Bitter taste
in your mouth
It's too late
to get it out
Another Tuesday... another Taste? Let's take a break from the frustrations of Toronto and take a trip in Toronto! Flawless logic. Up to St. Clair Avenue West station we go, my neighbourhood from Grade 11, to check out a little burger joint regarded as one of the very best in the entire city.
JABS (which stands for Just Another Burger Spot) began as a food festival pop up in 2021 before opening up a permanent burger slinging Wychwood home in 2022. Funny, from making food festival appearances in Vaughan, to opening shop near Vaughan Road (actually... that's not funny). This made a considerable trek for me (an east end chap of course) but the amount of praise and rave reviews I'd encountered made this a must-try on my Toronto burger list (more on that later). Plus, I really do like any excuse to visit this part of town once in a while (quite a few of my favourite secret-ish Toronto places orbit this strip).
The atmosphere inside was fairly subdued, it being mid-afternoon on a brisk cloudy Thursday in mid-March, as I took a small table for myself in the back. Immediately the music playlist, whether it be employee design or just whatever the radio station was playing, made me existentially cringe. Songs like "Starships"* and "Party Rock Anthem" assaulted my ears as I contemplated whether the early 2010s was the most obnoxiously abrasive era for top charting pop music. Songs that wormed their way into your head via their mindless repetitive insistence upon making you party, like some uninvited stranger at a get together who loudly complains how nobody is getting wild enough (The Black Eyed Peas personified). I'm not exactly a huge fan of most popular music at the current moment either (for very opposite reasons, funny** enough) but at least we've moved past that period of "Wazzzzzup! Boom Boom Pow!".
*seriously though, Starships is an awful, awful song and Nicki Minaj is... yeeeah not great.
**Actually funny
Enough of my "not old man yells at cloud not even there" shtick, how about a cheeseburger with some cheesy fries?
Cheesy fries: activated. Among cheese fries, these are a bit unusual in that the cheese sauce itself really slips between these French fries and pools in the bottom of the paper dish here. It also coats a lot of the fries in a very thin layer of itself, spreading its cheesy goodness around. Can't imagine too many complains about that one, though this does not lend itself well to dipping the fries in the sauce.
It's a very simple concoction (cheese sauce and shoestring fries) and a tasty one. Fries are quite crispy, there's just a touch of salt for the seasoning... meanwhile the thin cheese sauce still finds a way to cake the inside of your mouth with its American cheese cheesiness, semi-plasticky goodness. Plus, the fries most swimming in the bottom puddle of sauce did not get soggy either.
What we're really here for is the cheeseburger of course, and so here is... um... wait hang on a second...
...here we go! Better to use a picture where the burger doesn't look like it's slobbering all over itself.
Their cheese burger is likewise a simple one: pickles, cheese, JABS sauce (the stuff trying to escape the first photo) and a sweet onion jam. This thing also brings quite a scent... the smell of griddle and greasy beef just glows from this thing (can a smell glow? Ah whatever).
This is yet another smash burger and so you're getting a thin crumbly beef patty within a (actually rather dense) potato bun. The JABS sauce is indeed quite relishy and sharp, giving the burger a nice little zing to it... while the onion jam on here isn't all that plentiful but on the bites you get it: just fantastic. Tangy, sweet, oniony without the innate stinging sharpness onions are known for... a terrific match for the heaviness of the melted cheese and juicy beef. Really the star of the show here and this would still be a very good burger even without it.
Beyond that... well it's a cheeseburger that has the high level of quality that the flavours linger in your mouth quite happily on each bite, nor does it lose anything once it has cooled off. Simple seasoning (salt, pepper I'm assuming) is all it really needs. Getting all the little things just right, such as the lightly toasted edges of the bun... really quite tasty, with that onion jam elevating it even further.
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Overall! So apparently there was an attempted break-in here at JABS the day before I made my visit, thus why their front door here is all boarded up. To be honest, seeing this as I got off the St. Clair streetcar severely threw me a double take. I wasn't sure if the restaurant were actually open, or if I'd misread their website and this location was more of a prep kitchen than an actual sit-down spot. Obviously as I wandered closer the truth revealed itself but the moral of the story is: don't be an asshole by trying to break into restaurants, especially smaller ones that might/probably will struggle to pay that damage off. Special circle of hell and what not.
Anyhow, this was very much a terrific cheeseburger! I greatly enjoyed it and would indeed recommend checking them out if you have yet to do so. You definitely have to like the smash style but if you're a fan, this really is a memorable one for the right reasons.
JABS is well deserving of being so widely considered among Toronto's very best... though I myself might have them just a tiny notch below that particular level. Which hey, speaking of that...
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The 150th Tuesday Taste
So the next edition of this Tuesday review series will in fact be the 150th one! We're not exactly coming into this landmark with a lot of momentum sure, what with me barely writing any food reviews (or articles at all) here in 2026.
Nevertheless, I'm never one to pass up an opportunity to do something big and crazy for an arbitrary goalpost... and seeing how I've reviewed quite a lot of burgers over this past half-decade (that long already? Yipes)... well, perhaps some kind of culminating recap of all that is in order.
That's my wink wink clue as to what to expect for next time, so stay tuned! I'm hoping to have it ready to go for mid-May, there are just a few other things to do/places to try before this particular idea feels quite complete enough.
Tuesday Tune
A couple of weeks ago I saw this band live for the first ever time and I couldn't help thinking how thrilled nineteen year old me would've been to be at this show. Present day me who is double that age... well it was still quite a bit of fun (although my ears were ringing the entire next day... man I'm such a square).
While I only knew maybe a third of the songs they played (I kinda stopped keeping up with their releases in the late 2000s) their reputation for bringing an irresistibly ferocious energy to their live performances was as advertised. Especially the lead singer "Howling" Pelle with his multiple wanderings into the crowd, climbing along the sides of the stage, or insistently manifesting we all agree this Monday was actually a Saturday (for obvious reasons). Plus the opening band, The Chats, likewise brought some serious punch though more of the straight-up snarling punk style rather than garage rock revival.
Good stuff all around... and so here's a song that I listened to a lot back in Grade 12.
And that's all for this one! Like I mentioned stay tuned for the next Tuesday review (whenever that comes) which will be that very special 150th edition and definitely worth the price of admission... which as always, is free... actually. Well... seemed like a good idea at the time! (I kid I kid). Until then... stay safe, stay warm and most of all... don't spill that mustard.
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