Local microbreweries are experimenting with bold flavours, creating surprising and original beers. Here, the best pints and where to enjoy them.
Arkell Best Bitter from Wellington Brewery (Photo by Daniel Shipp)
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Starfish restaurant is serving rare species of abalone
Starfish serves the abalone raw in thin slices and with the incredibly rare roe (Photo courtesy of Patrick McMurray)
Toronto restaurateur and champion oyster shucker Patrick McMurray has tracked down a sustainable source of extremely rare pintos, Canada’s only naturally occurring abalone species, for his Adelaide Street seafood restaurant Starfish.
The large sea snails are prized for their luscious meat but cannot be legally caught or served in Canada unless grown on a farm, so McMurray tracked down the six-person-run, British Columbia–based Bamfield Huu-ay-aht Community Abalone Project, which aims to replenish wild stock of the mollusc and get it off the Canadian government’s threatened species list. Starfish is the second restaurant in the country to serve Huu-ay-aht’s abalone (C Restaurant in Vancouver was the first).
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It’s official: gastropubs are the new tapas bars
The new locals: the Queen and Beaver (Photo by Jessica Darmanin)
“Food and pubs go together like frogs and lawn mowers,” wrote the unswervingly provocative British restaurant critic A. A. Gill. “Pubs don’t do food; they offer internal mops and vomit decoration.” He didn’t entirely mean it, of course: the same article ends with a declaration of passionate love for a dish he had encountered in a London pub—a thick potato soup with a large island of pressed foie gras melting in the middle. But as a general observation it seems sound enough, in Canada as well as in England. Anyone who has accidentally ordered a meal in one of our fake Irish or English chain pubs knows the fried snack food and industrial meat pies are as phony and mass-produced as the pissy commercial beer and the Sherlock Holmes decor.
• Read the rest of James Chatto’s column from the November issue of Toronto Life »
Seven days of dinner deals
The elk at Amuse Bouche (Photo by Renée Suen)
In this year of scrimping, more and more Toronto restaurants are offering once-a-week meals that allow diners a cheap feast on a slow night. From Monday to Sunday, we list the best places to hit each evening.
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How to make Ceili Cottage’s unspeakably decadent sticky toffee pudding
Pour some sugar on me (Photo by Naomi Finlay)
With its deliberately pocked and pitted decor, the Ceili Cottage looks like it dates back to the days of the Loyalists. But Patrick McMurray’s new gastropub is clearly tapping in to Torontonians’ hankering for all things cheap and soothing. Our favourite dish is chef Kyle Deming’s unspeakably decadent sticky toffee pudding ($6). The place has been hopping since day one. For sweet tooths unable to snag a table, here’s how to make it at home.
Just Opened: Ceili Cottage
Irish times: Patrons live it up at Leslieville's Ceili Cottage (Photos by Signe Langford)
“We did this totally back-asswards,” says Patrick McMurray of Ceili Cottage, the Irish pub he opened in Leslieville, and the series of snafus that kept its doors closed until the end of June.
The last snag was the threat of an LCBO strike, which was scheduled to begin the same day McMurray planned to serve his first drinks. He sent his wife and a friend to the liquor store to fill four carts before he officially received his licensee number. As he tells it, the carts of booze were just approaching the cash at the same moment as his license was confirmed. The kegs of beer had yet to be delivered, but Leslievillians—having developed quite a thirst after months of watching the glacial progress on their new local—were pounding on the cottage’s red door, demanding refreshments. McMurray opened without kegs, serving cans of Guinness and bottles of Harp from a nearby Beer Store.
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