This smash burger stall is the best-kept secret of Toronto's coolest neighbourhood
Appearing like a mirage outside Geary's Division 88 on select nights, House of Smash is quickly becoming a contender for Toronto's favourite smash burger — if you know it's there in the first place.
On a steamy summer night in 2025, Division 88's Milan Sarkadi and Billy Wild were deep into brainstorming their programming ideas for the upcoming Geary Art Crawl when a sudden pang of hunger made them realize they had neglected to make dinner.
"We had some Italian sausages to grill, but for some reason I decided I would remove the sausage from its casing, smash it into a patty, and make burgers out of them instead. I also made a pickled fennel salad to top the burger. It was delicious, and we started to joke about calling it the Italian burger," Sarkadi tells blogTO.
It immediately clicked: they'd serve the burgers at the art crawl. Just as quickly, the name House of Smash came to them.
It was only meant to be a one-time thing, a novelty pop-up exclusive to the Geary Art Crawl, but when customers lined up around the block for most of the day and the stall sold out of burgers completely, Sarkadi tells blogTO that he and Wild realized they had "something special" on their hands.
"We decided to bring it back this year and make it a regular mainstay on the Geary strip for the summer," Sarkadi explains.
So they did. House of Smash returned in May and has been steadily growing its evangelical fanbase ever since — even with another smash burger business opening up down the block.
With a tight core menu of three burgers, Sarkadi explains that, in his opinion, what sets House of Smash apart is its willingness to experiment, alchemizing unexpected dishes and cuisines into smash-burger counterparts.
"All of the burgers and recipes are based off of dishes I love to cook," Sarkadi tells blogTO. "The idea is basically to take a cuisine's most popular beef dish and transform it into a burger."
The core trio —The American, your standard all-dressed burger; The Korean, topped with galbi sauce, kimchi and gochujang aioli; and The Mexican, a riff on birria tacos complete with consommé for dipping — is always on the menu, but unique specials pop in from time to time, too.
"Recently we did a finals watch party for the World Cup and served Spanish and Argentinian burgers for the event," he says, adding that The Spanish, with bravas sauce, garlic aioli, guindillas, manchego and serrano ham, "slapped," so it may find its way back onto the menu in the future.
Now three months into its reign on Geary, House of Smash isn't going anywhere. Sarkadi tells blogTO that you'll be able to find them posted up outside Division 88 on Aug. 7, 15, 16, 22, 28, 29 and 31, as well as at Geary Block Party in September.
"Our dates are usually tied to events on the street or at the venue, so our schedule is always changing but generally lands on weekends," he says, adding that the best approach for timing your visit is to keep an eye on House of Smash's Instagram story.
And once the weather turns cold, House of Smash will move indoors: Sarkadi and Wild are currently on the hunt for locations to make that happen, so we'll all have to stay tuned to see where the House of Smash will be built next.
