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Toronto Life - The Dish

The latest buzz on restaurants, chefs, bars, food shops and food events. Sign up for the Dish newsletter for weekly updates. Send tips to thedish@torontolife.com

Foodie Follies

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Weekly Eater: Toronto food events for May 21 to 27

Pedestrian Sundays at Kensington Market are back on May 27 (Image: Min)

Monday, May 21

  • 86’D: Join Ivy Knight for a tea party in honour of Queen Victoria. Featuring Victoria Gin tea cocktails and dainty tea sandwiches from Fresh City Farms. The Drake, 1150 Queen St. W., 416-531-5042. Find out more »
  • Queen Victoria’s Secret: The launch of Brewer’s Backyard, a new craft beer series at the Brick Works. This time around: beer by Great Lakes Brewing of Toronto and sandwiches from Fidel Gastro. Evergreen Brick Works, 550 Bayview Ave. Find out more »
  • Piola’s Monday Night Mixer: Piola’s weekly aperitivo italiano, with cocktail and beer specials and complimentary snacks. 1165 Queen St. W., 416-477-4652. Find out more »
  • Sorauren Farmers’ Market: 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. in the field house at Sorauren Park. 50 Wabash Ave. Find out more »

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Restauran-TO

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Friday Night Bites: tables for two at Scaramouche, The Gabardine and North 44

FRIDAY NIGHT BITESIt’s 4 p.m. on Friday, and you don’t have a dinner reservation. Still, there’s no need to fret (or waste your night waiting for a table). We just called some of the city’s hottest restaurants and found three that can squeeze in two for dinner tonight. Now it’s up to you to get dialing and snag a table before they’re all gone. Today: Scaramouche, The Gabardine and North 44

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Bottoms Up

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New LCBO wine tags explicitly spell out sugar content

This sauvignon blanc has 3 grams of sugar per litre, making it extra dry (Image: LCBO)

Wine tasting notes are notorious for purple prose and overly impressionistic descriptions, and it’s not always easy to glean that most basic of factors: how sweet the darn thing might be. Luckily for Ontarians, the LCBO has started putting up new bin tags that list the actual sugar concentrations in honest-to-goodness grams per litre. The Globe and Mail’s Beppi Crosariol explains the new numbers replace the previous sugar scale, which ranged from zero to 15 and was frankly a little opaque. The new tags will also take the sugar-acid balance into account by including one of five terms on the tag: extra-dry, dry, medium, medium-sweet and sweet. [Globe and Mail]

Rumours & Rumblings

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Joanne Kates to leave the Globe after 38 years (UPDATED)

If the Twitterverse is to be believed (and no less a figure than Shinan Govani has confirmed it, so it must be true, right?), Joanne Kates, the long-time Globe and Mail restaurant critic, will publish her last review in the paper this Saturday. As NOW’s Joshua Errett notes, the perennial Scaramouche lover was a prominent practitioner of the old-time hat-over-the-eyes school of criticism, although like most critics she didn’t entirely manage to keep her likeness under wraps. No word yet on who might replace her, or which restaurant will receive the honour of her final bit of praise or skewering.

UPDATE: We recently heard from Kates, who told us in an email, “38 years was a great run—and long enough. I didn’t need the grind of a weekly column any more.” As for what’s next for her, she noted that her “voice will not be silent.” Case in point: her iOS app.

Kevin Siu, the executive editor of features at the Globe, told the Dish that Kates’ last review will indeed run this Saturday, followed next Saturday by a column reflecting on her nearly four decades reviewing Toronto restaurants (her first Globe column has been scanned and uploaded). “She’s been the defining voice in Toronto dining for a long time,” Siu said, “and we do look forward to continuing to work with her.” The paper’s new critic will be announced on Tuesday, followed by an online chat between the two critics on May 28.

Foodie Follies

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Tickets on sale for June’s Toronto Underground Market

(Image: Caroline Aksich)

Since these things tend to sell out pretty much instantly (this month’s Street Food Block Party sold out in a few hours), we thought we’d let you know that tickets are now on sale for the June edition of the Toronto Underground Market at the Evergreen Brick Works. Get them while the getting’s good »

TV Diner

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Top Chef Canada exit interview, episode 10: that’s a wrap

This season, we’re chatting with each week’s eliminated chef after they get the boot (or, rather, after their boot-getting episode airs—this stuff was recorded months ago). Find out who got eliminated, after the jump »

Opening

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Introducing: Stack, uptown’s new barbecue restaurant (complete with a huge smoker)

(Image: Karolyne Ellacott)

“Anybody can do a good burger,” says Todd Savage, co-owner of Stack, uptown’s answer to Barque. “But being the pit master is a real art form.” Indeed, Savage and his high-school buddy from “about 400 years ago,” Bill Panos, originally intended to devote their new restaurant to on-trend burgers, but ended up deciding it was important to have more options, especially for a family-friendly spot.

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TV Diner

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Top Chef Canada picked up for a third season

Top Chef Canada has just been picked up for a third season, and Food Network Canada is looking for a fresh batch of competitive cooks. Hoping to be one of them?  The questions on the 23-page application range from training (“Have you attended a culinary school or any other cooking program?”) to the not-so-food-specific (“Describe your most embarrassing moment”). The form and a five-minute video are due June 19, so there’s still plenty of time for applicants to bone up on their best offal-prepping skills. After the first season, critics (and Torontolife.com commenters) complained that the cast wasn’t diverse enough to represent Canada—and the show did indeed put together a less white and less male cast for season two. Anything you’re hoping to see in season three? Let us know in the comments.

Weekly Wine Pick

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David Lawrason’s Weekly Wine Pick: a refreshing rosé that’s perfect for the patio

Weekly Wine PickNatura 2011 Rosé

$13.95 | Rapel Valley, Chile | 89 points
Devoted beer drinkers might call the Victoria Day long weekend “May 2-4,” but to another group it signals the start of rosé season. This organically produced pinkie stands out from the crowd, and it’s from a place not usually associated with good pink wine.

The taste: It has a generous, fairly piquant nose of red currant and pomegranate fruit with floral and citrus notes and dried herbs. It’s very bright, fresh and well balanced, with a perfect acid-sugar ratio. No sense of being too sweet or confected, which is a shortcoming of many inexpensive New World pinkies.

How to drink it: This is an ideal sipper for the deck or dock. Serve well chilled but not stone cold, with a plate of cheese, salami and fruit.

Vintages. LCBO 277962

Restauran-TO

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Splendido chef de cuisine Patrick Kriss to take over the kitchen at Acadia

Patrick Kriss at Splendido’s pass (Image: Renée Suen)

If you haven’t heard a lot about Patrick Kriss yet, you will soon. Owners Scott and Lindsay Selland have revealed to Torontolife.com that Kriss will be stepping into the role of chef de cuisine at Acadia when Matt Blondin departs for Momofuku Daisho at the end of the month.

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Pantry Raid

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Turns out, some fish stocks are actually on the rebound

Summer flounder, Bering sea snow crab and Washington State coho salmon (Images: courtesy NOAA)

Most reports about ocean fish stocks tend to be pretty ominous, but at last there’s some good news about fish populations. The New York Times’s Green blog points to new numbers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration that suggest six species are on the rebound and have already reached healthy population levels. The Bering Sea snow crab, the summer flounder on the mid-Atlantic coast, the haddock in the Gulf of Maine, the chinook salmon along the northern California coast, the coho salmon off Washington State and the Pacific widow rockfish are all back in a big way, thanks in part to not-so-popular government catch limits. The agency also found that 27 fish stocks have been returned to health in the past 11 years (NOAA also runs a neat consumer-oriented site with sustainable seafood information). Maybe now we can feel a little less guilty about how we get our omega-3 fix. But only a little less. [New York Times]

Bottoms Up

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Once again, the LCBO posts record sales—which isn’t surprising, given its monopoly

The Summerhill LCBO or Hogwarts? (Image: -sina- from the Torontolife.com Flickr pool)

Ontarians love their booze, and the LCBO’s 2011–2012 financial results prove they’ve been buying lots more of it. It’s the 17th year in a row of record sales for the board, with net sales up $218 million or 4.9 per cent over fiscal 2010–2011, totalling a cool $4.7 billion. Of course, that’s not exactly shocking, since the LCBO’s pretty much the only place in town where you can grab a bottle of bourbon or gin, unless you make your own. VQA table wines from Ontario were big winners last year, with an increase in sales of nine per cent, but the big success story is still craft beers. The fact that micro-brews are doing well shouldn’t be surprising, given the attention they’ve been getting from big beer companies, but the bump in sales is still pretty staggering: in the last year, Ontario craft beers led all segments with almost 45 per cent growth. All of this means that the liquor monopoly remitted $1.63 billion to the provincial coffers. With numbers like these, we doubt Queen’s Park would be in a greatf hurry to get rid of the LCBO any time soon.

From the Print Edition

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All-Beef Party: Toronto’s 25 best burgers ranked in order of heart-stopping, messy magnificence

25 BEST BURGERS

Nine years ago, Mark McEwan scandalized Torontonians with his $35 truffled Bymark burger. That was before words like “grass-fed,” “heritage” and “dry-aged” entered into the burger lexicon. The city is now crammed with craft burgers, and carnivores no longer flinch at steep price tags. Competitive chefs bring in whole cows from nearby farms, bake their own buns, smoke their own bacon (twice), replace ketchup with tomato chutney and source the most pungent cheeses they can get their patty-flipping hands on. Thankfully, the mom-and-pop shops haven’t been artisinalled out of business—there are still plenty of sublime greasy-bag burgers around, as well as a few new-school diners ironically replicating them. Here, the very best of the city’s boundless burgerdom. See all 25 burgers after the jump »

Aprons & Icons

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An afternoon with Chuck Hughes and 19 excitable kids at The Stop’s after-school program

Chuck Hughes leads the cooking class at The Stop’s after-school program (Image: Jenna Marie Wakani)

Yesterday afternoon, Chuck Hughes took a break from promoting his new cookbook, Garde Manger, to join 19 eager kids in a cooking class at The Stop’s after-school program at Wychwood Barns. Upon his arrival, three enthusiastic youngsters took Hughes on a tour of the Stop’s facilities at the barns (the organization was one of Canada’s first food banks and has since expanded into a community hub with a wide-reaching mandate that includes community gardens, food markets and advocacy). Some highlights of Hughes’s kid-led tour included handling compost and worms and ogling the now-in-their-prime seedlings that were about to be shipped out to west-end community gardens. We couldn’t resist tagging along.

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Bottoms Up

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Do some newly unearthed classic cocktails deserve to be buried once again? 

With the rise of nouveau speakeasies like the Toronto Temperance Society and SpiritHouse, there’s been an increased interest in some of the classic cocktails previously lost in the mists of time (witness SpiritHouse’s 11-page drink list, broken down by historical epoch). But what if some of those old cocktails deserve to be forgotten? Over on the New York Times’s Dining Journal, Robert Simpson recapped a panel at last weekend’s Manhattan Cocktail Classic in which prominent mixological types weighed in on that very question. The Brooklyn? “Not a good drink.” The Aviation? “Tastes like hand soap.” Hemingway’s signature Papa Doble? “Why should we have our drinking habits dictated by Hemingway’s diabetes problem?” Where exactly this leaves the Toronto, a mixture of rye, fernet branca, syrup and bitters that’s been popping up on cocktail lists around town, remains to be seen. Read the entire story [Diner’s Journal] »

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