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The comprehensive index of every blog post, magazine story and restaurant review that appears on Torontolife.com
The place: A quick wander around Bathurst south of King Street should confirm that the area is slowly morphing into a place worthy of its Thompson Hotel anchor: Riant Boutique, a clothing and accessory boutique tucked under a high-rise near the second outpost of the Drake General Store and boutique design firm Salt and Pepper, is the newest retailer in this oft-rebuffed neighbourhood.
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The reasons to abandon the overcrowded, overpriced, not-so-livable city are beginning to outnumber the reasons to stay. More and more of us are tempted by the 905 and beyond. Screw Jane Jacobs. We’re outta here
Brian Porter and Carrie Low thought they’d hatched the perfect plan to avoid the eight-lane gridlock they faced every week on their drive to the family cottage in the Kawarthas. Porter, a soft-spoken 41-year-old Toronto firefighter, would arrange his work schedule to be home on Friday. He’d pack the car at noon and pick up his daughters, Lily and Amelia, from daycare shortly after lunch. Then, rather than head from their home in the Beach to pick up Low downtown, he’d drive to a strategic pit stop in Oshawa. Low, a slim 41-year-old redhead, works as a lawyer with RBC in the financial district, her days and nights packed, respectively, with meetings and paperwork. Her role in the escape plan was to get off work early and catch the GO train to Oshawa Station. Often, she’d end up working a pressure-packed day until 5 p.m. anyway, leaving Porter and the girls waiting at the station for hours. In the end they never gained that much time—it could still be a challenge to get to the cottage before nightfall. But at least they’d avoided the worst hours on the DVP and the 401.
Charles Khabouth at his newest restaurant, La Société (Image: Gizelle Lau)
A few months back, we reported that restaurateur and nightlife impresario Charles Khabouth was planning to open two new restaurants on King Street West. Over the weekend, we found out that Khabouth has partnered with Hanif Harji to make a run on the neighbourhood with a handful of projects.
A member of our secret underground spy network spotted street artist Mr. Brainwash (a.k.a. Thierry Guetta) on King Street West at lunchtime, hanging around the TIFF Bell Lightbox surrounded by a protective shell of hipsters. But Guetta, the subject of Banksy’s 2010 doc Exit Through The Gift Shop, isn’t just here for the shawarma. Mr. Brainwash been commissioned by TIFF to install a number of giant spray cans based on Hollywood icons along the red carpet at Roy Thomson Hall. You can also check out his exhibition at Gallery One for free—we’ve got all the details. There’s a great profile over at the Toronto Star as well.
Find this story on our Star Spotting Map, where we plot the locations of celebrities spotted around Toronto.
Owner Luc Essiambre mans the counter at his eponymous ice cream shop (Image: Gizelle Lau)
King Street West has seen a lot of action this month, with the revamp of Brassaii’s menu, the closing of M:brgr, the opening of WVRST and now the launch of its first ice cream shop, Cool Hand Luc, which opened on June 3 with free samples for all. Behind the counter at the new shop, cleverly named after the Paul Newman flick Cool Hand Luke, is the affable Luc Essiambre (whose nickname growing up was, of course, “Cool Hand Luc”). After spending 15 stressful years in logistics for the aviation industry, Essiambre decided that he’d had enough and began working in an ice cream shop, serving scoops and mastering the art of making it from scratch.
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We don’t know much about Cool Hand Luc, the brand new ice cream shop opening on King West today, but it is Friday, and who doesn’t like free ice cream? From 4 p.m. till close, Cool Hand Luc is providing samples for all. Those who don’t enjoy lineups should probably stay away, but everyone else should go ahead and get their dairy on.
Cool Hand Luc, 545 King St. W.
(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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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 Briscola Trattoria (Image: Gizelle Lau)
Briscola, the new rustic Italian restaurant from Ink Entertainment’s Charles Khabouth and Amber’s Toufik Sarwa, opened last Friday to the packed crowds one would expect from a collaboration between the two nightlife vets. After taking over the space of Sarwa’s short-lived Cinq 01 restaurant, Briscola apparently saw visits from Ben Mulroney and Galen Weston Jr. on its first weekend.
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Soma’s new space (Image: David Castellan)
It takes time to coax a cacao bean into chocolate, and it took seven years for David Castellan and Cynthia Leung, Soma’s husband and wife co-owners, to heed the siren call of expansion. Bolstered by the ongoing success of their Distillery location, the bean-to-bar chocolatier and café will be spawning a second location at 443 King Street West, near Spadina, and a couple of doors down from the Calphalon shop.
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The southeast corner of King and John has been targeted by the local BIA for improvement. Specifically, the neighbourhood group wants to make John Street Square into something more like a hipstery hangout and less like where lonely men go for late-night rendezvous. The Entertainment District BIA held a competition, and the winner, pictured above, was announced this morning.
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“Coffee shop opens in west end”—it’s a story we’ve been able to write not once, not twice, not three times, not four times, but five times in November. And now, number six: The Abbott.
The latest addition to Parkdale’s caffeine scene is truly a locals’ coffee shop (and shouldn’t be confused with this Abbott or this Abbott). The owners and the manager live within walking distance, and they opened the café to give their neighbours a place to hang out in the ’hood besides the seedy bars that line King Street west of Dufferin. The space, a former dry cleaner, is tucked around a corner on Spencer Avenue. “I saw the space, and I thought it would be silly not to open something,” says co-owner Fadi Hakim.
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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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Brockton General 
1321 Dundas St. W., 647-342-6104
(Image: Lorne Bridgman)
The usual rules of running a restaurant don’t apply at this tiny former sports bar on Dundas West: the only decorative item of note is a decrepit poster of a Portuguese soccer team, the plates are mismatched china (the best of them are decorated with fluffy baby animals), and the daily menu of just three or four small-portioned entrées is written on butcher paper hanging from the wall.
And yet the place, which is run by plucky first-time restaurateurs Brie Read and Pam Thomson, is also one of the most enjoyable openings of this past year, in no small part because of the cooking. Chef Guy Rawlings (the former chef de cuisine at Cowbell) does country food, for lack of a better term, with urban panache: puckery pickled white turnips that show a blush of pink in their middles; beguiling anchovy- and garlic-enriched white bean mash with smoky grilled bread; house-made lamb sausage grilled to medium and topped with charred scallions.
Excellent fresh maltagliati (like pappardelle, but irregularly shaped) is tossed with chopped tomato, roasted hot and sweet peppers, mint and shiso—it’s cucina povera by way of Japan. A crostino Rawlings made this summer, with toasted walnuts, Cape Vessey cheese, tender sultanas, anchovy and walnut purée, and a soft poached egg, was so good it was impossible to stop at just one order.
The chef recently completed a month-long pastry stage at WD50, a cutting-edge restaurant in NYC, and his desserts—including a pear and rosemary tart made with fruit from a friend’s backyard tree and fried brioche with kefir and Rosewood Estates honey—taste like a super-sophisticated fall fair. The cocktails are good (the crabapple and Zubrówka vodka is genius), and the playlist (Coeur de Pirate, Arcade Fire, Carla Bruni) will make you want to run to Soundscapes for a nightcap. Limited wine list. Closed Monday and Tuesday. Mains $13–$19. Read the rest of this entry »
Biana Zorich and Marc Thuet at the opening of Conviction in 2009 (Image: Karon Liu)
Just over a year after opening Conviction—the third incarnation of their flagship restaurant—chef Marc Thuet and partner Biana Zorich have closed the restaurant for good. A lapsed lease has spelled the end of team Thuet’s presence on King Street West—and the end of an era, seeing as the couple was among the first to colonize what is now a hot restaurant strip. Now they’re turning their attention to places as close as Rosedale and as far away as Alsace. Anywhere, they say, but King West.
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