George Grabsky & Abraham Tesfazghi (Amber Kitchen): three countries, one kitchen
George Grabsky spent a decade learning to make some of the best bread in Israel. Then he spent six years cooking Middle Eastern food in Toronto. And when he finally opened his own restaurant, he put potato in his baguette because he's Ukrainian and that felt right.
That sentence tells you everything about Amber Kitchen and Coffee, the 30-seat spot at 4 Boulton Ave in Leslieville that Grabsky opened with business partner Abraham Tesfazghi in early 2025. It's a place where three countries show up on every plate, and nobody asks permission.
Ukraine to Israel to Geary Avenue
Grabsky was born in Ukraine. He ended up in Israel, where he apprenticed under Erez Komarovsky, the chef widely known as the godfather of modern Israeli cooking. That apprenticeship lasted more than ten years. Komarovsky is a bread obsessive, a forager, a teacher who runs his kitchen from a farm in the Galilee. Grabsky absorbed all of it: the sourdough, the tahini, the respect for ingredients that don't need much done to them.
He came to Toronto in 2018 and landed at Parallel Brothers on Geary Avenue, the Middle Eastern restaurant run by the Ozery brothers. Grabsky became executive chef and partner, spending six years building a menu rooted in the traditions he'd learned from Komarovsky. Parallel grew into two locations, including Parallel Basta in Kensington Market.
But six years is a long time to cook someone else's vision. Grabsky wanted a kitchen where his Ukrainian roots, his Israeli training, and his own instincts could coexist without anybody asking him to pick a lane. He's said he doesn't want to get too tied into tradition, that he'd rather be guided by instinct than convention.
Better guest experience. Bigger nights. $299. Once.
The partnership that makes the menu work
Abraham Tesfazghi was born in Eritrea. He's been called a wizard of dough, and his East African background shows up in the dishes most people don't expect. The pulled-beef sandwich is the clearest example: eight hours of slow roasting, beef rubbed in berbere (an intense chili-based Ethiopian spice blend), stuffed into a house-made cornmeal-coated potato baguette slathered with celery butter, topped with roasted parsnips and onions. It's $18 and it's the kind of thing that doesn't exist anywhere else in the city because it required two people from two continents to build it.
That's the pattern at Amber Kitchen. Grabsky's Amber Eggs are his take on shakshuka: two poached eggs sitting on his signature potato sourdough baguette, swimming in a garlicky tomato sauce with sauteed spinach and capers, finished with clarified butter. It's Israeli in structure, Ukrainian in its foundation (that potato bread), and entirely his own in execution. The smoked salmon comes on a Jerusalem-style bagel with whipped labneh instead of cream cheese, arugula, capers, and pickled red onion. The corn polenta arrives with roasted mushrooms, truffle oil, and poached eggs: earthy, grounding, European in spirit.
None of these dishes belong to a single cuisine. And that's the point.
Thirty seats in a heritage building
The space is the former Boxcar Social on Boulton Avenue, in the Riverside stretch of Leslieville. Arched windows, 18-foot ceilings, exposed brick and beams. The team added amber accents but kept the bones. It seats 30.
That size is deliberate. Grabsky ran kitchens for other people for nearly two decades. When the time came to do his own thing, he chose brunch and lunch, not dinner service, the kind of footprint a small crew can staff without burning out. He chose a neighbourhood, not a destination. Toronto Life included Amber Kitchen in their best new restaurants of 2025, and the recognition came because the food is technically skilled but the setting is completely unpretentious.
What other independents can take from this
The instinct, especially after a decade under a famous chef, is to open something ambitious. Tasting menus. Dinner service. Something that announces you've arrived. It is also one of the surer ways to sink a first restaurant. Grabsky went the other direction. He took everything he learned and put it into a baguette.
There's a lesson in that for anyone building an independent restaurant: your background is your menu, not your constraint. Grabsky spent years being the guy who cooks Middle Eastern food. Tesfazghi brought Eritrean flavours that most Toronto kitchens wouldn't think to combine with Ukrainian potato bread. Together, they built something that doesn't need a category to work.
It just needs to taste right. And at 30 seats on Boulton Avenue, it does.
Sources: Toronto Life, blogTO, EatingYYZ, Hungry 416, Hungry Onion, Parallel Brothers.
