver and Bonacini, the restaurant company that owns Jump, would have to settle for a seat at the bar.

It didn’t come as a surprise. Oliver’s been keeping an eye on how the rise of hybrid work has impacted his restaurants, which along with Jump — an upscale American bistro with an extensive scotch list — include the downtown spots Canoe, Leña, O&B Canteen, O&B Cafe Grill and Sap. He knows Tuesday is a busy day.

His restaurants — known for their power lunches, where deals are brokered and clients are schmoozed – remain popular, but reservations aren’t as steady throughout the Monday to Friday work week as they once were.

Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays are busy. Mondays were quiet pre-pandemic, and quieter now. Fridays are hit or miss depending on what’s happening in the office towers.

“Maybe you’re lucky and your restaurant is in the same building as a law firm or bank,” Oliver said. “Those people haven’t stopped coming in (for work).”

Jump is in the centre of the Financial District on the ground level of Commerce Court, with tenants including CIBC, Deutsche Bank and a handful of law firms.

“It’s the luck of the draw of the offices’ new work policies,” Oliver continued. “The people coming back aren’t represented on all levels. Anecdotally, the more senior you are and if you’re in a higher income bracket, the more likely you are to be back in the office and eating out more.”

A few Tuesdays later, the restaurant is as busy as Oliver describes. Around 12:30 p.m. the tables fill up with suits and the restaurant buzzes with work chatter. It’s too noisy to overhear any investing tips. As busy as it is, Oliver says that before the pandemic there would have been a line outside

“I don’t think remote work is going away,” he said, “but I think those (busier) days will come.”

The casual eatery: Salad King, 340 Yonge St.

It’s a little before noon on a Thursday in mid-April. Just five tables are occupied at the 4,600-square-food restaurant — a stark contrast to the lineups that would sometimes take half an hour to get through in the early 2000s.

By 12:15 p.m. more people start to file in. It’s a mix of Toronto Metropolitan University students with backpacks slung over their shoulders and young professionals. Some of them reminisce with their friends about first coming to Salad King as students years before.

The booths and tables at the front half of the restaurant slowly fill up, while the back half, with long metal communal tables, still has plenty of room during peak lunch rush.

Owner Alan Liu said business is “nowhere close” to what it was pre-pandemic. The restaurant is now seeing a little more than half of what business used to be. At its lowest, when dining rooms and offices were closed, he said it was at 10 per cent.

Dining patterns have shifted, Liu said. Not only are people coming to the office a few times a week — Monday and Friday lunchtimes are the quietest — they are also arriving later in the day. Salad King now opens at 11:30 a.m. instead of 11, a reflection of a lunch rush that’s later, and shorter, than it once was. What used to be a lunch crowd with two waves of diners has been cut in half.

For a casual restaurant like Liu’s, that makes a huge difference. He doesn’t have alcohol sales to count on, so he has to sell a lot of food.

And there’s another significant challenge. Salad King has always been the choice of students, but years of remote learning put a damper on that.

“We have to rebuild the student crowd because we had two, three years of no student interaction so we lost that goodwill,” he said. “We’re a neighbourhood restaurant that relies on word-of-mouth.”

For now, Liu said his family restaurant is hanging on, thanks to a flexible landlord. He hopes more retail will fill the vacancies along Yonge Street to get more people dropping in for lunch. “We’re still in survival mode and hopefully the new normal hasn’t been established yet.”

Karon Liu is a Toronto-based food reporter for the Star. Reach him via email: karonliu@thestar.ca