Joni Restaurant

Starter scraps back on the bench

Sourdough starter scraps return to the bench as pasta at Joni Restaurant in Toronto. Executive Chef Jonathan Williams sets that habit, bringing more than seventeen years across top Toronto rooms, Michelin-starred kitchens in England and New York establishments, with pastry chef Sarah Tsai working from her own Michelin experience in London and Taiwan. Antonio Soriano led the kitchen earlier, carrying influences from Lima, Paris and Buenos Aires, and the change of hands moved the room from global flair toward a more precise, sustainable line. Joni sits inside the Park Hyatt Toronto in Yorkville and opened with the hotel’s September 2021 reopening, after a broad revitalization of the property. The craft question has stayed the same throughout: how to make bistro grammar carry the weight of contemporary technique without losing warmth. Familiar dishes remain legible. The method underneath them does the work.

Koji, coffee grounds, and a five-course rhythm

The program is contemporary Canadian bistronomy, with à la carte dishes and a five-course tasting menu carrying the same seasonal logic. The kitchen uses Ontario, B.C. and Quebec products, and the technique often starts before the pass: fermenting marinades, citrus and coffee-infused oils, vinegars, preserves, dry-aged proteins, and butchery done in house. Bread & Butter Pasta turns sourdough starter into noodles, then folds in koji-cultured butter, burnt-end miso and croutons. Beef Tartare is hand-cut from Penokean Hills Farm beef and set on a Brodflour einkorn waffle with beef garum sabayon, elderberry capers and flowers. The 48-hour Beef Short Rib takes a coffee shio koji marinade made from used grounds, then meets grilled maitake, spring onions, cocoa-laced beef jus and spruce miso oil. B.C. Spot Prawn Crudo moves through citrus, tangerine vin, black lime oil from fermented limes, and espelette miso. These are not gestures added for theater. They are the mise en place.

The room keeps the pass in view

The room gives the kitchen enough quiet to work in detail. Joni sits in a sleek Park Hyatt space with soaring ceilings, warm colour, curated art, and a fireplace that softens the edges of the dining room. The sound stays conversational, which matters when a tasting menu asks for attention without making a ceremony of it. The pass sends out dishes that can read as comfort, then pull closer through technique: Beef Short Rib, Beef Tartare, Bread & Butter Pasta, Beeswax Poached Lobster. The counterpoint is the beverage program, with curated wine and cocktails set beside the food rather than over it. Ontario wines have a place in the pairings, while France, Italy and Canada appear across the wider list. The room carries both hotel scale and bench-side specificity, an uneasy pairing when handled poorly, a useful one when the plate stays exact.

A hotel kitchen with local patience

Joni’s value is not in pretending to be a farmhouse kitchen. It works from a hotel dining room in Yorkville and asks seasonal Canadian ingredients to hold their place inside that frame. Local sourcing and farm-to-table practice become language before they become food; here, the repeatable acts include the starter saved for pasta, the coffee grounds returned to marinade, and the beef cut by hand. The dish that holds the argument is Bread & Butter Pasta, built from sourdough starter and koji-cultured butter.