Neighbourhoods / Agincourt
Agincourt
Scarborough's food capital — the plazas where the region's best Chinese cooking actually is, on lots you could not afford within sight of downtown.
Eat this first: Dim sum at a plaza restaurant with a two-hour weekend wait, and worth it
Agincourt at a glance
Character
If you take one thing from this site, take this: the best Chinese food in the Greater Toronto Area is not downtown. It is up here, in the plazas along Sheppard and Midland, and it is better than what I ate in Shanghai for three years — a sentence I did not expect to write when I moved to Canada.
Agincourt is not a walkable main street and it does not pretend to be. It is a suburb of wide streets, quiet crescents and plazas, and its food scene lives almost entirely in those plazas: Northern Chinese noodle houses beside Hakka kitchens beside Hong Kong cafés beside Filipino bakeries, often four or five in a single strip.
What you get in exchange for the drive is space. A detached house with a driveway, a garage and a real backyard here costs a fraction of the equivalent downtown, and the neighbourhood is genuinely diverse and long-settled rather than newly built.
Housing stock
Post-war and 1970s detached homes dominate — bungalows, backsplits and two-storeys on wide lots, most with private driveways and garages.
Townhouse complexes and a growing number of mid-rise buildings near Sheppard and Kennedy supply the more affordable end, and are worth a look for first-time buyers.
Many original homes are being renovated or rebuilt, so streets increasingly mix untouched 1970s houses with substantial new builds — which makes comparable pricing here more nuanced than the raw numbers suggest.
Getting around
Agincourt GO on the Stouffville line reaches Union Station in roughly thirty minutes, which is the fastest way downtown by a wide margin and the single most underrated fact about this neighbourhood.
Frequent bus service connects to Line 4 at Don Mills, and Highway 401 access at Kennedy, Midland and McCowan is straightforward. Be honest with yourself, though: daily life here assumes a car.
Who it suits
- Families who want space, a driveway and a backyard, and who would rather drive to dinner than pay downtown prices for a smaller home.
- Anyone who cooks seriously — the grocery stores and specialty markets here are the best in the region and it is not close.
- Commuters who can build their week around the GO train rather than a daily highway drive.
Eat your way somewhere else
Curious whether Agincourt fits your life?
Tell me how you live and I will tell you honestly whether these streets match — and where else to look if they do not.