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The comprehensive index of every blog post, magazine story and restaurant review that appears on Torontolife.com
J. P. Challet at his new Queen East bakery (Images: Signe Langford)
Queen Street East has been steadily attracting culinary entrepreneurs for the last decade or so, but with prime spaces available for rent and condos and townhouses going up at every turn, the pace has really picked up. French ex-pat J. P. Challet, a culinary craftsman of many trades, is the latest to try his hand with Le Matin, a new authentic French bakery that’s slated to open in December.
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James Pasternak has an idea for making things a little more civil during city council meetings: bring back the snacks. Council voted to eliminate snacks shortly after Rob Ford—hater of gravy, snacks and, worst of all, gravy-smothered snacks—became mayor. (City hall saved 48,000 big ones!) Of course, Pasternak emphasized that no one is talking about “a 50-foot, Las Vegas–style, all-you-can-eat buffet”; the reasonable Pasternak only wants food at full council meetings and believes it should be paid out of councillors’ budgets. Frankly, our faith in government is slightly shaken by the suggestion that elected officials can’t sit still if they aren’t provided food (although Pasternak did suggest that other snack-related benefits include greater focus and harmony). Regardless, Pasternak’s hopes will probably be crushed, due to opposition on both sides of the political aisle. Adam Vaughan thinks all this snack talk amounts to yet another distraction at a time when council is “taking the necessities of life literally away from people.” The Star also notes that Paul Ainslie is avoiding white bread and deli meats. Now that’s principle. Read the entire story [Toronto Star] »
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A new restaurant focused on Aboriginal cuisine is set to open on Queen Street West this coming May. Behind Keriwa is Aaron Joseph Bear Robe, previously of Splendido, Michael Stadtländer’s Eigensinn Farm and Haisai, and the River Café in Calgary. With a strong pedigree of farm-to-table haute cuisine, Keriwa Café will bring Aboriginal recipes together with more contemporary dishes, and will focus on local, seasonal and organic ingredients. He’s also promised us fried bread.
This year’s crop of restaurants, from a million-dollar dining room to a brazen burger joint, pushed Toronto’s culinary culture in creative, comforting and blessedly cheap directions. Here, the 10 new spots that are redefining the way we eat, drink and play in the city
(Image: Signe Langford)
The Foodist Market, a new small grocery shop in Leslieville, has only been open for a few days, so it’s no surprise that many of the deep, white shelves lining the walls of this former juice bar are still bare. The shop should be fully stocked in a matter of days, but until then there are still plenty of organic goodies in store to draw the locals. Standouts include over-the-top rich and porky lonza (cured pork loin), pancetta and capicollo from Niagara Food Specialties, cheeses from Monforte, breads from nearby St. John’s Bakery, salsas and chips from Toronto’s Mad Mexican and, of course, locally grown veggies, eggs and meats. Despite these, the focus here is on organic first, local second.
With artisanal flours, custom-made ovens and full-time bakers, restaurants are turning the pre-dinner breadbasket into an indulgence in its own right
Dum Dum Girls, Brad Mehldau and Anne Sofie von Otter and Sandra Shamas
1. SANDRA SHAMAS’ WIT’S END III: LOVE LIFE
Comedy queen Sandra Shamas started making audiences laugh back in the ’80s—her show, My Boyfriend’s Back and There’s Gonna Be Laundry, was a huge hit at the Edmonton Fringe Festival in 1987, and led to no small amount of success on the comedy circuit. These days, after a nine-year absence from the stage, her shows reflect a performer more comfortable in her skin, perhaps the result of some country living (she moved to a farm and started growing carrots after the aforementioned boyfriend-turned-husband filed for divorce). Whatever the subject matter, Shamas is still making everyone laugh. To March 13. $25-$65. Winter Garden Theatre, 189 Yonge St., 416-872-5555, ticketmaster.ca.
2. BREAD DAY WITH ANDREA GIBSON (FREE!) Read the rest of this entry »
For many DIY foodies, bread is the final frontier. Sure, making a loaf is cheaper than tossing a bag of Dempster’s in your grocery cart, but for some (like, say, us) it can be a little intimidating. Enter the fine folks at The Cookbook Store, who are hosting a day-long ode to bread this weekend. Toronto “bread maven” Andrea Gibson, owner of Fred’s Bread, will be on hand to answer questions, and there will be various loaves of bread available for the tasting. February 26. The Cookbook Store, 850 Yonge St., cook-book.com.
Loaf lovers are seeking out breads with character at indie bakeries.
1. ALSATIAN SOURDOUGH
With a crisp crust, chewy crumb and superior tang, Petite Thuet’s peerless sourdough has it all. Chef Marc Thuet’s secret? A family recipe that calls for organic flour and a 200‑year-old sourdough starter smuggled from his native Alsace. $6.50. 1 King St. W. (at Yonge), 416-867-7977; plus two other GTA locations.
2. FOCACCIA Read the rest of this entry »
Best known for her pastries, Lesley Mattina, owner of OMG Baked Goodness, also bakes regal rounds of focaccia glistening with garlic oil and crunchy with sea salt. They’re so good that Dundas West it spot Enoteca Sociale down the street orders them daily for its bread baskets. $4.50. 1561 Dundas St. W. (at Sheridan Ave.), 647-348-5664.
Middle-class life isn’t what it used to be. Thanks to a heated real estate market, a strong dollar, new taxes and stagnating incomes, Toronto has become, improbably, one of the world’s most expensive cities. Is it worth it?
(Illustration by Julien Pacaud; skyline photo by Brian Summers)
Today, an average Saturday, I spent the following: $6 on a round-trip TTC ride; about $17 on groceries from the Wychwood Barns farmers’ market (organic Crispin apples, an olive boule and free-range eggs); $34 on two bottles of wine (one decent, one plonk); almost $20 on the recent Superchunk CD and $11 on toiletries. Lunch was cheap and simple: a peanut butter sandwich, an apple and a few spoonfuls of raspberry yogurt. Dinner was free: homemade rice-and-bean burritos at a friend’s house. On the way home from that modest dinner party, waiting forever for the Dufferin bus, I almost splurged on a cab, but it seemed wasteful. Then I got home and booked a flight to New York on Porter for a friend’s 40th birthday: another $326. There’s also what I spend on my mortgage, property taxes, insurance, utilities, cellphone, Internet, YMCA membership, charitable donations and credit card debt. All of that adds up to roughly $65 a day. So, as a childless, home-owning, not-terribly-extravagant-but-not-entirely-miserly-either Torontonian, this one day at the tail end of 2010 cost me—not counting the airfare, which, for argument’s sake, I’m setting aside as an exceptional expense—about $153.
That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s about $20 more than what I make every day, after taxes. And it leaves nothing, obviously, for home repairs, clothing, vet bills, investments, medical expenses, birthday presents, savings, recreational drugs, holidays or the kid that Liz, my fiancée, and I have been talking about having this year but which, if things continue in this fashion, we’ll have to postpone having until we get jobs that net us more than $50,000 each a year. Read the rest of this entry »
The $100 brgr and its associated finery (Image: Colin Griffin, M:brgr)
I ate two Kobe beef patties for lunch yesterday, plus a couple slices of bacon, a wedge of foie gras, an ounce of gloopy brie, a slick of fig jam, a stack of really fabulous grilled pear slices, four asparagus spears, piave del vecchio cheese, garlic-roasted ham (effing delish), porcini mushrooms (I’m thinking they weren’t porcini, but that’s what the menu said), three white bread buns, an olive, and a side each of black truffle slices and honey truffle aïoli. All this cost me $100, plus tax and tip, and the burger—yes, it was a burger—was so tall that it took several tries and a near-miss nasal-labial injury to get an honest bite of the thing into my mouth.
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Two neighbourhood restaurants serve up light-handed renditions of our rib-sticking favourites
(Image: Vanessa Heins)
The comfort food revolution has brought us much to be thankful for, including cheaper, more casual restaurants, and the glories of deep-fried mac-and-cheese, but it hasn’t exactly delivered a surge of culinary innovation. Spurred on by a sputtering economy, the comfort trend spawned a wave of barbecue joints, gourmet burger shops, neighbourhood pubs and by-the-book bistros, and it introduced childhood-evoking staples like cookies and milk to scores of restaurant menus where the “licorice root, three ways” used to be. It offered certainty when everything else around us seemed ready to collapse, not only for diners but for restaurateurs, too.
Comfort eating, like love and psychotherapy, is driven by equal measures of longing (for simpler times) and industrial-grade denial (s’mores are less fattening when they’re made with single-estate chocolate from São Tomé), powerful motivators both. So most chefs have been happy to feed our cravings without letting their own high-minded notions get in the way. Read the rest of this entry »
Brick Street Bakery's popular Distillery location (Image: Easternblot)
Baker Simon Silander is taking his much-loved east-end bread, sandwich and pastry chain, Brick Street Bakery, right into the belly of the beast: the Path tunnels below First Canadian Place. With approximately 90,000 people passing by this site every day, there’s potential for some serious dough. The new location is an expensive venture, but Silander’s hopes are high that it will pay off, given all those boardrooms upstairs in need of catered breakfast meetings and working lunches.
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Biana Zorich and Marc Thuet at their home in Toronto (Image: Davida Aronovitch)
Marc Thuet and Biana Zorich are exhausted. It’s taken the pair a month to recuperate after shooting the second season of their reality show, Conviction Kitchen II, in Vancouver. Like last year’s Toronto edition, the program is airing on CityTV and features former convicts learning the cooking and restaurant trade. Amid talk of a third season set in the U.S., Zorich and Thuet are in Toronto re-organizing their lives. They’ve shut down the original Conviction restaurant on King Street West and are focusing on their bread-making business. Here, they talk with us about their Vancouver experience, their marriage and the Conviction Kitchen contestants they came to love.
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