Best Burgers Near the Financial District and King West
Published
The Financial District has a burger problem, and it is not a shortage. It is that most of the burgers down here are attached to a ninety minute lunch and a bill to match. If you have got an actual hour, your options narrow fast.
Here is how the burger landscape around King and University actually breaks down.
The sit-down dining room burgers
The Financial District’s best known burgers live inside proper restaurants. Bymark, Mark McEwan’s long-running spot in the TD Centre, serves a famously extravagant burger finished with brie de meaux and shaved truffle. Jump, the Oliver and Bonacini mainstay, is another Financial District institution with a big patio and a burger on the menu.
These are excellent and they are also a commitment. Reserve, sit, order, wait, expense it. Worth it for a client lunch. Not worth it on a Tuesday.
The counter service burgers
This is the category that actually gets eaten at lunch, and King West is where most of it is.
Oklahoma Burgers at 214 King St W is ours, so treat this entry accordingly. It is a small standing-bar space, the menu is two burgers, and the Oklahoma is a four ounce patty pressed into thinly sliced onions on the griddle so the onions fry into the meat. Single $10.50, double $14. Fries, dirty fries and onion rings on the side. You can be in and out.
The Burger’s Priest is the Toronto chain that made its name on a strict, short, griddled menu and has downtown locations. Holy Chuck works the opposite end, big stacked burgers with maximalist toppings. South Street Burger is the build-your-own option and is reliably fast.
What to look for if you only have a lunch hour
Three things separate a burger you can eat on a break from one you cannot.
A short menu. Fewer items means the griddle is already running what you want. Kitchens with forty items are optimised for dinner.
Counter service, not table service. Ordering at a counter removes the two slowest steps of any restaurant meal, which are waiting to be noticed and waiting to pay.
Pickup ordering. Every downtown burger shop worth eating at now takes pickup orders ahead. Ordering from your desk ten minutes out is the single biggest time saver available to you, and almost nobody uses it.
Getting to us
We are at 214 King St W, between University and Simcoe, a couple of minutes from St. Andrew station. Directions, current hours and pickup ordering are on the King West location page.
If you are further east or north, we also have Spadina at 147 Spadina Ave and Yonge at 762A Yonge St. If you want to know what makes an Oklahoma onion burger different from a regular smash burger, we wrote that up here.