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Get those dialing digits ready: Toronto Special Events has just announced the slate of restaurants for Winterlicious 2012. The prix fixe extravaganza has now reached its 10th year, and it’s come such a long way from the winter pick-me-up for 36 Toronto restaurants hoping to draw people out of their homes and into the cold night. This year, 175 restaurants have signed up—up from last year’s 150—and prices have stayed the same: lunch menus will go for $15, $20 or $25, and dinner menus for $25, $35 or $45 (see charts below for a breakdown). The madness kicks off on January 10, when American Express cardholders can start making their reservations. The lines open up to the plebs on January 12, and the menus themselves will be served from January 27 to February 9. Tickets for the associated culinary events—like a meal devoted to sustainable fish or a beer-pairing primer—go on sale tomorrow. Check out the city’s website for the full roster of participating restaurants and stay tuned for our comprehensive guide early in the new year. In the meantime, here’s a pair of pie charts with breakdowns of how many restaurants are participating at the various price points at lunch and dinner (yes, they’re very similar):
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50 Reasons to Love Toronto: No. 28, Sweetbreads are the new chicken nuggets
The prosciutto-wrapped offal at Buca. (Image: Angus Fergusson)
When nose-to-tail restaurants like Cowbell and the Black Hoof started serving offal a few years back, diners debated the adventurous menus with the giddy trepidation of children about to play a game of truth or dare (“I’ll get the tongue sandwich, if you go for the pig’s tail”). Since then, entrails, organs, faces and feet have become requisite on the city’s best menus, emboldening our tastes and turning out a new breed of grown-up diner. Without a moment of misgiving, we’ll order prosciutto-wrapped lamb’s brain at Buca, slurp marrow out of a calf’s shank at Fabbrica, dip fritters in tripe ragù at Enoteca Sociale and top our crostini with tongue-to-tail duck rillette at Canoe. Our appetite has even surpassed the need for exotic-sounding names to mask the offal truth—the more brazen the dish, the better, like Parts and Labour’s pig platter, which brings sweetbreads, belly, foie gras and ear in trotter sauce. Yes, in 2011, there’s no half-assing our commitment to the flesh.
The sipper club: meet the city’s competitive cabal of top sommeliers
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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Seven-year itch: the Drake Hotel announces plans for expansion
The Drake Hotel (Image: Amber Dawn Pullen)
Since the day its current incarnation opened—Valentine’s Day, 2004—the Drake Hotel has been the restless centre of West Queen West. Unable to remain contained in its original building, the self-proclaimed “hotbed for culture” spread east, spawning a retail shop and barbecue joint. And now, as part of its seventh anniversary celebration, the Drake has announced that it will be expanding yet again. The plan is to provide additional rooms, new menu items, and enhanced performance and exhibit spaces for artists.
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Modern comforts: Chris Nuttall-Smith takes on Woodlot and Ici Bistro
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 »
12 best bets for Winterlicious 2011: our chief critic goes through the menus so you don’t have to
A steak dinner at Noce (Image: Renée Suen)
Big-spending downtown Torontonians have taken in the past few years to whining about Winterlicious, but the two-week dining festival, running from January 28 through February 10, remains popular for a reason: it offers great value, particularly if you choose your reservations well. Here are a dozen of Toronto Life’s best bets. They’re older, more established places, generally, with kitchens that clearly care. And though we haven’t yet tasted the restaurants’ 2011 Winterlicious menus, they’re full of interesting, delicious-sounding picks.
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The Winterlicious 2011 menus are out, so let’s compare them to previous years
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By now, Torontonians are well-seasoned winterliciousers—and at Winterlicious 2011, we will be deftly dodging the wilted arugula and heading straight for the belly of the beast (preferably pork). Looking through the newly published list of restaurants and menus, there is plenty to be pleased about this January. Our popular “Best of Winterlicious” piece is coming out next week, but we thought we’d get a jump on things and take a look at how this year’s roster compares with last year’s ’Licous lists.
Introducing: Kenzo Ramen, the newest contender in the Annex Japanese restaurant wars
The King of Kings is a spicy bowl of pork and ramen (Image: Gizelle Lau)
Does the Annex really need another budget-friendly Japanese restaurant? After all, the strip of Bloor Street is flooded with dozens of spots serving up cheap options for students: $4 all-day breakfasts at Futures Bakery, $6 lunch specials at Sushi on Bloor, pad Thai at Thai Basil… The list goes on.
We say yes, yes it does, and you can forget the 50-plus-item menus, cream cheese maki rolls and mediocre miso soups that characterize the neighbourhood’s dining options. At Kenzo Ramen, owners Daniel and Rose Park (she’s the chef) are perfecting authentic Japanese ramen, a skill that Rose learned in Hokkaido under one of the city’s best-known ramen chefs. It’s their second location; the first is at Dundas and Bay. Unlike most frozen and restaurant ramen, Kenzo uses homemade ingredients and no MSG; Daniel’s allergic—and besides, as he says, “It’s not good for you.”
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New menu at Caplansky’s nods to vegetarians
The leaning tower of Caplansky (Image: Jon Sufrin)
The “leaning tower of Caplansky” has been selling like a pile of hotcakes. Or, rather, a pile of challah French toast stacked three high and layered with cream cheese, blueberry jam and bacon (beef bacon, natch). The tower joins maple-dipped fried chicken, gefilte fish and a slew of veggie options to make up the new menu at Caplansky’s Delicatessen.
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Dineline wants to revolutionize how we eat out, but can it?
The premise behind the new bargain-hunting Web site Dineline.ca is an interesting one: rather than simply offering notifications on sales and specials at restaurants, its focus is on “off-the-cuff” or one-time deals. The idea is to help famished deal seekers spot resto bargains in real time. A restaurant happens to be in possession of food that could go bad unless cooked immediately? Dineline is there, ideally offering it up for a greatly reduced price. A restaurant wants to spice up an unusually slow day by offering an impromptu sale. Dineline is there, too.
Basically, this is Priceline for food. But does it work?
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Introducing: Blake House, Jarvis Street’s new Canadian pub
The Blake House (Image: Jon Sufrin)
Before the Blake House was the Blake House, it was the Red Lion, a storied old-school British pub. These days, it’s more of an old-school Canadian pub: local beer, poutine, VQA wines and vintage photos of posh, turn-of-the-century Jarvis Street. Co-owner Jim Vasilakakos, who quietly opened the venue over the summer, loves the road out front. “Did you know Jarvis was the first paved street in Toronto?” he asks. It’s one of the facts he picked up during the two weeks he spent at the Toronto archives, where the self-proclaimed history buff thoroughly educated himself about the site of his new pub and sourced images to decorate it.
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Introducing: Fabbrica. Take a tour of Mark McEwan’s new Italian restaurant
The chef poses in front of his new pizza oven (Images: Karon Liu)
“Would you like to try a pizza?” asks chef Mark McEwan as he stands in front of the wood-burning oven at his newest restaurant, Fabbrica, located in the suburban Shops at Don Mills. “It’ll only take 90 seconds, and we can eat it at the bar.” Never mind that he’s expecting dozens of guests for a preview dinner or that he also has to head downtown in an hour or two to do his second book signing this week; McEwan sits down and shares a salsiccia pizza (lamb sausage, caramelized fennel, mozzarella) with us like it was a lazy Sunday afternoon.
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Introducing: Bar Salumi, an aperitif bar by the owners of Local Kitchen
The interior of Bar Salumi. Volano meat slicer located near bottom left (Images: Jon Sufrin)
Inside Queen West’s new Bar Salumi—under hanging Berkshire prosciutto, garlands of hot peppers and a wild boar’s head—sits the Ferrari of all meat slicers: a Volano. In the hands of the right operator, the apparatus is supposed to make a perfect slice every time. Michael Sangregorio and Fabio Bondi, Bar Salumi’s owners, are hoping to become such operators. “It’s the most expensive thing in the entire bar,” says Sangregorio, who likens it to a Swiss watch. Bondi admits they’re trying to figure out how to use it to its full potential.
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Toronto’s 13 new cafés: board games, Bohème and a resurrected waffle house
(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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