For most of last year, a plastic blue horse sat in storage somewhere in Toronto, waiting. It used to stand on the patio at Kramer's Bar & Grill, at 1915 Yonge Street, where it had mysteriously shown up one morning years earlier and never left. Regulars climbed on it. Photos of it circulated. It became the kind of unofficial mascot that a neighbourhood accumulates without ever voting on it.
Then Kramer's closed at the end of August 2025, its lease ended so the building could be redeveloped, and the horse went into storage along with everything else. If you live in Davisville Village and walked past that stretch of Yonge last winter, the corner probably felt like it was thinning out. It wasn't just Kramer's. Fruits Basket and a neighbouring green grocer, both anchored at the corner of Yonge and Davisville, had to clear out around the same time.
Here's what actually happened next: none of them left the neighbourhood. They scattered a few blocks in every direction, came back changed, and the corner now has more going on than it did before any of this started.
Where Everyone Actually Landed
The Kramer's team, led by Christian Chiari and Ben Toma along with executive chef Steve Birdwell, didn't reopen once. They opened three times, in three different parts of the city, over the course of about six months. The first was Blue Horse Cucina, an Italian restaurant in Etobicoke that opened in December 2025 as an homage to the old mascot. The second, and the one that matters if you actually live near Yonge and Davisville, took over the former Fionn MacCool's space at 1867 Yonge Street, just south of the original spot.
Fruits Basket and the green grocer moved too, and the food-news beat in this city kept track of exactly where.
| Business | Displaced, fall 2025 | Where to find it now |
|---|---|---|
| Kramer's Bar & Grill | 1915 Yonge St | Blue Horse Eatery, 1867 Yonge St, opened May 30, 2026 |
| Fruits Basket | Corner of Yonge & Davisville | 1818 Yonge St, Unit 106-107 |
| Neighbourhood green grocer | Corner of Yonge & Davisville | Fresh Buy Market, nearby |
Fruits Basket ended up just steps from where Blue Horse Eatery landed, which means the same short stretch of Yonge that looked half-empty a year ago now has a grocer and a bar within sight of each other again. That's not a coincidence of timing so much as a reminder of how small this stretch of Midtown actually is. When a business here loses its lease, it doesn't usually have to go far to find its regulars again.
The Deadline That Actually Held
Restaurant openings slip. Anyone who has watched a "coming soon" sign gather dust on a storefront knows this. So it's worth pointing out that Blue Horse Eatery hit its target. Chiari has said publicly that the goal was to have the space ready in time for the World Cup, and it opened on May 30, 2026, well ahead of the tournament's June 11 start. Toronto spent this past summer as a host city, and for a few weeks the Eatery was exactly what a Yonge Street sports pub is supposed to be during a tournament like that: a place with a full bar and a menu of modern Italian bar food, built for watching a match with people you know.
The horse came back with it. It's not the same building and it's not the same name, but the statue that used to sit on Kramer's patio is back on Yonge Street, which is either sentimental or slightly absurd depending on how attached you were to the original.
There's a third piece still in motion. Blue Horse Rotisserie, planned for 554 Parliament Street in Cabbagetown, was expected to open sometime after the Eatery, with the team targeting late summer 2026. It's outside Davisville Village, but it closes the loop on a story that started with one pub losing its lease and ended with three separate restaurants operating across three different Toronto neighbourhoods.
Something That Wasn't Here Before
Not everything on this stretch of Yonge is a return. Second Story opened as a cocktail bar on the second floor at 1954 Yonge Street, tucked above street level in a room that didn't have a bar in it before. It's a small addition, but it matters for the same reason the Blue Horse Eatery matters: it's evidence that the corner isn't just refilling itself back to where it started. It's adding square footage it didn't have a year ago.
That distinction is worth sitting with for a second. A neighbourhood that simply replaces what it loses is holding steady. A neighbourhood that replaces what it loses and then adds something new on top is doing something else. Davisville Village, on the evidence of the last twelve months, is doing the second thing.
The Ride Across Town Got Shorter Too
None of this happened in isolation from how people actually move through the area. The Eglinton Crosstown, also called Line 5, began carrying passengers on February 8, 2026, after roughly fifteen years of construction. It runs largely underground and at street level between Mount Dennis and Kennedy, with a stop at Mount Pleasant, a short walk east of the Yonge and Davisville corridor. An end-to-end ride on the line takes somewhere around 50 to 55 minutes, compared to a comparable bus trip that can run past 100 minutes.
The opening was deliberately low-key. There was no ribbon cutting, and the TTC ran the line in a phased introduction with reduced hours while it worked out signal timing and reliability. But for anyone in Davisville Village who used to think of Eglinton as a bus corridor to avoid, there's now a faster way through it. The Mount Pleasant Village Business Improvement Area, which covers Mount Pleasant Road between Davisville Avenue and Eglinton Avenue, sits right along this new connection, which means the shops and cafes on that strip are now easier to reach from farther across the city than they were eight months ago.
None of this shows up if you only look at what closed last fall. It only shows up if you track where things went, which is a different exercise entirely.
What This Actually Adds Up To
The easy version of this story is "a neighbourhood lost some businesses and got some new ones," which is true of every neighbourhood in every city in every year. The more specific version, the one that's actually useful if you live here, is that the same corner absorbed three separate displacements in a single season and came out the other side with more restaurants, more grocers, and a faster way to leave the area entirely, all within about a ten-month window.
That's not a story you'd get by scrolling a portal or reading a citywide roundup. It's the kind of thing you only notice by walking the same four blocks often enough to see who left, where they went, and what showed up in the gap.
Whenever you're ready to think seriously about what a home in Davisville Village or the surrounding Midtown neighbourhoods is actually worth in a market that's still absorbing changes like these, Catherine Mortimer can put together a personalized market plan built around this stretch of the city specifically, not a generic read on Toronto as a whole.
