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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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A gravy boat around City Hall
Who’s the awesomest of them all? According to the Toronto branch of the Awesome Foundation, it’s Stephanie Avery, who was named the recipient of its first grant last night. A self-described “totally rad” artist, Avery was awarded $1,000 for her Connect the T-Dots pitch, a project that aims to turn aerial satellite views of Toronto into a giant connect-the-dots number puzzle.
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Two neighbourhood restaurants serve up light-handed renditions of our rib-sticking favourites
(Image: Vanessa Heins)
The comfort food revolution has brought us much to be thankful for, including cheaper, more casual restaurants, and the glories of deep-fried mac-and-cheese, but it hasn’t exactly delivered a surge of culinary innovation. Spurred on by a sputtering economy, the comfort trend spawned a wave of barbecue joints, gourmet burger shops, neighbourhood pubs and by-the-book bistros, and it introduced childhood-evoking staples like cookies and milk to scores of restaurant menus where the “licorice root, three ways” used to be. It offered certainty when everything else around us seemed ready to collapse, not only for diners but for restaurateurs, too.
Comfort eating, like love and psychotherapy, is driven by equal measures of longing (for simpler times) and industrial-grade denial (s’mores are less fattening when they’re made with single-estate chocolate from São Tomé), powerful motivators both. So most chefs have been happy to feed our cravings without letting their own high-minded notions get in the way. Read the rest of this entry »
The place: Arabesque Café in Little Italy. The people: writer Claudia Dey and biologist Bridget Stutchbury. The subject: the sex lives of creatures great and small
What do our courtship rituals have in common with the mating habits of birds? Quite a bit, as it turns out. Take, for instance, the fact that male birds are expected to sing and strut for the females in their lives, or that lady birds have a thing for older feathered fellows. These tidbits, plus dramatic tales of avian betrayal, are unveiled in The Bird Detective: Investigating the Secret Lives of Birds, the second book by the biologist and York University prof Bridget Stutchbury (seated on the left). Claudia Dey, a novelist, playwright and former Globe and Mail relationship columnist, is equally adept at discussing the birds and the bees, though her oeuvre is restricted to the human realm. Her new self-help manual, How to Be a Bush Pilot: A Field Guide to Getting Luckier, gives would-be Casanovas the what’s-what on everything from the female anatomy to how to talk dirty in a way that will turn women on, not off. We introduced them, bought them a cup of tea and listened in. Read the rest of this entry »
(Image: Incase.)
Dear Urban Diplomat, Read the rest of this entry »
I was cycling behind a father with a toddler in a rear bike seat, and he was weaving in and out of traffic, and even ran a red light. I was so angry that when I caught up to him at an intersection, I lit into him. He told me to mind my own business and sped off. I obviously didn’t get through to him. What should I have done?
—Good intentions, bad temper,
LITTLE ITALY
Religious burgers, heavenly house-made bread and a world-class oenophile
(Image: Ryan Szulc)
THE BURGER’S PRIEST 
1636 Queen St. E., 647-346-0617
The battle for the city’s best burger just got more heated. The loosely packed, hand-formed, cooked-to-medium patties at this tiny Catholic-kitsch place have a legitimate claim. They’re gloriously simple: Alberta beef that’s ground in-house a few times a day, plus exquisitely insubstantial buns that can be accessorized in any of the old-school ways. (If you want caramelized passion fruit, you’d best look at a heathen establishment.) The Option, made from two roasted portobello caps sandwiching a mix of cheeses, rolled in panko and deep-fried, is the city’s first joyful veggie burger. The Pope is a double cheeseburger, plus The Option, all on a single bun. (It’s also a death wish, in case you were wondering.) As for the name, the proprietor, a former seminary student, claims to be “redeeming the burger one customer at a time.” He’s even installed confessional privacy screens in place of sneeze guards. Cheesy, yes. But that’s the point. Unlicensed. Cash only. Closed Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »
Why Doug Saunders, a foreign correspondent for the Globe and Mail, could have called his new book The Torontoification of the World
(Image: Jonathan Worth)
The title of your new book, Arrival City, refers to the urban neighbourhoods that poor villagers settle in when they immigrate. You’ve said that the book might’ve been called The Torontoification of the World. Why is that? Anyone who lives in Little Italy, Kensington Market or at Broadview and Gerrard knows that most immigrants are from villages, not big cities, and they’re not living as villagers here, but they’re not living as core Torontonians, either. They’re creating a culture that keeps one hand in the village and one hand in the city, while trying to raise the standards of their kids. This has been happening in Toronto for some time; now it’s happening all over the world.
That dual way of life can result in culture clashes, like the riots that occurred in the Paris suburbs back in 2005, but Toronto hasn’t experienced that kind of violence. What are we doing right? We’re giving people on the fringes physical access to the city via public transit, it’s relatively easy for newcomers to borrow money and start businesses, they have access to real and de facto citizenship, and, for the most part, they’re not treated like alien outsiders on the job market. That said, we need to do better on all those counts. Until now, we’ve been lucky. Flemingdon Park could become Clichy-Sous-Bois if Toronto doesn’t put some money and effort into it.
This urban oasis near U of T nails the ’50s nostalgia and the chicken sandwich
This Little Italy sandwich shop sets a new standard for Toronto panino makers
She wanted to buy in Rosedale. He didn’t. After an epic 10-month, 140-house search, they settled on a fixer-upper in the Annex
The buyers
Matt Killen, a painter and high school art teacher, and Joanna Foster, a photographer, couldn’t agree on where to live. They had been renting an apartment north of Liberty Village, as well as an art studio on Ossington, but wanted a place large enough for an in-house studio. Killen suggested Little Italy, Seaton Village and Riverdale, all of which Foster nixed. She wanted Rosedale, the neighbourhood where she’d gone to school. “I pictured us in a house on a lush, tree-lined street safe for kids,” she says. They finally agreed on the Annex, which felt urban and central to Killen, yet cozy enough for Foster.
The criteria
Three bedrooms, close to transit, with a rental unit. They preferred an older Victorian home, and it had to be north of Bloor, east
of Bathurst and west of Yonge.
The budget Read the rest of this entry »
$550,000–$700,000.
Rumours of College Street’s death have been greatly exaggerated. Just when it seemed like the west-end strip was hopelessly cluttered with mediocre Italian trattorias, generic pan-Asian takeouts and busloads of barely legals from the burbs, along came a few culinary jewels: Sidecar, Negroni, Grace, Cinq 01 and now LAB.
“I liked the vibrancy of the neighbourhood, and being about 90 per cent Italian, I thought it could use something different,” says co-chef and owner Howard Dubrovsky. Once located (there’s no signage yet), the two-week old boîte proves to be a welcoming setting with a soundtrack of indie and down-tempo electro more common to Queen West than College. Formerly Bite Noodles and Rice, the 32-seat room feels like a collision of urban street and Victorian apothecary, with graffiti tags by artist Darcy Obokata, exposed brick, rustic wood and sleek black granite.
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(Image: Karon Liu)
Yorkville’s own little Little Italy—that block of Avenue Road where Sotto Sotto and L’Unità have stood these past few years—just got an added taste of the home country. Malena opened last week, setting itself apart from its neighbours with a focus on seafood from the Ionian Sea. “We believe that the more restaurants the better. The more people it brings in the better,” says co-owner David Minicucci, who is also a co-owner of L’Unità. “They might come here one night, see Sotto Sotto next door and decide to go there next time. We’re all friends here.”
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(Image: chelseagirl)
By our count, a whopping 22 new indie cafés opened in Toronto in 2009, but it looks like 2010 will be giving the java scene an even bigger jolt. In the four months since our last roundup, 11 new coffee houses have sprung up, and three more are on the way. Below, a list of the latest indie coffee vendors, from Little Italy to Gerrard Street East.
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Cinq 01: Take the boy out of Yorkville, but not Yorkville out of the boy (Photo by Karon Liu)
After finding success among the socialites with Yorkville’s Amber, nightclub king Toufik Sarwa opened Cinq 01 to create a more grown-up venture—a place where the emphasis is on the food rather than the guest list. But no such luck. Since the spot opened last fall, it has been increasingly packed with the well heeled, making this the first time since the ’90s that the glitterati are partying on College Street (and this time, they’re not slumming it).
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(Photo by Travis Crawford)
• TasteTO has scoured Little Italy and a few other neighbourhoods to find cannoli that best Café Diplomatico’s. The results are inconclusive, with the Dip part of a three-way stalemate in cannoli quality, along with Riviera and Caldense Bakery. Perhaps the most shocking part of the article is that eating cannoli for a living is not all it’s cracked up to be. [TasteTO]
• Kraft Foods has retaliated against Stephen Colbert’s recent bashing of one of its products by running with the gag. Miracle Whip told the TV host in a newspaper ad, “We will own you,” and proceeded to buy four commercial spots on Thursday’s show. The ads consisted of the same footage parodied by Colbert on his show. Hey, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. [Chicago Tribune]
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