Announcing Our 2026 Restaurant Awards Hall of Fame Inductees: Umberto Menghi and Tojo’s

Though we usually wait until the big day to announce our Hall of Fame inductees, this year we realized: there’s no good reason to wait. Sharing our 2026 honourees early only has the side effect of giving their colleagues, friends, supporters and mentees a chance to join us at the Restaurant Awards for a proper celebration of their achievements.

So without further ado: we’re thrilled to announce the newest entrants into our esteemed Vancouver Restaurant Awards Hall of Fame. If you’d like to join us in raising a glass to these legends, there are a still a handful of tickets available to the May 4th event at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver here.

The Vancouver Magazine Restaurant Awards Hall of Fame 2026

The Vancouver Magazine Restaurant Awards Hall of Fame is presented by Cactus Club Cafe.

Hall of Fame: Individual

Umberto Menghi

Giardino, 1328 Hornby St., umberto.com/giardino

Long before burrata became a personality trait and “nonna-style” was a menu cliché, Umberto Menghi was teaching this city how to eat Italian properly—with restraint, reverence and a deep respect for ingredients. Arriving from Tuscany via Rome, London and Paris, he opened Il Giardino in 1979 and promptly set a new standard for fine dining in Vancouver: polished without being pretentious, classical without being stiff. It became the restaurant where deals were closed, anniversaries celebrated and chefs quietly took notes.

But Menghi’s real legacy isn’t just a room or a recipe—it’s a world view. Through cookbooks, television (remember The Elegant Appetite?) and decades of mentorship, he insisted that hospitality is a discipline, not a vibe. His influence radiates outward: in the chefs he trained (Michel Jacob, Pino Posteraro, John Bishop), the diners he educated and the idea that Vancouver could hold its own on the international culinary stage without losing its soul.

When Italy awarded Menghi the Order of the Star of Italy back in 2020 for promoting Italian culture abroad, it felt less like a personal honour than an overdue acknowledgement of what so many Giardino diners already knew. And now comes our own overdue acknowledgement, with a 2026 Vancouver Magazine Restaurant Awards Hall of Fame induction.

Hall of Fame: Restaurant

Tojo’s

1133 W Broadway, tojos.com

Eagle-eyed readers may recall that we celebrated Tojo’s legacy in 2021: that strange year where lockdowns brought our planned Restaurant Awards judging program (among other things) to a halt and our valiant then-food editor bravely soldiered on to present what awards we could on Instagram Live. (We salute you, Neal McLennan.) With fewer new restaurants to celebrate in that edition, we leaned in to honouring some of the all-star chefs and restaurants who had laid the foundation for what would prove to be a resilient industry—and, yes, that included Hidekazu Tojo and his legendary, eponymous high-end Japanese room.

But this year, as we debated about which legends to induct into the Hall of Fame for the 37th edition of these awards, it felt wrong to not consider the great Chef Tojo’s restaurant for a second moment in the spotlight—to deny ourselves the opportunity to properly pay our respects at the big awards ceremony that he deserves. After all, here’s a room that put Vancouver on the culinary map. It’s not just that Tojo’s was the birthplace of the California roll, the dish that made sushi accessible to a whole new audience of timid Westerners and is arguably responsible for the widespread adoption of Japanese food in North America. It’s that the restaurant set the standards here so high for Japanese cuisine that a world-class roster of competitors rose up to match, inarguably setting the scene for omakase to become the epitome of Vancouver fine dining.

Watching the recent moving documentary The Chef and the Daruma—about Chef Tojo’s journey from Japan to Vancouver and back to Japan again—only cemented what a vital role he has played in the evolution of our city, and how the man behind the restaurant has climbed to success with humbleness, warmth and determination. So let us properly welcome to the Hall of Fame, with all the grandeur it deserves, the forever-great Tojo’s.