Best for
- The pre-club dinner — real food, real beer, two minutes from the clubs
- Groups who want a table, not a lineup — communal seating swallows big parties
- Beer people — the rotating tap list is one of the best in the city
Skip if
- You want DJs and a dance floor — there aren't any, ever
- You want table service and a quiet booth — it's counter service and shared benches
- You're after cocktails — this room is about beer, cider and sausages
WVRST has been doing one thing extremely well since 2011, when Aldo Lanzillotta opened a Munich-style beer hall up a flight of stairs at 609 King West. The room hasn't needed to change: long communal tables, hanging Edison bulbs, red subway tile, and a counter where you order sausages by number and pints by tap. It predates almost everything else on the strip, and most weekends it out-draws half of it.
The menu is the draw. More than 25 artisanal sausages built to house recipes — bratwurst and chorizo on the safe end, venison with red pepper, wild boar with black tea and kangaroo on the adventurous end, with three vegan options and a vegetarian for good measure. The chorizo done currywurst-style is a sleeper hit. Everything comes with the option of duck fat fries, which are the single most recommended item in the building. Behind the bar: roughly two dozen taps that rotate constantly, weighted heavily to Ontario craft beer and cider, plus an international bottle cellar that goes far deeper than a sausage joint has any obligation to.
What WVRST is not: a nightlife venue. There's no DJ, no dance floor, no dress code, no guestlist. Friday and Saturday the hall runs to 2am and gets properly loud — a few hundred people, benches full, pitchers moving — but the energy is beer-hall roar, not club. Some people end their night here; more use it as the launch pad. Its position — steps from Lost and Found, Cassius and the rest of the King and Portland cluster — makes it the strip's default first stop.
Bottom line: book (or squeeze) a table around 8pm, split a few sausages and duck fat fries, work through two or three taps you've never heard of, and walk to the club at 11 with the best-fed group in the line. As a night-starter it has no equal on King West.
