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Sure, the fact that Bell Canada and Rogers have teamed up to purchase Maple Leafs Sports and Entertainment is old news now, but the full implications of the deal remain to be seen. For our part, we’re wondering if the Toronto Maple Leafs will be slapped with absurd roaming charges on the road, or whether fans will have to purchase beer by following a series of annoying prompts on their cellphones. Of course, there’s also the tricky matter of whether or not the $1.32-billion purchase will turn out to be a good thing or a bad thing for Toronto sports teams—and, by extension, their fans—when it comes to the business of winning and losing. We round up what the city’s sportswriter corps is saying on the matter, after the jump.
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Reaction roundup: What the city’s sports (and business) writers are saying about the MLSE deal
Destination Munkistan: A look at Peter Munk’s new Adriatic playground for the super-rich
The latest project of the gold magnate Peter Munk is a seaside resort and tax haven for fellow billionaires in the post-Soviet backwater of Tivat, Montenegro. A delirious tour of a world of champagne-drenched parties, supersize yachts and the recession-proof Ultra-High Net Worth Individual

Captain Fantastic: Peter Munk on his 40-metre yacht, the Golden Eagle, which has a full-time staff of five. (Image: Jim Ross)
There are birthday parties, and then there was Nathaniel Rothschild’s party this past July. The financier, scion of the prominent banking family and future baron was turning 40 and spent £1 million on the weekend-long extravaganza. The venue: Porto Montenegro, a newly developed luxury resort and marina in the Montenegrin coastal town of Tivat, on the southeast side of the Adriatic Sea. It was the sort of gathering that marks the end of an era or the birth of an empire—and in a way, for Europe’s youngest and smallest democracy, it was both.
Four hundred guests arrived at the village airport on private jets or stepped off the fleet of super-yachts that washed ashore from the world’s most glamorous tax havens—the Grenadines, Gibraltar, Grand Cayman. The attendees were described in the Guardian society pages as “200 ugly rich people and their poorer but more attractive partners,” or, as one guest more generously put it, “plutocrats and the women who love them.” A number of the partiers were so fantastically rich they could bankroll whole armies (which the birthday boy’s family, in its heyday, once did): Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska (who arrived on his £70-million yacht, the Queen K); the wealthy Egyptian Sawiris family (who have embarked on their own Montenegrin development nearby); King Leruo Molotlegi, ruler of a tiny, platinum-rich part of South Africa, who hit the dance floor in a fabulous dashiki; British politician Lord Peter Mandelson; Jimmy Choo honcho Tamara Mellon; the historian Niall Ferguson and his Dutch-Somali partner, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a feminist critic of Islam. There was a healthy smattering of European royalty, as well as members of the Guinness and Goldsmith clans.
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Meet five Bay Street escapees who left six-figure jobs to work for themselves
They left six-figure corporate jobs for the queasy uncertainty of self-employment. Tales of emptied bank accounts and the elusive but oh-so-sweet gratification of running your own shop
The Candy Man
Tim English, 46
Then: Bay Street lawyer
Now: owner of Chocolateria
I started my Bay Street career as a labour and employment lawyer at Filion Wakele Thorup Angeletti in 1991. Then I moved to Ontario Power Generation for eight years, and after that to Direct Energy for about a year and a half. I had a high salary, about $250,000, and was on the cusp of moving up into the executive ranks, but in the back of my head, I’d always wanted to run my own business and work for myself. In the summer of 2009, when I turned 45, I decided it was time.
My first step was to study every shopping district in the city, to figure out what kind of business appealed to me and which neighbourhood was booming. I realized chocolate is really hot right now. I had taken baking classes at George Brown College for fun and enjoyed it. So I set up a production kitchen in my house and rented a candy kiosk at the Downsview farmers’ market for three months last summer. I wouldn’t call it a hugely successful apprenticeship: the chocolate melted in the summer heat, and I ended up giving most of it away. Also, Downsview doesn’t attract a demographic that buys quality chocolate and pastries. Read the rest of this entry »
Good Stuff Cheap: Three unbeatable go-to spots for home improvement

Addison's (Image: Lorne Bridgman)
BATHROOMS
Addison’s
See it on Castlefield Avenue, buy it at Addison’s. The rambling, one-of-a-kind decor mecca is outstanding for bathroom, heating and plumbing goods. Among the vintage gems: deco-ish repro faucets, antique claw-foot tubs and pedestal sinks (each from $200), replacement toilet-tank lids ($25–$40), chrome towel bars (from $25) and cast iron hot water radiators ($100 and up).
41 Wabash Ave., 416-539-0612.
LIGHTING
Paul Wolf Lighting and Electric Supply
Beat big-box prices at Paul Wolf, home to all-hours service and hundreds of light fixtures, bulbs, dimmers and switches. Call the shop’s 24-hour emergency number if your lights fizzle, and they’ll get you what you need.
555 Eastern Ave., 416-466-9957; 425 Alliance Ave., 416‑504-8194.
FRAMING Read the rest of this entry »
Victor Gallery
Find rows of solid ash or basswood frames and shadow boxes in black, white and brown stains, as well as hard-to-find dimensions, with nothing over $120. In the rare event that you can’t find a size, a member
of the Mitic family (the owners) will customize a piece in a week.
636 Queen St. W., 416‑504-1659.
Introducing: Aravind, an authentic south Indian restaurant in Greektown

Ontario meets the subcontinent: a local fish wrapped in a banana leaf (Image: Jon Sufrin)
Set in the midst of gyro-heavy Greektown, new Indian restaurant Aravind is something of an anomaly. It stands out by serving Keralan and southern cuisine (the curry-and-cream dishes of northern India are way more common downtown) and for utilizing Ontario-sourced ingredients when possible. Aravind, which opened last month, is not a bargain joint by any means—mains here range from $14 to $21—but owners hope the local ingredients, dedication to service and the concise, VQA-heavy wine list make up for it.
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Introducing: The Abbott, yet another coffee shop in Parkdale
“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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Rogers might buy MLSE, somehow make Leafs fans even more depressed
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The blockbuster news of the morning, broken by the Toronto Star, is that telecom goliath Rogers is looking to buy a majority share of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment for more than $1 billion. The deal would give Rogers control over the Leafs, the Marlies, the Raptors and Toronto FC, as well as MLSE’s TV channels. This is the rare kind of business deal that alters pieces of the city’s DNA—hockey and the Rogers clan—and would effectively unite the means of communication with the very things we communicate about. It would also allow Rogers to come close to cornering the market on pro sports in this town (it owns the Blue Jays, but not the Argos).
Salad King coronation pushed back to January; Ryerson students still hungry

Crumbling empire: Salad King's old location on Gould Street suffers from partial wallessness (Image: Matthew Fox)
Hungry Ryerson students are going to have to suffer through yet another exam period without the aid of cheap yet nourishing Thai. Salad King, that improbably tasty staple of downtown cheap eats, won’t be reopening until at least the end of January 2011, according to a thorough report by the intrepid SK watchers at Torontoist. It seems owner Ernest Liu had underestimated the amount of time it would take to convert the sports bar above the Foot Locker across the street into a new palace of stainless steel and satay.
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Toronto’s best Korean food: Chris Nuttall-Smith makes his picks
Move over, sushi. Now there’s something sexier. The new Korean cuisine is exciting, modern and worth crossing town for

The seafood stew at Tofu Village (Image: Ryan Szulc)
National cuisines, like drunk-driving starlets, get the reputations they deserve. Korean food—dependably rough-edged, cheap and fiery in Toronto’s first-wave Korean restaurants—has suffered a serious perception problem since it first appeared near Christie Pits in the early 1970s. Korean expats ate Korean food. Starving, steel-gutted U of T students ate Korean food. The rest of humanity got along quite happily without it.
That started to change about 10 years ago, when South Korea launched a sustained and successful campaign to become a major cultural exporter. What began with film and TV—including several food-obsessed soap operas that drew massive audiences across Asia—soon trickled down to dinner, and as a new, more cosmopolitan generation of Korean chefs began to refine the cuisine, the gastro-weenies of the world took notice. In London, Korean went high-end, and in New York, David Chang, of Momofuku fame, created a hybrid Korean–French–Southeast Asian style that has become one of the most influential forces in the business. Over the past few years, this culinary renaissance set down in Toronto, too, hidden—or hidden to non-Koreans, at least—in plain sight between the all-you-can-eat bulgogi joints and bibimbap houses where serious foodies would never have dared to dine. Read the rest of this entry »



With new indie cafés opening in Toronto every month, it takes a lot of gumption to jump into the fray—especially if the new spot is located between java havens
There’s more to making good espresso than having really cool gadgets. That’s why Patrick Tu—who opened Thor Espresso Bar on Wednesday with his partner Tom Junek—is pretty excited that the company roasting his beans is Richmond Hill’s 
From the outside, there’s been little more inherently confusing, even 
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