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(Photo by Sally Mahoney)
December 31st is rapidly approaching, and the pressure’s on: what to do on New Year’s Eve? For those who hate crowds, messy house parties and shivering in Nathan Phillips Square but still don’t want to feel curmudgeonly come the stroke of midnight, Toronto’s best restaurants are offering multi-course meals at bargain prices. Here, our list of nine of the best prix fixe menus throughout the city. (Looking for the guide to Toronto’s high profile NYE parties? Click here »)
(Photo by Alan Turkus)
As Starbucks attempts to boost profits with its instant coffee and Tim Hortons’ profits tumble, Toronto’s indie café craze just won’t abate. We seem to write this article every few months—and with good reason. In the past 15 weeks alone, at least nine decent new cafés have popped up, with several more scheduled to open before Christmas. We visited the new spots and learned that the only thing they have in common is that they appeal to divergent tastes. From Leslieville to the Junction, here are the 12 latest spots to keep the city buzzing.
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Noah Cowan, Bell Lightbox artistic director, shows off the fourth floor of the building that will be used as a film reference library (All photos by Karon Liu).
Although the Toronto International Film Festival won’t be settling into its new home until this time next year, last week we donned hard hats, construction boots and goggles (and signed a spooky-looking safety waiver) and took a tour of the half-built Bell Lightbox. Oh, the perils of entertainment reporting.
The five-storey tower at the corner of King and John Streets (a $22-million piece of land donated by Ivan Reitman, his sisters and the Daniels Corporation) will have five theatres with a total of 1,300 seats, learning studios for film students and two dining spaces occupied by Oliver and Bonacini. Noah Cowan, artistic director of the Bell Lightbox and a former TIFF co-director, says that the goal is to move the festival into a more central downtown location over the next three years.
The new meal: The Roosevelt Room, which remains under construction, intends to put the focus on food (Photo by Karon Liu)
Another supper club is opening in the Entertainment District, but before the eye rolling commences, note that The Roosevelt Room is attempting to distance itself from its cookie-cutter urban-chic counterparts. The menu is to be prepared by a high-profile executive chef, and the interior is done in a deco motif intended to channel golden-era Hollywood (rather than the slick, soulless look into the future we’ve come to expect from supper clubs).
We met visonary and Bay Street whiz Jeff O’Brien yesterday as he was configuring the lines on the patterned ceiling above the bar and giving thumbs down to wallpaper deemed too shiny. “I’ve thought for the longest time that Toronto hasn’t really nailed the supper club concept,” he says. “There have been a lot of attempts, but they haven’t really fired all cylinders on the food, service and entertainment components.”
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Smolkin shows off his triple pork poutine: bacon, pulled pork and sausage atop fries (Photo by Karon Liu)
Fries, curds and gravy—three simple ingredients that, when combined, create a dish as Canadian as hockey. Toronto’s love affair with poutine started years ago with haute incarnations from Jamie Kennedy and in restaurants like Bymark (it’s hard to go wrong when both lobster and fries are involved). When Café du Lac opened in 2008, we swooned for its foie gras–topped version. It was perhaps inevitable, then, that poutine-focused restaurants would soon follow, and the first was thanks to Ryan Smolkin, an ex-advertising exec with no hospitality experience.
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• Seal meat is the hot entrée at Montreal restaurants a month after the Governor General Michaëlle Jean horrified vegans by eating raw seal, proving that when it comes to good eating, diners are unmoved by cuteness. Perhaps PETA’s campaign to stop the consumption of fish—by renaming them “sea-kittens”—might actually backfire. [New York Times]
• Corey Mintz strives to prove that there are good Mexican restaurants in Toronto. His weekend review of fancy Frida, mid-priced Milagro and straight-up Rebozos reveals that authentic Mexican can be found at every price point. But while he made us crave citrus ceviche, we’d like to point out that all the restaurants he visited are all north of St. Clair. Luckily, Milagro has a second location in the entertainment district. [Toronto Star]
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Rooms with a view: C5 makes the top 10 (Photo by jethros_tale)
• The ROM’s C5 ranks second in Food and Wine magazine’s list of the top 10 restaurants with a view. In your face, Santa Monica! [Canada.com]
• Not to be outdone by the swine flu, listeria makes a comeback in the form of Piller’s Taste Better Than Bacon maple-flavoured smoked ham and Taste Better Than Bacon hickory-smoked turkey bacon. [Ottawa Citizen]
• Hot on the heels of a similar profile in the U.K.’s Telegraph is a Brit-written guide to Canuck cuisine. This time, they discuss Ontario’s best offerings and spend 288 words gushing about Jamie Kennedy. [Travelbite]
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Friday’s eTalk party at the CTV building is in the running for crassest party at TIFF—or at least the one most resembling a barnyard. It took 20 minutes to get a drink, and it was enormously undignified to be smooshed on the stairwell and yelled at like third graders by security. Just another night out in the entertainment district? Maybe—but then something of Biblical proportion started to take shape. Gospel chants began, then drumbeats escalated to an intense degree. It felt as though the CTV parking lot was about to split open and money would blow up from the ground. Diddy had arrived. “Bad Boy 4 Life” kicked in and infected the crowd. It didn’t matter if you were behind the stage, rammed up against a fence or front and centre amid a sea of busty blondes—everyone simultaneously started to shake their rump with punctuating gang signs. It was a CTV corporate crunk-down. After the jump, our search for Lindsay Lohan.
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David Lee and Yannick Bigourdin, co-owners of Splendido, have thought of a way to keep themselves occupied this summer by colonizing the entertainment district. They’re taking over the vast, three-storey space of The Original Motorcycle Café on King Street West when it closes on May 31, sprucing up the interior and reopening a month later as King West. The idea was first suggested to them a year ago by someone who happens to be a silent partner at Splendido and TOMC, but neither Lee nor Bigourdin were prepared to let their attention waver from Splendido until now. “And of course that will always be our main priority,” says Bigourdin. “David will continue to cook at Splendido nearly every evening. But we will oversee King West. It’s exciting and scary at the same time.”
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