Toronto

Step onto the glass floor 342 metres above the city for a vertiginous straight-down view of streetcar rooftops and lake freighters.

The Daniel Libeskind crystal addition crashes dramatically into the Victorian facade, housing everything from a full dinosaur gallery to ancient Egyptian mummies.

Vendors have been selling peameal bacon sandwiches, aged cheeses, and Lake Erie pickerel from this 1845 iron-and-brick hall every Saturday morning for generations.

This dense, car-free neighbourhood of Victorian rowhouses hosts vintage shops, Caribbean bakeries, and a cheese shop with wheels of aged gouda stacked floor to ceiling.

A ten-minute ferry from the financial district drops you into a car-free world of lagoons, a small amusement park, and unobstructed skyline views that most tourists never find.

These 90-metre-tall white clay cliffs rise suddenly above Lake Ontario's eastern shore, carved into cathedral-like formations that look borrowed from a different continent.

A linear park and event space threading beneath the Gardiner Expressway's concrete columns, hosting skating in winter and art installations where the highway's hum becomes ambient music.

This Victorian garden cemetery in Cabbagetown is the quietest green space in the east end, full of gothic chapels, weeping willows, and the graves of Toronto's founders.

Chef Masaki Saito's omakase counter holds just eight seats and serves aged Edomae-style nigiri that earned it a Michelin star and a months-long waitlist.

On the 54th floor of the TD Bank Tower, this quintessentially Canadian room serves dry-aged Ontario duck and Haida Gwaii halibut against a panoramic lake horizon.

Tucked above a Queen West clothing shop, this intimate French tasting-menu destination consistently ranks among the best restaurants in the country for its precise, seasonal cooking.

A tiny Niagara Street room where the two-person kitchen produces a single nightly menu built around foraged mushrooms, wild fish, and Iberian ingredients in quietly brilliant combinations.

The godfather of Toronto's craft beer scene on Yonge Street, with rotating taps heavy on Ontario sours and saisons and a knowledgeable staff who can walk you through every cask.

A genuine British pub in Yorkville with dark wood, hand-pulled ales, proper Scotch eggs, and none of the forced theme-park Englishness that ruins so many imitations.

The Queen West taproom for this cult-status brewery draws long weekend queues for its Jelly King sour and Witchshark IPA, best enjoyed in the narrow backyard garden.

One of Canada's oldest brewpubs, on Mount Pleasant, pours its house-made Peculiar bitter and Best Bitter from cask engines in a comfortable, no-nonsense room that feels unchanged since 1991.

Open since 1947, this Queen West institution has put on everyone from The Band to Arcade Fire and remains the city's most reliable room for discovering the next important Canadian act.

Two or three live jazz sets happen here every single night in a no-cover, no-fuss room on Queen West where local musicians jam until last call and the sound spills onto the sidewalk.

A cavernous waterfront venue on the Port Lands hosting major international DJs with a sound system powerful enough to feel in your sternum from the back of the floor.

A serious underground club on Bloor with a booming Funktion-One system, no-frills industrial interior, and bookings that lean deep techno and house from Friday through Sunday morning.