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The Dish

De-licious

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We called the 10 most clicked Winterlicious restaurants to find out how the festival’s going (and how to get a table)

Hoping to squeeze into Canoe this Winterlicious? You’re out of luck (Image: Jen Chan from the Torontolife.com Flickr pool)

With the end of Winterlicious in sight, we got curious about how this year’s prix fixe madness was going. “Stronger than last year,” said Pangaea owner Peter Geary, who credits social networking with driving last-minute reservations throughout the festival. “Even last night, you could see people taking photographs of their meals and tweeting,” he told us (apparently phones at the dinner table are no longer a faux pas). The folks over at Canoe also noticed the impact of word of mouth, saying, “As soon as we change our voice message to say we have some availability, the phones go crazy.” While quick-fingered foodies have snapped up all of Canoe’s remaining tables, there’s still hope—the people at Scarpetta, Biff’s and Jump all advised diners to call last-minute, since no-shows are still very much a Winterlicious tradition. We also talked to the 10 restaurants whose menus got the most hits from our list of the 61 best bets to find out whether and when tables are still available.

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The Dish

De-licious

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Winterlicious 2012: Toronto Life’s picks for King West and the Financial District

WINTERLICIOUS 2012 | DOWNTOWN SOUTH

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 Dish

Bottoms Up

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Top Toronto chefs recognized in 2011’s Nine of Dine at the Gourmet Food and Wine Expo

This weekend, the Metro Toronto Convention Centre will host the Gourmet Food and Wine Expo, four days celebrating everything imbibable. Over 38,000 guests are expected to sample more than 1,500 fine wines, spirits and beers and participate in tutored tastings. The show also recognizes some of Toronto’s hottest chefs as part of the sixth annual Nine of Dine award, sponsored in part by Now and the expo itself.

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The Dish

Aprons & Icons

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GALLERY: At this year’s What’s on the Table benefit, Toronto’s top chefs came out to support The Stop

(Image: Jenna Marie Wakani)

On Wednesday, 550 Toronto foodies and philanthropists gathered in the Wychwood Barns for What’s on the Table, the annual fundraiser for The Stop Community Food Centre. The sold-out event featured 35 food and drink stations representing a staggering array of top Toronto restaurants, including Canoe, Scaramouche, Niagara Street Café, Parts and Labour, Jamie Kennedy Kitchens, C5, Ruby Watchco, Noce, Cowbell, George and the Gabardine, with desserts from Frangipane, Nadège and Soma, and drinks from Steam Whistle, Henry of Pelham, Frodpond Farm and Château des Charmes, among many others, not to mention two contestants from season one of Top Chef Canada.

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The Dish

From the Print Edition

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Toronto’s best five restaurants to go for a business lunch

The top five spots to break bread, dent the expense account and sign a deal while you’re at it

Best for a Business Lunch

No. 1
A $1 million facelift loosened the tie of Oliver and Bonacini’s flagship Canoe, while the breathtaking view from the 54th floor never fails to awe. It tops our chart for the expertly executed haute Canadiana and service that’s as polished as the silver. 66 Wellington St. W., 416-364-0054.

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The Dish

Foodie Follies

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This year’s What’s on the Table fundraiser for The Stop features over 30 top chefs from Toronto and beyond

Eat well and feed the hungry along the way—that’s the concept behind the annual What’s on the Table benefit being held this year on November 2. Since 2005, the fundraiser has gathered $1.5 million for The Stop, the innovative community food centre whose goal is to increase everyone’s access to healthy food (check out our interview with chef Chris Brown from shortly after he joined The Stop). Dining stations open at 6:30 p.m., and patrons won’t be starved for choice; the event features offerings from over 30 chefs, including Lynn Crawford of Ruby Watcho, Anthony Walsh of Canoe and pâtissier Nadège Nourian (see below for the very impressive full list).

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The Dish

From the Print Edition

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Chris Nuttall-Smith on Keriwa and Bannock, two restaurants riffing on Canadian culinary traditions

Chef Joseph Bear Robe works the stoves at Keriwa, the city’s only Aboriginal restaurant

Chef Joseph Bear Robe works the stoves at Keriwa, the city’s only Aboriginal restaurant (Image: Emma McIntyre)

In the basement hallway of Keriwa Café, there’s a row of photographs showing an Ojibwa man dancing through Paris in feathered powwow regalia. From the Louvre to the Champs Élysées, the stomping, rattle-shaking man appears in hyper-saturated colour, while the City of Light behind him is rendered in muted sepia, as if to invoke a noble past. But in the final image, the dancer leans over. As you look more closely, you see that he’s fiddling with something, an iPod connected to a ghetto blaster—Sitting Bull meets the b-boy crew. “You think you know me?” the photo seems to say.

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The Dish

Opening

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Introducing: Tosho Knife Arts, the new Mirvish village mecca for fans of Japanese blades

Tosho specializes in hand sharpening and restoration of Japanese blades. (Image: Gizelle Lau)

Sitting down with knife enthusiasts Olivia Go and Ivan Fonseca, we couldn’t help but flash back to Kill Bill: Vol. 1, when Uma Thurman’s character visits Okinawa to procure the ultimate in Japanese steel, a Hattori Hanzō sword. These two knife nerds share that same reverence for finely-crafted blades and the art of knife making and sharpening, so it’s no wonder they’re now the co-owners of the new Tosho Knife Arts in Mirvish Village.

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The Dish

De-licious

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We called the 10 most clicked Summerlicious restaurants to scope out their experience—and availability

Toronto restaurants are firmly in the grip of Summerlicious, which continues to this Sunday, so we decided to find out how the annual prix-fixe fete has treated them. The consensus? It’s been a wild week-and-a-half. “It’s definitely crazier than normal,” the folks at Brassaii told us. “Crazy busy,” echoed the people at Starfish Oyster Bed and Grill, who also had some sage advice for those spurned by packed houses and peculiarly empty tables: “If you’re unsure [of availabilities], call in or swing past, because there are always no-shows” (ah, the infamous Summerlicious no-shows). With less than a week left before the summer food fest wraps up, we got in touch with the 10 restaurants whose menus got the most hits from our list of the 63 best bets to find out whether and when tables are still available.

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The Dish

De-licious

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11 best bets for Summerlicious 2011: our chief critic Chris Nuttall-Smith makes his picks

The imported Neapolitan pizza oven at Fabbrica (Image: Karon Liu)

Now in its ninth season, the city-run ’Licious phenomenon (there are both summer and winter incarnations, in case you’ve been living under a pizza stone all this time) shows no signs of tiring, even if every year it seems to enrage more and more curmudgeonly downtown diners who don’t much like sharing their favorite restaurants with the plebes. Summerlicious succeeds precisely because it makes inaccessible restaurants accessible, even if it’s only for two weeks each July. The big list (there are 150 participating restaurants this year) will never include the hottest, newest, most interesting restaurants in the city—those places don’t typically need the help. It typically does include more than its share of dogs. But there are plenty of places in between: proven, well-run, inviting rooms with committed kitchens. We’ve picked a few of the best.

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The Dish

De-licious

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Summerlicious 2011: Toronto Life’s favourites for the Financial District

SUMMERLICIOUS 2011 | DOWNTOWN SOUTH

Power lunchers and after-work diners are the bread and butter of Summerlicious. Here, 22 Toronto Life picks for where to go.

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The Dish

From the Print Edition

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The sipper club: meet the city’s competitive cabal of top sommeliers

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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The Dish

Restauran-TO

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Wvrst, a new King West beer hall, to feature menu from “Southern Italy by way of Munich”

A couple weeks back, news broke that the space that once held Marc Thuet’s Conviction (which closed last fall and was previously Bite Me! and Bistro and Bakery Thuet) was turning into a loosely interpreted Munich-style beer hall called Wvrst. Recently, we caught up with chef and owner Aldo Lanzillotta to ask him about joining Hogtown’s sausage party.

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The Dish

Aprons & Icons

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Five things we learned about O&B from Corey Mintz’s behind-the-scenes feature

With the recent announcement that Toronto’s ever-growing food service company Oliver and Bonacini Restaurants is set to make The Bay the city’s newest foodie destination with a string of in-store eateries, not long after adding food service at Muskoka’s Windermere House to its porfolio, one thing is clear: the O&B empire is officially taking over. In his recent Toronto Star feature on the corporation, Corey Mintz shadows the two men behind the company, Peter Oliver and Michael Bonacini, to find out what it takes to build an empire. (Mintz also published a “deleted scenes” post on his own blog.) Here are five things we learned.

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Opening

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Introducing: Black Moon, the latest excuse for Bay Streeters to stick around after five

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.

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