This Chapter is Closing

After four years of operations here at 1581 Dundas St. W, and 6 years total of building this company, we have made the difficult decision not to renew our lease and to close this chapter of Affinity Fish.

This is not a decision we have taken lightly. We have made many personal sacrifices to build this business and to create the kind of fish shop and restaurant that we believed Toronto needed. We are incredibly proud of what we have accomplished, but the reality is that we have not been able to make the business financially sustainable in its current brick and mortar while keeping true to our values.

Over the past five years, we have been fortunate to work closely with local fisheries and help improve the systems and quality behind the fish that reaches your plate. We feel we have contributed and enriched food culture in Ontario through the amazing local fish we have supplied to both our restaurant clients and home cooks.

Working this way has not been easy, the industrial food system we operate within has created the expectation of convenience, variety and volume that small local fisheries have difficulty meeting. Weather, wind, equipment failures and seasonal changes make it challenging to compete with the industrial giants. We had many opportunities to lower our standards and source from large commercial distributors but we chose to never compromise.

Despite all of this, we feel incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to try. Affinity Fish has been a dream of ours and we could not have done it without the support of our families and friends, our staff, our fishing partners, the chefs who believed in what we were doing, and most importantly you, our customers. We hope that the work we have done will continue to have an impact. We hope that the people who discovered local and freshwater fish through Affinity will continue to seek them out, and that the relationships and ideas we have helped build will carry forward. Thank you for letting us dream this dream, and for being part of it with us

As for what’s next? We want to stress that this is not the end of Affinity fish, this is merely a chapter in its existence and we will go on to continue the dream in our own ways. We will be operating as normal till the end of our lease (January 16, 2027) this includes our wholesale, retail, a-la-carte, and tasting menus. We wanted to give our guests and supporters a long heads up so that you can come in and enjoy our last dinners and lunches.

Matt will start work on his next project: Satchmo, a robotayaki inspired restaurant with local Canadian fish and seafood. He will be doing some pop ups and residencies in the near future after Affinity, so be on the look out for that. He has realized that in the past few years of owning and operating Affinity, that he is a chef through and through, the more that he cooks at Affinity, the clearer his vision of Satchmo Restaurant becomes.

Jon plans to stay in the food-world, working to promote sustainably harvested and quality focussed fish. The positive impacts of Affinity Fish have inspired him to continue the journey, helping restaurants and fisheries make better decisions for both the environment and local food culture.

If you would like to support us in the last few months of operations, we would love to have you in! You can reserve a dinner through the link below, swing by for our a la carte menu, or grab some fish to take home!

With eternal gratitude, Matt & Jon