The Café Everyone's Calling a Lawrence Park Opening Sits Just Outside It
September 17, 2026
September 17, 2026
Half a dozen food writers in recent weeks have told you the same thing: Lawrence Park has a new place to eat. Toronto Life ran the headline. So did Hungry416. So did efosa. All three used the neighbourhood's name like it was simply true, the way you'd note a postal code. It isn't. Walk the actual line and 3204 Yonge Street, the address for a new café-and-snack-bar called Baba, sits on the wrong side of it.
That's not a correction anyone owes the writers. It's a pattern Lawrence Park has been living with since 1907, and it explains something about this neighbourhood that the restaurant coverage never gets around to saying.
Lawrence Park's boundary has never been a matter of interpretation. Yonge Street forms its western edge, with Bayview Avenue on the east, Blythwood Ravine to the south and Lawrence Avenue to the north. Everything on the west side of Yonge, including the stretch of storefronts clustered around Yonge and Lawrence, falls under a different neighbourhood designation. One local guide puts it plainly: that commercial strip is technically part of Bedford Park, close enough to Lawrence Park that most people never notice the difference.
Baba sits at the corner of Yonge and Woburn, on the northwest side, which places it inside that same technically-Bedford-Park pocket. The café is real, the buzz is earned, and the neighbourhood attribution is wrong on paper for every outlet that printed it.
The mix-up isn't sloppy reporting. It's the direct result of a decision made more than a century ago. When developer Wilfrid Dinnick laid out Lawrence Park as one of Toronto's first planned garden suburbs, he and surveyor Walter Brooke pushed commercial life to the neighbourhood's edges on purpose, keeping the interior streets residential and quiet. Lawrence Park, as designed, has almost no shops of its own within a five-minute walk. Its shops, schools and recreational facilities were always meant to live on the periphery, not inside it.
That original plan is why every meaningful retail or restaurant story involving this neighbourhood, for well over a hundred years, has technically happened somewhere else. Yonge and Lawrence became the default answer to where do we go to eat because there was never a competing answer inside Lawrence Park's own borders. The corner absorbed the identity of a neighbourhood that structurally couldn't hold its own commercial district, and nobody bothered to correct the record because the correction wouldn't have changed where anyone actually walked.
Baba is just the newest entry in that inherited habit.
As Toronto Life reported, the two names behind it are Michael Medeiros and Kevin Chen, who met roughly a decade ago working together at One Hazelton. Medeiros went on to run the kitchen as executive chef at Lyla, with Chen as his executive sous-chef, before Chen told his friend in January that he was leaving to start something of his own and wanted Medeiros in on it. They found the space at 3204 Yonge this past spring and turned it around in a seven-and-a-half-week renovation.
What they built runs on two clocks. From 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., it's a café, with brunch starting at 9:30. At 4:30, the room flips into a snack bar built around a charcoal grill, a seven-seat bar and cocktails that top out at $20, with larger shared plates landing around $40 to $45. The interior keeps a piece of the building's past intact: a 1920s bank vault, worked into the design and repurposed as a rotating memory wall of disposable-camera photographs from the founders' friends and family.
A short list of who's actually behind the plates and glasses:
The menu leans into the same Western-Asian mashup Medeiros has built his career on: mapo tofu and eggs, charcoal-grilled skewers, a mapo bolognese made with house-made rice tofu noodles, pastrami eggs benny, avocado toast with a gochujang vinaigrette, and a pastrami sandwich Medeiros built around a dish he used to eat with his own father every other week. Seating runs 37 to 40 guests, with a patio expected once the weather cooperates later in the season.
"We want Baba to feel familiar from the first visit, a place where people can stop in during the day and return at night for a completely different energy."
— Medeiros, as quoted by Hungry416
That's Medeiros describing the concept, and it lands closer to the truth than the neighbourhood tag ever did. The place is built to function as two different rooms depending on when you walk in.
None of this happens in a vacuum. The stretch of Yonge running north from Lawrence has functioned as Lawrence Park's unofficial front porch for decades, home to a long-running mix of fashion stores, bakeries and gourmet dining that residents lean on because their own streets were never zoned to hold it. The Yonge-Lawrence Business Improvement Area organizes festivals and events along that same corridor every year, the kind of programming that exists precisely because a commercial strip needs an organized identity when it's serving two neighbourhoods at once rather than one.
Baba fits that role without trying to redefine it. It adds a slower daytime option and a later, louder evening one to a strip that already runs on both registers, coffee-and-errands by day, dinner-and-drinks reservations by night. What's changed isn't the corner's function so much as its ceiling: a chef with Lyla and One Hazelton on his resume, a bartender who built cocktail programs at Uh Bar, and a coffee supplier with a global ranking all landed on the same 40-seat room at once, which is a level of concentrated hospitality talent this particular block hasn't had before.
If you're planning a visit, the practical version is straightforward. Go before 4 for the café side, brunch starting at 9:30, or come back after 4:30 for the grill and the bar. Cocktails priced at up to $20 and shared plates in the $40 to $45 range put it closer to a neighbourhood spot than a special-occasion splurge, even with the chef pedigree behind it. Patio seating isn't open yet, so plan on the dining room for now.
The larger point worth carrying past this fall is simpler than any single menu item. When the next notable restaurant, shop or gathering space opens along that stretch of Yonge, and it will, expect the same headline. Lawrence Park will get the credit again, because it always has, ever since a developer decided a hundred years ago that the neighbourhood's front door belonged somewhere just outside its own lines. Knowing that doesn't change where you'll end up eating. It just means you'll know exactly which side of Yonge you're standing on when you do.
If you're weighing what a specific street, block or price point actually gets you in Lawrence Park or the neighbourhoods around it, Courtney Smith has spent years reading this stretch of Midtown block by block. Let's Connect.
Stay up to date on the latest real estate trends.
Every client deserves a strategy tailored to their goals. With trusted market knowledge, clear communication, and dedicated guidance, Courtney is committed to helping you achieve the best possible outcome.
