Mak Deli

There is a particular smell that tells you a Balkan grill is doing it properly — charcoal, beef fat, raw onion — and it reaches the pavement outside 1335 Lawrence Avenue East well before you get to the door. Mak Deli is a European delicatessen with a grill at the back, and the grill is the reason people drive here from every corner of the GTA.

Cevapi is the dish everything else is judged against. Ten pieces for $15.59, arriving with lepina, raw onion and kajmak, and the difference between this and a supermarket version is entirely in the char — cooked over live coals, so the outside crisps while the inside stays loose. If you have not eaten here before, order the $16.59 combo instead: five cevapi and two sudjukice, the smoked veal sausages, which are deeper and smokier and the thing regulars quietly switch to after their tenth visit. Pljeskavica, at $15.59, is a ground beef steak the width of the plate under a spoonful of kajmak, and it makes most burgers in the city look like an idea nobody finished.

The burek is the other half of the argument. Coiled pastry in cheese, meat, spinach or potato, baked until the top shatters, $9.99 whole and $7.59 for a slice. Buy the whole one. The slice is a decision you will regret in the car.

And then there is the catering side, which is where a lot of the business actually lives — 100 cevapi for $102, burek trays at $75, mousaka and lasagna, cabbage rolls, goulash, and a page of sides priced honestly for six to sixteen people. Very few restaurants in Toronto will feed a room of fourteen for the price of two mains downtown.

Honest notes: it closes at 7pm on weekdays and 5pm on Sundays, so this is lunch, takeaway or a party order rather than a night out. It is a counter with a handful of seats, not a dining room. Parking on Lawrence East is thin at midday. None of that is the point. The point is the charcoal, and there is nobody in the city doing it better.