Air Canada’s Best New Restaurants named its 2026 finalists on September 17, and 4 Vancouver spots made the list.
Nui, Kavita, Touk and Angela Pastificio are the Vancouver names among the shortlisted 30.
The Top 10 will be revealed later on November 16 in downtown Toronto.
That is the bar these four are chasing.
Last November, Sushi Hyun placed fourth, Nero Tondo sixth, Sumibiyaki Arashi eighth and Niwa tenth.
This year’s field is built the same way, with a national panel of journalists, chefs and food writers nominating restaurants that opened between May 1, 2025 and April 30, 2026.
One anonymous expert then travels the country and eats at each finalist.
Toronto leads the list with nine entries, and BC has six.
Nui sits at 4811 Main Street, where Main starts to thin out into the quieter blocks of Riley Park.
enRoute says it serves “some of Vancouver’s best gomtang,” the Korean soup, from a compact open kitchen along one wall.
The name comes from an old Korean word tied to mothers and older sisters.
Kavita is on West 3rd Avenue in Mount Pleasant.
Chef-owner Tushar Tondvalkar grew up in Mumbai, and his cooking pulls from the city’s street food, India’s regional cuisines and charcoal techniques he learned cooking beside the matriarchs of his family.
The restaurant also runs an ammakase tasting menu that changes with the seasons.
Touk is the one with the biggest name in the kitchen.
Chef Chanthy Yen, a Top Chef Canada winner and a former personal chef to Justin Trudeau, opened it at 1152 Alberni Street downtown on December 19, 2025.
Touk means boat in Khmer, and the menu turns toward the Cambodian food Yen first cooked with his grandmother.
Angela Pastificio is the smallest of the four.
It is a 20-seat room at 1869 Powell Street where the whole evening is a tasting menu of handmade fresh pasta.
Chef-owner Calvin Vogstad named it after his Italian grandmother.
Look at the neighbours.
Angela Pastificio is just a few doors from Nero Tondo and Niwa, so one short stretch of Powell Street could hold three national Top 10 restaurants in two years.
The rest of BC’s entries are also small-room stories.
In Victoria, chef James Frost and sommelier Heather Dosman run Lumache, a 16-seat Italian room where the best seats face a kitchen barely bigger than the counter.
In Revelstoke, Australians Lauren Webster and John Pierce opened Alfred’s with executive chef and co-owner Ivan Blackwell, after a pop-up at Spilt Milk outgrew its space.
Across BC, Nui, Kavita, Touk and Angela Pastificio join Victoria’s Lumache and Revelstoke’s Alfred’s on this year’s shortlist of 30.
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