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Ask a table of Torontonians where the best dumplings in the city are and you won’t get a fight about filling. People are fairly relaxed about filling. The discussion is mostly about the wrapper. One person wants the thick, chewy, hand-rolled northern kind that eats like a small meal. While someone else wants a Shanghainese skin, thin enough to see the broth moving inside it, and thinks anything heavier is padding.
Neither of them is wrong, which is annoying if you were hoping for a verdict. So this list is grouped by what the wrapper is doing rather than ranked one to fourteen. Every address, price and opening hour below was checked against the restaurants’ own listings this month. Five places that turn up on other Toronto dumpling lists aren’t here: two have closed, two are in Markham and Richmond Hill, and one trades under two different names depending on which listing you read.
What’s left starts at $2.99 for six pieces on Yonge Street and finishes on the second floor of a hotel. Tibetan momo, Georgian khinkali and Roncesvalles pierogi in between.
The thick end of the scale
1. Mother’s Dumplings — Chinatown
The window is the whole pitch. Walk up Spadina past number 421 and you can watch someone rolling wrappers by hand at a table facing the street.
Zhen has been cooking northern Chinese food here since June 2005. The boiled dumplings are thick-skinned, the kind that hold their shape when you drag them through vinegar instead of splitting and losing everything to the dish. Order the pork and dill boiled. Get the green onion pancake too. It isn’t a dumpling and it should be on the table anyway. Most plates land between $11 and $25.
The Michelin Guide picked the place up, which has done nothing good for the queue. On weekend evenings it spills onto the sidewalk and there’s no bar to wait at. Go at 4pm on a weekday and you’re in a different restaurant.
Address: 421 Spadina Ave • Neighbourhood: Chinatown • Price: $$ • Website
2. Yummy Yummy Dumplings — Chinatown
(temporarily closed for renovations but you can order their frozen dumplings)
Cash or debit. No credit cards, no exceptions, and the number of people who find this out at the counter is a small daily comedy on Huron Street.
Past that, it’s a family-run room half a block off Dundas doing pork and dill dumplings with a properly substantial skin. The stuffed pancakes are underrated next to the dumplings everyone comes for. Portions are large and prices are low enough that a second plate isn’t a decision. Open to 10pm most nights, 10:30 on Wednesdays and Fridays.
It’s small and loud, and nobody is going to let you linger. Fine. Eat, pay, go.
Address: 79 Huron St • Neighbourhood: Chinatown • Price: $ • Google Maps
3. SHINYI Handmade Dumplings — Church-Wellesley
The rainbow dumplings get photographed a lot, so it’s reasonable to assume it’s a gimmick. They use fruit and vegetable for the colour, no dye, and there’s no MSG in the filling, and underneath the colour sits a solid northern dumpling with a wrapper on the sturdy side.
The rest of the menu wanders between northern Chinese and Cantonese. That’s a lot of ground for one kitchen and the results are less consistent than the dumplings, so stay in the dumpling section. Open daily 11:30 am to 9:30 pm, one of the more reliable options on that stretch of Yonge for a late-ish weeknight dinner.
Address: 641 Yonge St • Neighbourhood: Church-Wellesley • Price: $$ • Website
4. Tumi Dumpling House — The Junction
Most Toronto dumpling restaurants handle vegans by shrugging. Tumi labels the vegan dumplings on the menu, clearly, so nobody has to interrogate a server about what’s in the broth.
Hours are shorter than downtown, noon to 9:30pm Monday through Thursday, and the Junction being the Junction, it’s a proper walk from Dundas West station. You don’t step off the platform into it.
There are xiaolongbao and a lamb version worth ordering. But the thing to know about is the braised beef noodle soup that half the room is eating on a cold Tuesday.
Address: 2904 Dundas St W • Neighbourhood: The Junction • Price: $ • Website
Thin skins, and what’s inside them
5. Juicy Dumpling — Chinatown
Six steamed pork xiao long bao, $6.48, handed over the counter in about five minutes. There is no version of this that isn’t a good deal.
It’s a counter inside Dragon City Mall. Calling it a restaurant oversells the seating, and at peak lunch you eat standing or you walk to a bench. The skins are thin and they don’t tear when you lift them, and not tearing is the harder half. If you’re eating on the move, get the pan-fried pork buns instead, $3.99 for four. A soup dumpling in a paper bag is a burn waiting to happen.
Long queue? The wider case for eating cheaply in this city has a few alternatives within a block.
Address: 280 Spadina Ave, Dragon City Mall • Neighbourhood: Chinatown • Price: $ • Google Maps
6. Hero Dumpling — Downtown Yonge
Opened 7 September 2025 and priced like it. Six pieces started at $2.99, soup dumplings at $3.99, BBQ pork buns at $2.59. The team has a family connection to the people behind Juicy Dumpling, which explains how a brand-new shop turned up with its technique already sorted. Small room, a lot of Toronto Metropolitan University students, and an opening-promo price structure that probably won’t hold forever. Go before it settles.
Address: 437 Yonge St • Neighbourhood: Downtown Yonge • Price: $ • Google Maps
7. The Daily Dumpling Wonton Co. — Little Italy
Wontons, not dumplings, and the difference matters. The wrapper is a thin sheet that gathers rather than pleats, so it carries sauce as much as filling.
Start with the Classic Pork & Mustard Greens. There are beef and chicken versions for people who don’t eat pork, plus a vegan option that isn’t an afterthought, and that’s rarer in this category than it should be.
They sell frozen packs to take home, which is arguably the best use of the place: the dine-in room is small and the hours are awkward. Closed Mondays. Tuesday to Friday, 11am to 9pm.
Address: 792 College St • Neighbourhood: Little Italy • Price: $$ • Website
8. Myeongdong Gyoza Kalguksu — Koreatown
The kimchi mandu skins here are close to translucent, thin enough to see the pink of the kimchi through them, and the filling is pork, kimchi, scallion and glass noodle. Most places stop at the pork.
Order the half-and-half and you get pork and kimchi on one plate without having to decide. The kalguksu, knife-cut noodles in a light broth, is the other reason to come, and mandu plus kalguksu is the standard lunch on that block of Bloor. Open daily, noon to 10pm.
Small room. It fills at 1pm on weekends and nobody rushes you, so the wait is real. For the rest of the strip, see our guide to Korean restaurants across the city.
Address: 467 Bloor St W • Neighbourhood: Koreatown • Price: $$ • Website
Momo, khinkali and pierogi
9. Loga’s Corner — Parkdale
Momo are Tibetan and Nepali, the wrapper sits between the two extremes on this list, and the house hot sauce does most of the work. Loga’s has held that corner of Queen West for about a decade, in the stretch of Parkdale people call Little Tibet, and beef momo with a spoonful of the house sauce is one of the better ten-dollar meals in the west end.
Ask for the sauce on the side your first time. It’s hotter than it looks. It is also not optional the second time.
Address: 1407 Queen St W • Neighbourhood: Parkdale • Price: $ • Website
10. Tiflisi — The Beaches
Khinkali are the biggest dumplings here by a distance. Georgian, hand-pleated into a thick topknot, filled with beef, cheese or lamb, and holding a broth that stays put until you bite.
The knot at the top is traditionally left on the plate. It’s a handle. A pile of them is how you keep score. Two or three makes a meal. It’s also a genuinely odd thing to find at Queen and Woodbine, and that’s most of the charm.
Address: 1970 Queen St E • Neighbourhood: The Beaches • Price: $$ • Website
11. Cafe Polonez — Roncesvalles
Forty-five years on Roncesvalles, which in this city counts as geological.
The pierogi are the large, pan-blistered kind stuffed with minced pork and cheddar, and the dough is thicker than anything else on this list by a wide margin. Closer to pasta than to a dumpling skin, really.
Nobody has redesigned the room to suit anybody’s Instagram, and the service is brisk in a way that reads as rude if you aren’t used to it. Order the pierogi and a bowl of soup and you’ll work out why the same families have been coming since the eighties.
Address: 195 Roncesvalles Ave • Neighbourhood: Roncesvalles • Price: $$ • Google Maps
When there’s a whole restaurant attached
12. Chop Chop — Dundas West
Family-run, opened 18 June 2017 in the old Yu Shan space. The handmade dumplings sit on a mostly Taiwanese menu alongside crushed cucumbers and braised beef noodle soup. So the dumplings are very good and are not why most tables are there, and that keeps the wait manageable. Order them next to the cucumbers. They work better as a side dish here than as the main event.
Address: 771 Dundas St W • Neighbourhood: Dundas West • Price: $$ • Google Maps
13. DaiLo — Little Italy
Nick Liu is the son of Hakka parents and has spent a decade putting that on a College Street menu through a French technique filter. The Hakka wonton, pork and shrimp, five pieces in XO sauce, is the dumpling to order. It is also the most expensive per piece on this list by a comfortable margin.
This is a full restaurant with a tasting menu, so you’re building an evening around it. Nobody drops in. Lopan, the cocktail bar upstairs, is the low-commitment way to try the kitchen. Tuesday through Sunday.
Address: 503 College St • Neighbourhood: Little Italy • Price: $$$ • Website
14. Lai Wah Heen — Downtown
Closed for two years, reopened in 2026 after a full renovation, second floor of the DoubleTree on Chestnut. New owners, the people behind One Fusion Cuisine and Skyview Fusion, and a daytime menu built on lobster, geoduck and scallop-and-prawn dumplings, plus the koi-shaped ones that made the room’s name the first time round.
These are the most technically fussy wrappers in the piece: thin, translucent, folded into shapes that exist to be looked at. Whether that’s worth the price is a personal question, and the answer is different at lunch than at dinner. Book ahead. The reopening buzz hasn’t worn off.
Address: 108 Chestnut St, 2nd floor • Neighbourhood: Downtown • Price: $$$$ • Website
Save this one by wrapper, not by rank. If you want dumplings to be dinner, start at the top of the list. The middle is where you’ll find six of them for under $7 between errands on Spadina. And if what you actually pictured was a trolley, a teapot and a table of eight arguing over the last har gow, that’s a different meal entirely. Our Toronto dim sum directory covers the cart-service rooms this list deliberately left alone.
