Toronto, Kensington MarketHibiscus Café, a family run vegetarian gem

The setting

Hibiscus Café is on Augusta Ave, one of the main streets in hipster Kensington Market. The area is packed with casual street food cafés, thrift shops and quirky boutiques. Chinatown and the trendy shopping drag of Queen St West are a few blocks away.

The space

There’s a small wooden fenced-in and umbrella covered patio outside. Inside is relatively compact, but home to several wooden tables with Bentwood chairs.

One wall is dark shelving displaying foodie ornaments, the back wall is cool green and the final wall has pretty lit alcoves housing natural objects and prints.

The staff are friendly and very helpful.

What we ate?

The Hibiscus Café sells an array of sweet and savoury buckwheat crepes. You can pair with a soup or salad, but do save room for their innovative dairy-free ice cream.

There’s also a good choice of sweet crêpes, including: home-made chocolate-hazelnut and spread with banana; cinnamon and lemon icing; apple and cinnamon; banana and walnut and home-made vegan dulce de leche and kiwi. Hibisicus also have a selection of mouth-watering gluten-free, vegan cookies, squares and brownies. However, much as we were tempted, we went for the vegan ice-cream, as we couldn’t resist the flavours on offer.

The vegan ice-cream is made in small batches and comes in a cup or GF cone. The ices are made with either coconut, almond or home-made mung bean milk.

We had a double scoop of sea buckthorn and a strawberry and basil. Both were stunningly creamy and delicately favoured.