This underrated Toronto Vietnamese restaurant should be on everyone's radar

Nestled away in a shoebox of a Cabbagetown retail space, you'll find one of the only restaurants in Toronto serving chè, a Vietnamese dessert of coconut milk, jellies and fresh fruit, on top of what I consider to be some of the best banh mi in town. It's a hidden gem in every sense of the word, but one you'd be remiss to overlook.

Opened in 2025 when its founder, Lily Huang, was just 23 years old, Viet Bites, her Gerrard East chè shop, was a gamble.

"It was very scary at first, because we had no idea how to open the store and how to run the store exactly. I worked at a restaurant before, so I knew, like, how to do an order, to pack an order, but it was very difficult to do it on my own," Lily says.

But, where there's a will, there's a way, and in Lily's case, that will was to bring chè, a staple served on virtually every street corner in her native Vietnam, to Toronto.

At first, she tells blogTO, she was worried that people in the city wouldn't be immediately receptive to something they weren't familiar with, and in a neighbourhood with a relatively small Vietnamese population, she figured it would be best to also offer some more familiar bites, too. 

So, she and her partner, V, with whom she runs the restaurant, devised a menu of banh mi and other snacks to serve along with the desserts.

It's a good thing they did, because these banh mi are things of beauty. Sizeable and served on soft bread that's baked in-house, I'm already planning my next trip to pick one up.

Lily acknowledges that they're slightly pricier than others in the city (the grilled pork banh mi, pictured above, goes for $8, when you can find others around the $5 mark), but it's a function of upkeeping values that were non-negotiables to her when opening her business: paying her staff a living wage and using uncompromisingly high-quality ingredients.

The richness of the sandwich begs for something sweet to cap it off, which is where the chè comes in.

The cool, sweet, and refreshing treat comes in 12 different flavours, but Lily tells blogTO that the avocado pudding ($7.99) is a best-seller, especially after it found unexpected viral success among tourists on Chinese social media app RedNote.

My personal favourite is the pomelo sweet soup ($6.99). A thick, jelly-like base of pomelo peel and mung bean, sweetened with palm and yellow sugar, is capped off with a frothy topping of coconut milk. It's refreshing and rich all at once, with a vaguely caramel-like flavour that's utterly addictive.

If you're feeling ambitious, there's a durian ($7.99) chè, too. Here, the divisive fruit is complemented by a generous helping of icy coconut milk, pandan, chocolate and coconut jellies, sago pearls, longan and jackfruit.

Sweet, satisfying and texturally delightful, it's no wonder that Lily believed these desserts deserved a spotlight in Toronto, and, if you ask me, it's only a matter of time before they hit the mainstream.

Though it's only been a year in business, Lily and V are already planning a big expansion for the restaurant. A new, bigger location is in the works for the Bathurst and Eglinton area, easily accessible for fans in Richmond Hill and Markham, where diners will be able to sit down with bowls of chè, rather than the to-go cups used at their current location.

The Cabbagetown spot isn't going anywhere, though: instead, it'll be an express version of what will become the restaurant's flagship on Eglinton West. As if that wasn't enough, they're also working on a cafe around the corner on Parliament, with both new ventures expected to open in the coming months.

If Viet Bites truly was a gamble, Lily is about to hit it big: this hidden gem isn't going to stay hidden for much longer.

Viet Bites is located at 246 Gerrard St. E.