Street food is peaking in Toronto right now with tacos, steamed buns, and burgers dominating menus. And yet the noble slider—those mini-burgers that inspired a movie franchise—are still largely relegated to sit-down restaurants and pubs. (No joke, this writer was once turned away from a downtown restaurant that served sliders because I wasn’t dressed nice enough.) But coming this October to 673 Danforth Ave. (at Pape) is casual restaurant Slider Revolution.
“It’s something I haven’t really seen in the city,” says owner Rich Lee, who previously worked in various roles with consumer packaged goods companies (Kraft, Heinz, Clorox) as well as the Wolfgang Puck brand when it tried to open in Toronto. “We’ll be doing non-traditional sliders with different flavour profiles and textures paired with slaws. We’ll do a pulled-pork slider, jerk-chicken sliders, bulgogi sliders, meatball sliders—just non-traditional hamburger sliders. You can get them in sit-down restaurants, but they’re usually just three of the same hamburgers.”
The restaurant will be licensed for alcohol and will seat about 40. There will also be take-out and weekend brunch. Price wise, a meal will be in the $10-$12 range, and a burger slider will contain roughly 3.5 ounces of beef.
“The restaurant that was here before did brunch and we’re going to continue with that because it was popular with the neighbourhood,” says Lee. “An eggs benedict is basically an open-faced slider so we’re going to try to pull in that crowd with full-service brunch on the weekends.”—Karon Liu
