One Toronto content creator is proving just how easy it is to find good food across the city. Ranique McFarlane, the founder of Metro Eats on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, has started a series touring all the subway stations across the city to find the best restaurants, bakeries and cafés within a 15-minute walk.
“Good cuisine, good food, good experiences are all accessible — all you have to do is take the train,” he says. “It’s just a couple stops away to experience good food in the city and different cuisines in the city. When you’re coming home from work, give one of those local restaurants a chance.”
McFarlane credits getting fired in the summer of 2025 as the impetus for Metro Eats. Before moving back to Toronto after losing his job in the Kitchener-Waterloo region, he decided to make it his mission to visit restaurants he’d never tried before leaving and document the experience.
When McFarlane returned to Toronto, he tried creating similar content but found the restaurant creator market was “oversaturated,” making it difficult to get views and engagement
“I was going on different creators’ pages trying to figure out how to stand out and I was reading a lot of comments and a lot of them were saying ‘this place is too far. It’s in Scarborough, it’s in Thornhill, it’s in Oshawa — it’s too far,’” he explains. “But I don’t drive either, but I’m still going on date nights, I’m still exploring restaurants. I thought let me see if I can do a series where I’m just highlighting restaurants that are within a 15-minute walking distance of a train station.”
For McFarlane, food runs in his blood. His grandfather has a restaurant in Jamaica and his father makes his own jerk sauce.
“I’ve always been around food and my parents always told me I loved to eat food. Even when I had no teeth, I was trying to eat chicken,” he says. “It was a natural fit and I just love trying out new restaurants. I love aesthetics, I love trying new foods, I love trying new cuisines.”
While Metro Eats focuses on finding restaurants near transit stops, McFarlane drew inspiration from creators who document completing bucket lists. The idea sparked a new series highlighting places to eat within a 15-minute walk of each of Toronto’s 109 subway and LRT stations.
“I’m going to go into neighbourhoods that I haven’t seen before myself and there’s probably going to be neighbourhoods that people haven’t seen as well, because Toronto likes to stay in their little pockets,” he says.
McFarlane admits there’s no set order or system for visiting each station, but he posts three to four videos a week, featuring either a single restaurant or several in one video. He also takes suggestions from viewers and makes a point of covering a range of price points to keep the series accessible to everyone.
Though he’s only a few weeks into the series, McFarlane says he’s already learning new things about various communities. As someone who grew up in Brampton, he says this was one of the first times he’s been given a chance to explore Scarborough. So far, he says Landsdowne is one of his favourite stations, but he’s also been pleasantly surprised by others.
“When you’re looking for good Jamaican food, Oakwood on the LRT is a really good station because there are so many different Jamaican spots,” he says. “But I still have so many stations to go, so if you ask me [my favourite station] at the end of the series, I’ll probably have a different answer.”
Once he’s visited all 109 stops, McFarlane says he has no plans to stop riding public transportation. His next project will see him going outside the city to explore the best restaurants around each of the GO Train station stops. We’re talking exploring Pickering, Guelph, Oshawa and beyond — all with the intent of showing diners how accessible quality dining can be.
“I know a lot of people are comfortable with big chains, but there are a lot of good small-business restaurants that you’d be surprised by. You just don’t know about them yet,” he says. “I want to open people’s minds to different types of cuisine in the city because Toronto is one of those rare cities where we have almost every single cuisine, and people should take advantage of that.”