Method
How this register is put together
Every figure on this site is arithmetic on something a kitchen published, not an estimate. Here is the arithmetic, in the order somebody sceptical would ask for it.
Where the C$198 comes from
Across the 5 kitchens there are 51 cards with a number on them. Sorted low to high, the middle one asks C$198 a head. The floor is C$154 and the ceiling C$277, both of them real menus you can read on their entries. We quote the median rather than the average on purpose: one wagyu tasting card drags a mean upward by more than it tells you about what a Tuesday costs.
Where the guest scores come from
436 scores, left by people who ate the food in Toronto and the ring around it, weighted by kitchen. A cook with 201 notes behind them moves the register average further than one with 26, which is the only fair way to combine them. We publish the unflattering ones too: 4.68 and 4.72 sit on this page next to 4.82.
What was left out
Kitchens that will not put a per-guest number against a named menu. Kitchens with no photographs of their own food. Agency listings where you cannot tell whose hands will be on the pans. And, deliberately, any kitchen whose guest notes complained about how the worktops looked at midnight — at these prices that is not a small thing.
What this page cannot tell you
Whether a given date is free. What a bespoke menu lands at once you have moved three courses around. How travel is quoted north of the city. Those are conversations rather than published facts, and inventing them here would make the rest of the numbers worth less than they are.
Standing policy
Nobody pays to appear here and no position is for sale; where a kitchen sits on the front page follows how much work it does in this city. Every figure is transcribed from that kitchen's own published card in Canadian dollars per guest, and re-read each season rather than rounded up between updates. And every photograph belongs to the kitchen it illustrates — none of it is licensed stock, which is why the framing is uneven. This is real service, shot by whoever was holding a phone.
Imprint
The Six Burners. Kept since 2017. Toronto, the 905 and cottage country. Written and re-checked in Toronto, and set in Petrona and Archivo.