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Leslieville’s recent boom in new gourmet food stores—including Foodist Market, Hooked and Sausage Partners—shows no signs of abating. The latest addition? Olive and Olives, the first Toronto location of the Montreal-based purveyor of high-quality olive oils. Danièle Beauchamp and Claudia Pharand, who run five shops and a thriving mail order business in Quebec, have partnered with Torontonian Mia Sturup to open up the Leslieville location.
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The Sausage Partners: Lorraine, Lilly and Kyle Deming (Image: Signe Langford)
First there was the Leslieville Cheese Market, then the Foodist Market, then Hooked, and now Sausage Partners. Leslieville is rapidly becoming the east end’s go-to ’hood for gourmet food shopping, and with many of these places being run by pro chefs, it’s easy to see why. This new meat shop will open in June in the former Inspired Cook space, with Kyle Deming (head chef at Starfish and Ceili Cottage) and his wife Lorraine at the helm. “We’ve been thinking about doing this for a long time,” explains Lorraine, “but we really got the push about two years ago when we made sausages for Patrick [McMurray]’s 40th birthday. Everyone was asking, ‘Where can we buy these?’ So we just kept thinking about it and it feels like the right time now.”
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Downtown Mississauga as seen from Square One (Image: Ian Muttoo)
As Mississauga continues to deal with having few spaces left to develop, we’ve been fascinated to see how the politics of the city would change to accommodate a new reality of rising taxes, more demand for transit services, and questions of how to develop remaining land. The latest revelation is that the city council voted to freeze development in the downtown core, because too many parking-intense big-box stores were on their way.
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(Image: Signe Langford)
The Foodist Market, a new small grocery shop in Leslieville, has only been open for a few days, so it’s no surprise that many of the deep, white shelves lining the walls of this former juice bar are still bare. The shop should be fully stocked in a matter of days, but until then there are still plenty of organic goodies in store to draw the locals. Standouts include over-the-top rich and porky lonza (cured pork loin), pancetta and capicollo from Niagara Food Specialties, cheeses from Monforte, breads from nearby St. John’s Bakery, salsas and chips from Toronto’s Mad Mexican and, of course, locally grown veggies, eggs and meats. Despite these, the focus here is on organic first, local second.
Middle-class life isn’t what it used to be. Thanks to a heated real estate market, a strong dollar, new taxes and stagnating incomes, Toronto has become, improbably, one of the world’s most expensive cities. Is it worth it?
(Illustration by Julien Pacaud; skyline photo by Brian Summers)
Today, an average Saturday, I spent the following: $6 on a round-trip TTC ride; about $17 on groceries from the Wychwood Barns farmers’ market (organic Crispin apples, an olive boule and free-range eggs); $34 on two bottles of wine (one decent, one plonk); almost $20 on the recent Superchunk CD and $11 on toiletries. Lunch was cheap and simple: a peanut butter sandwich, an apple and a few spoonfuls of raspberry yogurt. Dinner was free: homemade rice-and-bean burritos at a friend’s house. On the way home from that modest dinner party, waiting forever for the Dufferin bus, I almost splurged on a cab, but it seemed wasteful. Then I got home and booked a flight to New York on Porter for a friend’s 40th birthday: another $326. There’s also what I spend on my mortgage, property taxes, insurance, utilities, cellphone, Internet, YMCA membership, charitable donations and credit card debt. All of that adds up to roughly $65 a day. So, as a childless, home-owning, not-terribly-extravagant-but-not-entirely-miserly-either Torontonian, this one day at the tail end of 2010 cost me—not counting the airfare, which, for argument’s sake, I’m setting aside as an exceptional expense—about $153.
That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it’s about $20 more than what I make every day, after taxes. And it leaves nothing, obviously, for home repairs, clothing, vet bills, investments, medical expenses, birthday presents, savings, recreational drugs, holidays or the kid that Liz, my fiancée, and I have been talking about having this year but which, if things continue in this fashion, we’ll have to postpone having until we get jobs that net us more than $50,000 each a year. Read the rest of this entry »
(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).
AMERICAN APPAREL
Print out this flyer and get 20 per cent off your purchase. Until Nov. 14. Various GTA locations.
ESPRIT
At this warehouse sale, clothing and accessories for men and women are up to 80 per cent off regular price. View the sales flyer here. Nov. 24, 6–9 p.m.; Nov. 25 and 26, 9–9; Nov. 27 and 28, 9–6. Queen Elizabeth Building, 190 Princes Blvd.
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The venerable Toronto eyewear chain is holding its annual sale, with up to 70 per cent off frames. Until Nov. 30. 60 Bloor St. W., 416-964-7070, plus five other GTA locations.
(Image: one2c900d)
These days, the arrival of a new indie café on Queen West or in Leslieville is about as novel as a Gap opening in a mall, which is why we’re pleased to inform readers that the newest coffee houses in town aren’t located in hipster hubs. Since our last café census in March, we count a total of 13 new spots for Hogtown’s java lovers.
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Toronto offers so many engaging activities for a Sunday night in the summer. A person can go to the CNE, walk along the lake shore or even just have a quiet night in. Or, a group of religious people could get together outside a same-sex couple’s home and pray for their salvation. Of course, this provides other opportunities, like chasing the aforementioned church folk off the street in a scene that just needs some pitchforks and torches to be complete. Finally, we all get to watch it on YouTube for days of entertainment. Thanks, Internet, and thanks, Toronto.
• Let Us Prey [Torontoist]
• Church group protest in front of couple’s house? [The Leslieviller]
Say “hello” to one of the city’s best bakeries, which also happens to serve a pretty fantastic lunch.
The place: The best French bakery west of Leslieville is as famous for its pastries as it is for its weekend brunch (and lineups), but on a weekday afternoon, we’re seated in no time on the cozy, shaded patio. The small interior, cluttered with baker’s racks, is charmingly no frills.
The crowd: From Riverdale families to work-at-home freelancers to shoppers taking a break from antiquing, everyone on this sunny Wednesday seems to be moving at a languid, mid-summer pace.
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Ossington’s nightlife is alive and well, but the strip can be quite dead in daylight hours—there’s I Deal Coffee and, well, not much else. Perhaps that’s why Crafted by Te Aro is full of coffee drinkers and laptops, despite the fact that it’s been open for only a week. The café is essentially Te Aro’s second outpost, allowing people in the west end to experience what made its Leslieville counterpart so popular: coffee made from beans roasted on the premises, classes on how to make a better cup, and a quiet, relaxed atmosphere in which customers don’t have to shout their order to the barista. It even has a glass garage door similar to the other shop’s, though co-owners Jessie and Andy Wilkin says it was a necessity—the window was about to fall out when they took over the space from the Get Real! Café two months ago.
The space was designed by Yabu Pushelberg (Image: Avenue Road)
The place: For the Avenue Road team, 415 Eastern Avenue was a worthy fixer-upper. The store’s previous showroom—a go-to spot for contemporary designer furniture—was in the area on Booth Street but was too small to properly display all the lines it carried. The new three-level space was formerly a Consumers Gas Company warehouse and most recently housed the printing facilities of the World Journal, a Chinese-language daily. After a year and a half of renovations (it opened in June), the soaring ceilings, concrete floors and painted brick are a tribute to its history.
The stuff: All the mainstays from the previous store are still here: the curving sofas from Yabu Pushelberg, a classic armchair from Brazilian designer Jorge Zalszupin, Piero Lissoni’s glass tables from Italy, along with a new area on the upper floor to use as a gallery or display space for seasonal items—outdoor furniture currently occupies the space.
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No neighbourhood will react the same way to a burst bubble. We talked to market watchers, economists, mortgage brokers and seen-it-all real estate agents for the scoop on where to park your money, what streets to avoid and when to sell, sell, sell
It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Our recovery from the Great Recession happened faster than expected, we got in the mood to buy again, and the housing market spontaneously returned to bidding wars and double-digit gains. Experts say we’re in a bubble that’s ready to pop. The question is, how bad will it be?
Christopher Wahl
We’ve seen bubbles before. The last time the market went pffft was in the spring of ’89. The country entered a deep recession, mortgage rates hit 13.5 per cent, and the market was glutted with condos that speculators couldn’t off-load. Over the next seven years, the price of resale houses downtown dropped by 28 per cent. Owning a house was a burden.
The birth of the current bubble-like conditions can be traced back to 2008, when we smugly discovered our market was safe from the financial evils that led to the housing collapse in the U.S. We were intoxicated by good news: speculative investing was comfortingly low, our interest rates dreamy. Neighbourhoods like Parkdale, the Junction and Leslieville were lusted after by young couples and families in want of $400,000 fixer-uppers. The upwardly mobile had ballooning debt and stars in their eyes. Among the singles flooding into sparkling new condominiums were women in their mid-20s to late 30s, a boom demographic. One industry source estimated that they represented 40 per cent of the market, significantly higher than a decade before.
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HOW DID WE DO IT? While the Great Recession battered other cities, Toronto has emerged triumphant—Bay Street is bullish, our real estate market is hot, and the streets are sparkling for this month’s G20. Yes, our success has a lot to do with our stingy financial system, but it’s also because smart, interesting people move here every day, attracted to a city that’s challenging and gritty and exciting and indulgent (we have a restaurant dedicated entirely to grilled cheese sandwiches, Reason No. 2). If Torontonians have one shared flaw, it’s that we’re pathologically reluctant to acknowledge our greatness. Now, more than ever, we have reasons to brag
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