Downtown Dundas: The Story Behind King Street's New Restaurants
King Street closed to traffic from York Road to Market Street for the festival, as it has every August for fifty-one years. The Cactus Festival parade stepped off from Dundas Driving Park at 6:45 p.m. on Thursday, and the main festival opened Friday evening. The festival weekend brought a few thousand more people than usual to the sidewalks between Cross Street and Ogilvie.
What's different this year isn't the festival. It's what's sitting behind the storefront glass on either side of it.
The Cactus Festival has never really changed shape. It grew out of the 1975 end of the St. Joseph's House of Providence Picnic, and the first Cactus Festival ran the following year as a nine-day event at Dundas Driving Park. It moved to its current three-day, third-weekend-of-August format in 1979 once local merchants started tying sidewalk sales to it. The name comes from Ben Veldhuis, a Dutch immigrant who ran a greenhouse on King Street East that was, by the mid-1970s, shipping three to five million cacti a year and had earned Dundas the nickname "Cactus Capital of Canada."
This year's parade carried the theme "Legendary Dundas." The festival ran Friday from 6 to 10:30 p.m., Saturday from 10 a.m. to 10:30 p.m., and Sunday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., with King Street closed to vehicles for the full stretch. If you've lived here more than a summer or two, none of that is news.
What locals scrolling past the festival banners might have missed is a quieter shift happening at street level, one that's been building for about eighteen months and says more about where Dundas is headed than the festival itself does.
Three separate King Street stories, each involving an owner who already had a business here, point to the same pattern.
Cumbrae's, the Toronto butcher that first bought a tiny corner shop at 26 King Street West in 1999, spent years eyeing the building next door: the nearly 100-year-old former Majestic Theatre, which most recently housed the organic grocer Horn of Plenty until it closed in 2024 after more than 40 years in business. Owner Stephen Alexander bought the building and opened a new 6,000-square-foot Cumbrae's at 24 King Street West this past June, with a full production kitchen alongside the retail counter. He didn't walk away from the original spot. It's now La Valle, an artisanal gelato shop named for Dundas Valley, which opened at the end of July.
A few doors down, Maro Al Chamaa opened Bohemian Beirut at 90 King Street West in late 2024, his third restaurant after two in Oakville. Rather than open something new somewhere else in the region, he's opening his fourth restaurant directly across the street. Râz, a Persian concept, is set to open at 65 King Street West on September 15. Right now the windows are covered with a hand-lettered sign that reads "Curious, eh? Nothing to see here. It's just another restaurant," pointing curious passersby to "the guy in the fedora across the way at 90 King Street West."
The third piece: 65 King Street West is the former home of Pinbones Fish Market, which didn't leave Dundas either. It moved up the block to 44 King Street West.
Here's the pattern in one place:
Cumbrae's expanded nearby, and Maro Al Chamaa is adding a fourth restaurant across the street. Pinbones moved to a new King Street address, while La Valle now occupies Cumbrae's former storefront.
Compare that to how the retail side of King Street usually works. Beanermunky Chocolate closed its doors at 50 King Street West after more than a decade, and within a few months a different chocolate maker had taken over the same space. A gift shop called Strawberry Fields gave way to a sewing and fabric studio at 5 King Street West. That's the normal churn of a small downtown commercial strip: one tenant leaves, another moves in, the address stays constant but the business behind the glass is unrelated to what came before.
Food service on King Street isn't following that script right now. Cumbrae's opened a new shop at 24 King Street West; its original location at 26 King Street West became La Valle. Râz is set to open across the street from Bohemian Beirut. Pinbones moved to 44 King Street West, while Râz is set to open in its former space. Stephen Alexander said the goal is straightforward: build Dundas into a food destination for the Hamilton, Ancaster, and Burlington area, alongside Detour, Dear Grain, and Picone's Fine Foods.
That's a different kind of growth than a strip mall filling its last empty unit. It's existing owners betting that there's more appetite on this street, by expanding nearby or moving to another King Street address. For anyone who's watched other small Ontario downtowns lose their anchor businesses to bigger cities once they hit a certain size, that's worth noticing. The people who know this market best are the ones putting more capital into it, not less.
Downtown Dundas's established food spots include Collins Brewhouse at 33 King Street West, the Thirsty Cactus, Detour Coffee House, Quatrefoil's contemporary French menu from chefs Fraser Macfarlane and Georgina Mitropoulos, and Betula at 225 King Street West.
The newer additions include Cumbrae's expanded shop at 24 King Street West and La Valle gelato next door. Bohemian Beirut opened in late 2024, and Râz is set to open at 65 King Street West on September 15, 2026.
None of this changed how the festival itself worked. King Street closed from York Road to Market Street. The parade ran the Thursday before, and the vendors lined up for three days, as they have since Ben Veldhuis's greenhouse gave the whole thing its name. When the tents came down Sunday afternoon, King Street went back to being a regular downtown strip, just one with a few more doors than it had last summer.
That's usually how you can tell whether a place is holding its value or just holding its ground. It's not what shows up once a year for a festival weekend. It's what the people who already run businesses here decide to build next, right where they already are.
If you're curious what a downtown like this means for property values in Dundas, or you're weighing whether now's the right time to buy or sell nearby, Jessica Alexopoulos & Associates knows this street corner by corner. Get in Touch.
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