Turkish Food in Scarborough & the East End

Scarborough’s Turkish food scene is small but disproportionately good. The borough has fewer Turkish restaurants than Mississauga or North York, but the ones it does have are some of the most consistently excellent in the GTA — many are family-run, multi-generational, and serve a community of Turkish-Canadians who have been in the area for thirty years or more.

This guide is for visitors making the trip and for residents looking for the spots worth supporting.

Small but disproportionately good — the east end punches well above its restaurant count.

A note on the data

Scarborough was amalgamated into the City of Toronto in 1998. In OpenStreetMap — our source for the verified restaurant directory — Scarborough addresses are typically tagged as “Toronto” with “Scarborough” as the borough or neighbourhood. We use reverse-geocoding via Nominatim to recover the Scarborough tag on entries that have lat/lon coordinates.

That said, Scarborough is under-represented in OSM’s Turkish-restaurant tagging right now: there are clearly more Turkish places in the borough than the data shows. If you know one, email tips@turkishdining.ca — we’ll add it both here and contribute back to OSM upstream.

Scarborough-tagged restaurants

East-end Toronto (Danforth, Queen East, Leslieville)

Many of the city’s strongest Turkish places sit just west of Scarborough proper, on the Danforth/Queen East corridor. These are the closest options if a Scarborough trip doesn’t work out:

For the full GTA-wide list grouped by city, see the restaurant directory.

The map of Scarborough Turkish dining

Scarborough’s Turkish dining historically clusters in three small areas:

Kennedy & Eglinton. A couple of family-run sit-down restaurants and a Turkish grocery store within a five-minute drive of each other.

Birchmount & Sheppard. Quieter, mostly takeout. Several long-running shops.

McCowan & Steeles. A few family-run sit-down restaurants that have been operating for over fifteen years each.

What to look for in a Scarborough Turkish restaurant

The signs of a serious east-end Turkish kitchen:

• An open kitchen where you can see the döner spit (or rotisserie) running
• House-baked pide rather than pre-bought
• A Turkish grocery store nearby — the restaurant probably uses it for sahlep, real Antep pistachios, and pomegranate molasses
• A bilingual menu that lists dishes in both English and Turkish — a tell that the kitchen takes Turkish naming seriously
• A loyalty crowd at lunchtime — locals who’ve been eating there for years

A note on the Turkish grocery store

Scarborough has at least one excellent Turkish grocery store stocking ingredients that are hard to find elsewhere:

• Real sahlep powder (not the instant drink mix)
• Gaziantep pistachios by the kilogram
• Pul biber (Aleppo pepper) and isot (Urfa pepper)
• Pomegranate molasses from several Turkish producers
• Real Turkish coffee ground to the right fineness
• Fresh phyllo dough for home baklava

This is where most of the area’s Turkish-Canadian families do their weekly shopping. We’re working on adding Turkish groceries to a separate directory — until then, ask at any Scarborough Turkish restaurant and they’ll tell you where the locals shop.

Help us close the data gap

If you live in Scarborough or visit Turkish restaurants there, please tell us what we should include. Send the name and address to tips@turkishdining.ca. Every tip we get gets verified and contributed back to OpenStreetMap, so other guides (and Google Maps) improve too.

Our methodology

• Restaurant directory compiled from OpenStreetMap and refreshed quarterly
• Scarborough-specific tagging in OSM is sparse — we’re actively contributing to fill this in
• No paid placements — see editorial ethics
• Editor notes on individual restaurant pages reflect anonymous visits paid for like a regular customer