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The dining scene in and around the Financial District has seen a lot of changes since last year’s festival, with new restaurants (Aria, Estiatorio Volos) and new chefs at existing restaurants (Lucien, Brassaii). Here, 24 Winterlicious picks south of College.
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The top five spots to break bread, dent the expense account and sign a deal while you’re at it
Bymark’s B.C. halibut in a banana leaf, a main course on the restaurant’s regular menu, appears on its Summerlicious menu as well. (Image: Renée Suen)
Summerlicious officially launched last Friday (see our complete guide), and instead of serving a second-string menu, many restaurants, like Mark McEwan’s Bay Street standby Bymark, are offering plates from their regular roster at discounted prices.
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Power lunchers and after-work diners are the bread and butter of Summerlicious. Here, 22 Toronto Life picks for where to go. Read the rest of this entry »
An uncharacteristically friendly looking judge’s table—could it be because of Thea Andrews’s Princess Leia outfit? (Image: Food Network Canada/Insight Productions)
TOP CHEF CANADA
Season 1 | Episode 8
The Restaurant Wars challenge on Top Chef is always a fan favourite, and for good reason—it’s a reliable way to jump-start any season low on drama, bleeped-out words and finger pointing, much like our rather polite Canadian edition. After the jump, our recap of how it played out on last night’s episode.
(Image: Jon Sufrin)
On Tuesday, we heard through the grapevine from Montreal food journalist Lesley Chesterman that the Toronto location of M:brgr, home of the $100 burger, had closed. At the end of last week, we received confirmation from M:brgr’s Toronto PR firm that the rumours are true, and founder and owner Jeff Dichter has confirmed that the Toronto location has “ceased operations” and will remain closed.
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The giant Michael Smith and the merely tall Thea Andrews (Image: Food Network Canada/Insight Productions)
TOP CHEF CANADA
Season 1 | Episode 7
Top Chef and blatant product placement have always gone hand in hand, with each season ratcheting up the level of sponsor integration. Far from being an outright fault, it has become something many fans almost look forward to—albeit with a little cringe. Top Chef Canada really outdid itself last night in that regard, with both the quickfire and the elimination challenges centred around a sponsor—a real milestone in the annals of Canadian TV brand integration. But episode seven was about more than just the all-important sponsors; it also featured a delightfully snarky Michael Smith, some adorable pictures of chefs with their significant others and rhyming put-downs from the judges. We recap it all, after the jump.
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Will Predhomme belongs to a competitive cabal of top sommeliers who sniff, sip and spit their way through hundreds of bottles a week. They do this to help you decide what to drink with your dinner, while making you think it was your idea all along
One hundred and fifty-one people have reservations at Canoe tonight. Among these are many Bay Streeters, a couple celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary, dozens of people on dates, including the bar manager from Crush, and a young woman who plans to propose to her boyfriend over dinner. The two private dining rooms are fully booked.
Canoe, part of the ever-expanding Oliver and Bonacini empire, is routinely considered one of the finest restaurants in the city. Last summer, in a rigorous competition held by the Canadian Association of Professional Sommeliers, known as CAPS, Canoe’s head sommelier, Will Predhomme, was proclaimed Ontario’s best. Predhomme has devoted a third of his life—he’s 29—to wine scholarship. He now knows more about wine than almost anyone in Toronto.
Just after 5 p.m., the bar area begins to fill up with commuters sipping cocktails as they wait for the traffic on the clogged Gardiner, 54 floors below, to dissipate. One of the restaurant’s first guests, a retired trial lawyer, arrives. As a young female host escorts him to his large corner table, he puts an arm around her shoulder. “I don’t like to pay bills,” he says. “I want a fucking account. Last time I was here, I offered those ladies”—referring to the hosts who greeted him at his last visit—“$300 and told them to set up an account for me. And I still don’t have one.” He and his three dining companions, Canoe regulars, have brought in several bottles of their own wine, including a cabernet franc from the ex-lawyer’s private vineyard in Tuscany. When Predhomme arrives at the table to discuss the wine, the ex-lawyer, captivatingly bratty in a way that only the rich and sort-of-powerful can be, repeats his complaint. “Look, I spend about $50,000 a year at Bymark, and I’d do the same here if I had a fucking account.” Predhomme is unmoved, but gracious. “If you give me your contact information,” he says, “I’ll make sure that it gets to the right people.”
“You’ll get me an account?”
“I’ll look into it.”
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Inside Black Moon (Image: Daniel Barna)
With the notable exception of Bay Street’s upscale banker-bait, it’s been hard to imagine Toronto’s financial district ever becoming a destination for more casual fare. But with the recent openings of The Gabardine and Blowfish on Bay, and now Black Moon, a new resto-renaissance seems to be taking hold. “Most people who worked here would leave the neighbourhood as soon as they finished working, but that’s changing,” says owner Abdi Ghotb, also the man behind the Sandwich Box. Since opening last week, the glitzy resto-lounge is already becoming a go-to spot for Bay Street’s in-and-out lunch crowd as well as office castaways looking for a late-night libations.
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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(Image: Renée Suen, from the torontolife.com Flickr pool)
January is upon us, and for many hungry Torontonians, that means one thing: Winterlicious. The menus are less predictable than previous years—crème brûlée’s out, lentils du Puy are in—so even the ’Licious haters might have a reason to take advantage of the festival this year. We’ve already named the 12 menus that we think are the best bets, but that doesn’t begin to cover it. Here, find Toronto Life’s 62 favourite Winterlicious restaurants, complete with menus, reviews and reservation numbers.
Winterlicious runs from January 28 to February 10. Reservations are accepted from January 13 onward (January 11 for American Express users).
Fried dough is suddenly everywhere, infiltrating dessert cards and pastry cases and threatening to dethrone panna cotta as the sweet du jour. From rounds to holes, beignets to churros, here are a baker’s dozen of the city’s best
This past Sunday marked the 20th anniversary of Toronto Taste, the annual event that unites Toronto’s food lovers and food makers for a day of innovative cooking, tasking and fundraising for Second Harvest. 60 of Toronto’s top chefs—including Jason Bangerter, Donna Dooher, Chris McDonald, Mark McEwan, Anthony Walsh and Anne Yarymowich—doled out top-notch cuisine to an estimated 1,600 guests at the ROM. We caught up with the chefs and asked them what’s in store for them and their restaurants this summer.
The view from Toula: be a tourist in your own city (Image: Ian Muttoo)
First things first: there’s not much change under the Summerlicious sun. All of the old favourites are here (including Canoe and Bymark, which always sell out first). Seven Numbers, which by Winter/Summerlicious rules is allowed only one location, has swapped out its Danforth location for its Eglinton one. Winterlicious participant Conviction is out for the summer edition as the second season of Conviction Kitchen films in Vancouver. The new owners of Crush Wine Bar are apparently not feeling the ’licious love—nor is Moroco. And while The Citizen’s digs are alive and kicking under new ownership, its vaunted replacement, Ruby Watchco, is opting out.
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