For years, the storefront at 561 Bloor Street West sat behind paper. Not construction paper with a rendering taped up, just paper. A vacant sign, then no sign, then the kind of blank window you stop noticing on a walk you've done a thousand times. It had been an Ali Baba's, then a Hakka Chinese spot, then a cafe that didn't survive 2020. After that, nothing.
This year it filled, and it didn't stop with one door. Walk that same stretch of Bloor today, from Bathurst past Brunswick, and you'll pass a Parisian brasserie where a forty-year brunch counter used to be, a boutique hotel with its own cocktail bar sitting in a space that had been empty since the pandemic, a reprogrammed corner that now runs live music three days a week, and a new mural going up on a wall that used to just be a wall. None of this happened because a developer decided the Annex was due. It happened because people who already had every other neighborhood available to them picked this one anyway.
Six Years Behind Paper
The building at 561 Bloor didn't just sit vacant by accident. It went up for sale after the cafe closed in 2020 and stayed that way through most of the years everyone else on Bloor was renovating around it. What eventually opened there, a 14-room boutique hotel called Nomas, soft-opened on March 19, 2026, with its ground floor built around Bellis, a Japanese-Italian dining bar from Jeffrey Chu, the operator behind Yuugi Izakaya and 915 Dupont, working with chef Attila Baksa.
Bellis runs as two different rooms depending on the hour. By day it's a sunlit cafe where you can sit with a coffee and not feel rushed. By evening the lighting drops and the menu shifts toward small plates and cocktails, the kind of place where the same faces show up across breakfast, lunch, and last call because it's built to be a hangout, not just a dinner reservation. That distinction matters on a street that has mostly offered one or the other.
The Ossington Names Who Came Home
A few blocks east, the more telling story is what replaced By the Way Café, a Mediterranean brunch spot that had held its corner at Bloor and Brunswick since 1979. When it closed, the space didn't sit empty for long. Teo Paul, the chef behind Ossington's Union and Côte de Bœuf, along with Hamilton's Le Tambour and Grey County's Hearts, opened Brasserie Côte there with his longtime partner Eamon O'Dea.
Paul grew up in the Annex. O'Dea's connection to the neighborhood goes back nearly as far, to a friendship formed decades before either man opened a restaurant.
"Teo's sister was my girlfriend's best friend, they both grew up in the Annex together."
That's not the kind of detail that shows up when a restaurant group is chasing rent on the cheapest available block. Paul had Ossington. He had Hamilton. He had Grey County. He chose Bloor and Brunswick because it's where he's from, and he built something with more room than the original Côte de Bœuf ever had, working the same 1920s Paris aesthetic, zinc counters and a vintage chandelier, into a space four times the size.
| Brasserie Côte | Bellis | |
|---|---|---|
| Location | Bloor & Brunswick, former By the Way Café | 561 Bloor St. W., inside Nomas Hotel |
| Feel | French bistro, expanded from the Ossington original | Cafe by day, cocktail bar by night |
| From | Teo Paul and Eamon O'Dea (Union, Côte de Bœuf) | Jeffrey Chu and chef Attila Baksa |
| Good for | A sit-down dinner with some occasion to it | Coffee before noon, a drink after dark |
A Parkette Turned Into a Stage
The street around these two spots changed shape too. The northeast corner of Bloor and Brunswick, which used to be little more than a parkette, now runs the Bloor Annex BIA's Summer Music Series, a free program of live sets every Friday evening, Saturday late morning, and Sunday early afternoon. This is the series' third year, and the lineup has stretched well past background noise, with acts like the All Angels Jazz Band bringing 1930s New Orleans-style horns and banjo, and Seu, a Toronto-based artist reworking traditional bolero with reggae and funk influences.
A block away, the Bloor Annex BIA commissioned a new mural at 394 Bloor Street West through the city's StreetARToronto program, timed to Toronto's role as a host city for the 2026 FIFA World Cup. The wall faces west on Brunswick, visible to anyone walking, biking, or waiting for a streetcar on one of the busiest sightlines in the neighborhood. It's a small addition on paper, but it's one more sign that the BIA is treating this stretch as something worth designing for, not just filling in.
Why This Street, Not Ossington
Here's the part that doesn't show up in a simple list of what's new. Local food coverage this year pointed out that a neighborhood absorbing a handful of new restaurants isn't remarkable on its own. What's harder to explain away is when those restaurants come from operators who could have opened almost anywhere else in the city, Ossington, King West, Dundas West, and picked this half mile of Bloor instead.
The Annex hasn't been a dining destination in the way Ossington or King West have for a long stretch of the last two decades. It's had the shawarma counters, the sushi spots serving the university crowd, the student bars pouring cheap margaritas, all useful, none of it drawing anyone from outside the neighborhood on purpose. That's the baseline these openings are actually working against. Brasserie Côte and Bellis didn't land here because rent was cheaper than Ossington. They landed here because the people behind them are from here, and because a building that sat empty for six years and a storefront that had run the same menu since 1979 finally became available at the same time other operators were ready to bet on their own street.
That's a different kind of signal than a rent-driven cluster of new openings. It suggests the block had been waiting for the right combination of vacancy and timing, not for someone from outside to discover it.
What This Looks Like on a Tuesday
None of this requires an occasion. Bellis works as a coffee stop before a walk down to the ROM, or a cocktail on the way home from a Lee's Palace show. Brasserie Côte works for a dinner that doesn't need a reason. The music series runs through the warm months on a schedule you can plan a Saturday morning around, and the new mural on Brunswick gives the corner something to look at that wasn't there in July.
The Annex has always had the bones for this, five subway stations, a walk score in the 90s, a mix of Victorian houses and university energy that no other central Toronto neighborhood quite replicates. What changed this year is that the street finally has a few more reasons to slow down on your way through it.
If you're already calling the Annex home, none of this is a reason to think about your next move. It's just a reason to eat somewhere new this week. But if a friend, a neighbor, or a family member ever asks what it's actually like to live here day to day, this is the kind of detail that answers it better than a listing ever could.
For questions about buying or selling in the Annex or any of Toronto's established neighborhoods, Barry Cohen Homes is available for a confidential consultation.
