ADDRESS: 138 Bedford Road

NEIGHBOURHOOD: The Annex

AGENT: Barry Smith, Chestnut Park Real Estate Limited, Brokerage

PRICE: $4,450,000

THE PLACE: Bringing a little of the 8th Arrondissement to the heart of the Annex, this Parisian-inspired townhome embodies European luxury with inlaid-pattern marble floors, traditional custom millwork, plaster cornice mouldings and fireplaces in nearly every principal room (many of them are even wood-burning).

BRAGGING RIGHTS: In the early 1900s, the property is rumoured to have been home to Robert Ernest Augustus Land, leader of the Toronto branch of the Knights of St. John and Malta (now defunct) and later president of the Laura Secord National Monument Committee, which often met at this address.

BIG SELLING POINT: The home underwent a major overhaul in 1991. Now, the generous 5,000-plus square feet of space—which includes five bedrooms (all with ensuite bathrooms) and communal living areas on two floors—emphasizes quality craftsmanship and exquisite attention to detail.

POSSIBLE DEAL BREAKER: Those with a green thumb may be disappointed by the lack of a backyard or front gardens, but in a city where parking is at a premium, the garage and brick motor court (with room for six cars) may not be such a bad thing.

BY THE NUMBERS:
• $4,450,000
• $17,918.05 in property taxes (2011)
• 5,000+ square feet
• 7 bathrooms
• 5 bedrooms
• 6 car parking (two-car garage)
• 5 fireplaces
• 3 skylights
• 1 wine cellar
• 1 “tree-like” chandelier

Albert Latner made his fortune in real estate, health care and casinos, and lavished his four children with riches. After his wife died, he gave them their inheritance early. Now they’re feuding over the estate, launching lawsuit after lawsuit and tearing the family apart. A cautionary tale about the burdens of love and money
By Leah McLaren

In February 2010, Joshua Latner was alerted by several friends about a photo posted on the Internet. He sat down at his computer, Googled himself and was disturbed to find his picture with the word “loser” scrawled across his face.

Joshua is not, and has never been, a man with a nine-to-five job. An enthusiastic collector of fine wines and rare antiques, he is 49 years old and lives in Zurich with his wife, Kendal, and their two young children. He also maintains residences in Toronto, Key Biscayne and Tokyo and on the Greek island of Mykonos, where he raises chickens and honeybees as a hobby. He inherited $150 million when his father, Albert Latner, a Toronto property developer and entrepreneur, decided to give each of his four children what’s known in high-net-worth circles as the velvet handshake—shorthand for early inheritance.

Joshua had his suspicions about who posted the photo. His lawyers obtained a court order to uncover the Internet service provider, which turned out to be Rogers. The communications giant was compelled, in turn, to produce the name of the subscriber. It was Steven Latner, Joshua’s older brother and former business partner.

Although the photo soon disappeared from the Internet, Joshua was not willing to let the matter drop. Like the rest of his family, he knows how to use lawyers to inflict pain and make a point. He launched a defamation suit against an as yet unidentified person, and had his lawyers bring a motion to examine his brother to discover if he was the perpetrator. Steven’s lawyer, Ronald Moldaver, contested the motion on the grounds that his client has approximately five computers in his house and other members of the family and house staff all had access to them.

The presiding judge, Joan Haberman, wasn’t buying it. She ordered Steven to submit to a 90-minute cross-examination. Moldaver, without success, had asked the judge to recuse herself from the case, on the grounds that she had presided over another Latner vs. Latner case earlier that year. In that previous instance, Haberman had described the Latners as “extremely litigious” and expressed her disappointment that such an affluent family could not find better ways to spend their money. “Litigation is not a sport,” she said, “and should never be treated as such.”

For the super rich, the civil court system offers the promise of a place where feuds and rivalries can be redressed and sorted out by justice professionals. The Latners’ fight is one that takes place in the tender spot in all families, where love and money intersect. It’s the story about what a once-humble family can lose in the process of becoming great.

The Latner name is more established in Ontario than those of many of the old WASP families of Rosedale. The family first came to Canada in the late 1800s, emigrating from eastern Europe. Albert was born in Hamilton in 1927 and later moved with his parents to Toronto, where they lived in a house on Major Street, near Kensington Market, then the city’s thriving Jewish enclave. Albert’s dad worked at Tip Top Tailors, and the family got by, but just.

Continue reading this story »

Bixi bikes in Toronto (Image: Gary J. Wood)

Ever since its inception in Toronto in early May, the Bixi bike-sharing rental program has been a hit, growing from 700 trips in its first week to more than 28,000 trips a week by the end of the same month. The obvious question is what to do now. The Toronto Cyclists Union says the next step is to add more bikes (no surprise there) despite the fact that Bixi is underused by the standards of, say, Paris, where the Velib “freedom bike” program racked up roughly six rides per day in its first month back in 2007.

According to the Toronto Star:

The cyclists union is praising the 73,000 rides taken by users of Toronto’s fledgling program from its start on May 3rd through to June 19th. Toronto has 1,000 bikes on the road.

That translates to under two rides per day per bike — far lower than some other bike-share projects. But it’s still early days, and [Jared] Kolb [director of membership and outreach at the cycling advocacy group] defends the number, saying May’s rains kept the numbers down.

He and Councillor Mike Layton argue that putting more Bixi bikes on the road and widening the service area will boost numbers.

The more-bikes argument makes good sense because Bixi operates as a network rather than a more discreet bike rental service: in other words, it becomes more useful as more bike lock-up stations are distributed throughout the city (in much the same way the Internet became more useful as more people signed up for email accounts). Even with its limited existing network, Bixi already has the potential to reshape the way people commute. Take, for instance, the guy the CBC interviewed earlier this month, who takes the GO Train into Toronto, then rides a bike to his office at Bloor and Jarvis. In that vein, Bixi could have an even larger impact on the city if it had a wider network.

For our money, we’re pretty sure the Toronto Cyclists Union is right on this one. Quite simply, the city needs more Bixi bikes. And given how unobtrusive the docking stations are—when they’re not getting creamed by luxury sedans, that is—it’s something we think the city should encourage.

• More bikes needed to help Bixi survive, says union [Toronto Star]

T.O. is the second best (Image: Anonymous)

U.S. firm PricewaterhouseCoopers has released a list of the world’s best cities, in which “best” is defined by a high score on an index that’s intended to highlight “cities of opportunity.” That New York City took the top spot is no surprise—they did, um, pay for the study—but we’re a little bit tickled that Toronto came in a close second, despite what the report calls its “beta city” status, which, apparently, means that it isn’t “part of the conversation with London, Paris and New York.”

We decided to dig into the PWC report, and what we found turned out to be rather intriguing: for instance, while the Big Apple beats the Big Smoke on a number of financial scores (ease of doing business, economic clout, etc.), Toronto has New York’s number on sustainability, cost of living and health, safety and security. In short, Toronto may not be the best place for stockbrokers—but it’s a much better place than NYC for basically everybody else.

The Financial Times did some digging of its own, exploring the tension between a “great city” and a “livable city.” Their conclusion: lists like these may not really be worth the pixels they’re printed on:

Most of these people are profoundly concerned with things like well-designed street furniture, a proliferation of eye-wateringly expensive artisanal retail, boutique hotels with good (English-speaking) service and environmentally friendly mayoral policies. Certainly these are all things which help but they skew the polls to a particular type of European or marginal Pacific city. What they also do is to strip out all the complexity, all the friction and buzz that make big cities what they are.

I spoke to Joel Kotkin, a professor of urban development, and asked him about these surveys. [He says,] “I’ve been to Copenhagen…and it’s cute. But frankly, on the second day, I was wondering what to do.” So, if the results aren’t to his liking, what does he suggest? “We need to ask, what makes a city great? If your idea of a great city is restful, orderly, clean, then that’s fine. You can go live in a gated community. These kinds of cities are what is called ‘productive resorts’. Descartes, writing about 17th-century Amsterdam, said that a great city should be ‘an inventory of the possible’. I like that description.”

Everyone has an idea of what makes a great city. For, say, the mayor’s brother, it’s NFL football and a monorail. For the PWC index, it’s good transit and capital accumulation. For most of the people actually living in Toronto, more of the same might not be terrible.

• Liveable v lovable [Financial Times]
• City of opportunity: Toronto ranks No. 2 in the world [Yahoo]
• Downloads: Cities of opportunity [PWC]

Jessica Stam and John Galliano in 2007 (Image: Dave M. Benett/Getty Images)

Natalie Portman may have withdrawn her support for John Galliano after a video surfaced depicting the soon-to-be former Dior designer unleashing an anti-Semitic tirade on patrons at a Paris bar, but Canadian model Jessica Stam remained committed to the label, walking in Galliano’s final Dior show in Paris last Friday. In the drunken rant, Galliano, who joined the fashion house in 1996, drunkenly proclaims “I love Hitler,” an offence punishable as a crime under French law.

Portman, who is the face of Dior’s Miss Dior Cherie fragrance, released a statement Monday condemning Galliano’s remarks, according to a New York Times blog.

I am deeply shocked and disgusted by the video of John Galliano’s comments that surfaced today. In light of this video, and as an individual who is proud to be Jewish, I will not be associated with Mr. Galliano in any way. I hope at the very least, these terrible comments remind us to reflect and act upon combating these still-existing prejudices that are the opposite of all that is beautiful.

Stam, on the other hand, took to her Twitter account in defence of Galliano. She wrote late last week, “I believe every human being on this earth was created equal. I also don’t turn my back on my friends when they’re in a dark place.”

Before Dior’s runway show in Paris, company president Sidney Toledano gave a speech describing Galliano’s comments as “a terrible and wrenching ordeal for us all.” Amidst rumours that Galliano—who has reportedly entered rehab for alcoholism—could not do much preparatory work for his autumn 2011 collection, Toledano said, “the heart of the house of Dior, which beats unseen, is made up of its teams and studios, its seamstresses and craftsmen.” The atelier specialists received a standing ovation at the end of the show.

• Video Raises Questions for Designer [New York Times]
• Tears and Applause at Dior [New York Times]

One of the things we love about Rachel McAdams is her adventurous fashion sense. It’s easy to look good when the risk is minimal, so in the endless sea of LBDs, our girl almost always stands out—even if it’s not always for the right reasons (ahem). Recently, McAdams has been earning frequent flyer miles in service of her movie Morning Glory, gracing red carpets in New York and all over Europe. Here, we rate her efforts, which—phew!—seem to get better as time goes by.

Start the slide show »

(Image: Andrzej Wrotek)

The Art Gallery of Ontario will host two world-class exhibitions in the coming year, further cementing its status as a player in the international art circuit. The first show, titled Abstract Expressionist New York, will feature 100 pieces from MoMA’s permanent collection, including works by big names like Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky and Robert Motherwell. It’s the first MoMA show at the AGO in 34 years, and Toronto is the only Canadian stop of the exhibition’s tour, which was a hit in New York.

The second show—Chagall and the Russian Avant-Garde: Masterpieces from the Collection of the Centre Pompidou—pulls 120 Russian-themed paintings directly from the Centre Pompidou’s vaults. Marc Chagall and Wassily Kandinsky are both well-represented in the exhibition, which brings the Paris gallery’s collection to the AGO for the first time. It is also the only North American stop of the travelling show.

The shows are a coup for AGO director Matthew Teitelbaum. Between the two, he’s managed to bring a sizable chunk of the last 100 years’ most famous artists home to Toronto for our viewing pleasure. Our kudos.

• Masterpieces by Chagall, Rothko and more coming to AGO in 2 blockbuster shows [Globe and Mail]
• 2 stunning shows in 2011 AGO lineup [Toronto Star]
• Some of the works coming to the AGO [Globe and Mail]

Prices are for a five-kilometre trip by taxi in 14 major cities

We all know that taxis are expensive in Toronto, but today’s Globe goes one step further and proves it. According to the paper and a new survey, our city has some of the most expensive taxis in the world. Toronto cabs tied with Montreal’s as the most expensive in North America, pricier than those in both Los Angeles and New York. The most expensive, with few exceptions, are in European cities, where it’s not uncommon to be escorted around in a Benz. Zurich’s cabs, apparently, are the most exorbitant.

The good news is that it’s pretty easy to hail a cab in Toronto, which can’t be said for some of the other cities on this list. And Toronto cabs aren’t subject to weird tariffs that change according to the time of day, nor are the drivers prone to bouts of intoxication. Still, nobody’s rushing to vote Toronto’s taxis among the best in the world or anything.

For outgoing city councillor Howard Moscoe, explaining the cost is simple: “It is very expensive to take a cab,” he told the Globe. “It is also very expensive to operate a cab.”

At least there are plenty of efficient alternatives available if taxi fares exceed one’s budget, like cycling or taking the streetcar. Oh, wait.

• Toronto stumped on how to fix high taxi rates [Globe and Mail]
• World taxi prices: What a 3-kilometer ride costs in 72 big cities [Price of Travel]

(Taxi prices are in Canadian dollars and have been calculated from rates listed by Frommer’s. They do not take into account traffic or time of day.)

Parisian couple and first-time business owners Ben Castanie and Aurelia Peynet got the idea for a board games café from memories of toy libraries in Paris—places where kids can rent playthings—and from a visit to a hobby shop in Chicago two years ago. After amassing 1,500 board games from vintage shops, yard sales and toy stores, the pair moved into a defunct coffee shop at Palmerston and Bloor West.

True to the owners’ heritage, the selection focuses more on European board games that are short, family-friendly and don’t eliminate players. In other words, there’s less Monopoly and more Mastermind. Settlers of Catan, which has been slowly gaining popularity in North America, is here, as is the ultra-rare Fireball Island (recently seen on eBay for $200). Helpful staffers are on hand to offer tutorials and recommendations.

“There’s going to be wear and tear and pieces lost. I sound naive, but I want people to play and have fun, which is why board games are created in the first place,” says Castanie. “Our mission is to mix gamers and non-gamers and get them to socialize and meet new people under one roof. There’s a social aspect. It’s not like Facebook, where you connect with people by staring at a computer screen. Here you have to look at people in the eye and talk to them. It’s a great way to break the ice without having to talk about the weather.”

Snakes and Lattes, 600 Bloor St. W. (at Palmerston Ave.), 416-500-2911, snakesandlattes.com.

Bixi bikes await their renters in Montreal (Image: Shawn Carpenter)

City council has given the thumbs up to a bike-sharing program that should see about 1,000 bikes set up for public use throughout downtown Toronto by May 2011. The initiative will be run by the same company that orchestrated the successful Bixi—“bicycle taxi”—program in Montreal. In theory, the city of Toronto will incur no costs in the endeavour but will act as a guarantor for the $4.8 million loan needed to start things up.

The city will also cover the cost of replacing or repairing stolen or vandalized bikes if the rate of damage to the fleet rises above six per cent. Here’s hoping that Torontonians are as tame as Montrealers (we are, after all, out-partying them now), who demonstrated an admirable one per cent rate of vandalism or theft in their program last year. Things didn’t go so well in Paris, where a much larger bike-sharing program ended up with 80 per cent of its initial bikes stolen or damaged.

Councillor Glenn De Baeremaeker, ever the optimist, speculated to the Star that demand could be so high that the number of bikes may need to double or triple. Looks like the conversation about bike lanes won’t end with the election.

• Bike share plan gets a green light [Toronto Star]
• Proposed bike-share program would put 1,000 bicycles on street next May [National Post]

If you build it: the Thompson Toronto, on Wellington West, is the first international arm of the New York–based brand (Illustration: Kagan McLeod)

Lately, King West is an urban cloud nine: designer condos, old brick studio spaces, fantastic carpaccio. Only 15 years ago, no one had much reason to venture down here—not for work, not to live, not for a dining scene, because there wasn’t one. There were no ad agencies, no Susur Lee joints, no Spoke Club and certainly no boutique hotels. But now the dozen or so blocks bounded by Spadina and Bathurst, from Adelaide down to Wellington, are a humming, self-sustaining ecosystem—a model of how to retrofit a vintage downtown neighbourhood.

Real estate agents call this part of town King West Village, a handle the locals find too artificial to pass their lips, especially considering the place isn’t yet fully formed. At every turn, there’s a construction site, or a gaping hole in the ground, or a lot with a target on its back, almost all of them bearing the same signage: an artful graphic in lower case letters saying “freed.” It’s not an existentialist statement; “Freed” stands for Peter Freed, the Forest Hill–bred developer who has nine projects on the go in the area. No one has been a bigger catalyst of the evolution of King West, or capitalized on it more, than Freed. His real estate portfolio, mainly condos, is worth $1 billion, and much of it is geared to a highly specific breed: a 35-ish, design-obsessed demographic that wears Japanese denim, listens to Phoenix, works in advertising or banking or consults in high tech, travels often and widely, and stays at properties designed by Ian Schrager, the Manhattan entrepreneur often credited with founding the boutique hotel genre. In King West, Freed has prepared a landing strip for these hipster high flyers (and those who aspire to become them). They’re not rich, necessarily. Their ambition is to be tastefully in the know.

For them, Freed has invested in a crowning achievement, a gleefully anticipated light box on Wellington: the 102-room Thompson Toronto, which is scheduled to open its high-concept doors this month.

The Thompson Toronto is the first international arm of a New York brand, and it comes to a city that’s been slow to embrace its kind. Boutiques or “genre hotels” pour art and fashion from a cocktail shaker. Guests see them as anti-generic, even though many are now multinational chains. The best of them become cultural hubs, a scene of art shows and film screenings staffed by modelesque bartenders. The American hotelier André Balazs calls his boutique chain The Standard, presumably since that’s what it wants to be: the measure of vitality.

Montreal saw the rise of boutiques in the early 2000s while the Toronto hotel market stood relatively still (unless you count the massive overhaul of the Windsor Arms, which had closed a tatty shell in 1991 and reopened elegantly in 1999). The last real estate bubble made investors skittish, and the city’s inferiority complex fed the reticence. Were we world class? Not enough to deserve a bunch of nice hotels. Now, the GTA has swagger: a population boom, a cultural rebirth to flesh out its merits as a destination, and foreign investors snapping up our real estate.

In the first blush of these changes, well before the economy turned, developers began planning several hotel projects to keep in step with the growth. The Ritz-Carlton, the new Four Seasons, the Trump International and the Shangri-La should be completed by 2012, at which point the city will have more than 1,000 new luxury rooms to rent. The big four will be considered five-stars, in the rankings of the hotel world. (Until now, Toronto’s only five-star has been the two-year-old Hazelton Hotel in York­ville.) They come with altitude, ranging from 52 to 66 storeys.

(Images: Renée Suen)

The place: Bloor-facing windows flood the room with light and make this a perfect spot for people-watching while sipping on cocktails. The long, loungey room oozes modern chic, with soft greys and bright splashes of red from leather chairs.

The crowd: Couples on cozy couches, Yorkville ladies flanked by pink Holts bags and suits discussing the mayoral race.

The deal: The day’s fish and chips special is popular, but we go for the signature tartines ($15 each)—open-faced sandwiches, made with the famed Poilâne bread that Holts flies in from Paris three times a week.

The dish: The tartine is brunch-like, with its layers of sautéed mushrooms, perfectly poached eggs, oven-roasted tomatoes and Kristapsons’ smoked salmon. The storied bread lives up to its reputation: the dense, butter-kissed crust has a hearty, smoky flavour. Crowned with a tumble of delicate mâche and served with a little tray of spices (Himalayan sea salt, Italian herbs and cracked pepper), this tartine is worth a walk up Bay Street. The grand finale lemon tart ($9) is delicate, tangy and excellent with a cup of Mariage Frères’ aromatic Marco Polo tea ($3).

The time: Without a reservation, our drop-in lunch totals 72 minutes, 15 of which are spent browsing Blahniks and Lanvins while waiting for a table.

The cost: $41, including taxes, tip and a bottle of Voss sparkling mineral water ($4).

Holts Café, mezzanine level, 50 Bloor St. W. (at Bay), 416-960-7817, official Web site.

Famed meat lover Sarah Palin (Photo by Roger H. Goun)

• Sarah Palin takes aim at vegetarians in her highly anticipated memoir, Going Rogue. The moose-hunting former governor’s justification for being a meat eater: “If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?” Perhaps Palin should present her infallible logic to Hillary Clinton over carnivorous scones when the two meet for coffee. [Examiner]

• Paris no longer reigns supreme as the Michelin star capital of the world. With 11 three-star restaurants, Tokyo has inched ahead of the City of Light, which houses a meagre 10. Some observers say that comparing the two cities isn’t fair, as Tokyo is home to about 160,000 restaurants—about four times as many as Paris. [Bloomberg]

• A Holstein from P.E.I. can now join the ranks of cows to sell for over $1 million (there were only five in North America to earn the honour before her). Missy, as she is known, has been dubbed the “Claudia Schiffer of the milking parlour” for her looks, but the hefty price is largely attributable to her ability to produce 50 per cent more milk than the average cow—about 50 kilograms per day. Her appearance at this year’s Royal Agricultural Winter Fair in Toronto was deemed the highlight of the show. [Globe and Mail]

• As if officials at the U.S.-Mexico border didn’t have enough to worry about, they can now add seafood delicacies to their watch list. Two Chinese citizens were caught Sunday trying to smuggle over 300 pounds of sea cucumbers into the States. Sea cucumbers are often dried to use in Chinese soups and can fetch up to $45 a pound, but it’s illegal to import food into the U.S. without declaring it. [L.A. Times]

• Green Mountain Coffee Roasters Inc., a Vermont company, has purchased Timothy’s World Coffee for $165 million from Sun Capital Partners. The deal is expected to broaden distribution for the U.S. company’s coffee machines and single-serving beverage pods throughout Canada. They also plan to open a roastery in Toronto for their fair-trade beans. [Financial Post]

Footwear from Alexander McQueen's spring/summer 2010 show

• While some are praising Toronto fashion week as a bona-fide fashion event, we hear the work’s not over yet. David Graham applauds the designers snagged by the Fashion Design Council of Canada but thinks next year, the FDCC needs more A-list talent. (Well, duh.) Graham wants to see Toronto phenoms Jeremy Laing, Lida Baday and Michael Kale in the tents, too. [Toronto Star]

• Does Lululemon cater only to skinny yogis? One shopper complains that a Lulu employee told her the shop would be discontinuing size 12 outfits because bigger sizes are not within the company’s target demographic of young, high-income, childless women. [National Post]

• The lucky ladies at British Vogue just received a pair of coveted Alexander McQueen heels that were the talk of Paris fashion week. Covered in alligator skin and measuring one foot tall, these puppies are for footwear fetishists only. Sadly, even the most experienced stiletto-strutting Voguettes couldn’t walk in them. [Vogue]

• The London Times scores an interview with Lindsay Lohan in Paris, following her disastrous premiere collection for Ungaro. In the oh-so cleverly named, “Living la vida Lohan,” writer Claudia Croft not-so-subtly hints at a cocaine problem, says LiLo looks at least 10 years older than she is, and notes her skin is the colour of a “ginger-snap biscuit.” We suggest that Lohan fire her publicist for allowing her to speak to any reporter after the Ungaro debacle. [London Times]

• Designer Miuccia Prada is looking to make skirts more popular for dudes because she finds current menswear looks limited. Well, Prada, it looks like your dreams may already be coming true. Marc Jacobs has been rocking dresses for the past year, Thom Browne showed what look like skorts in his spring-summer 2010 show, and men’s retailer Duckie Brown is talking about chiffon shirts. [Black Book]

• The economic downturn has created a new consumer experience: “luxury shame,” the guilt that results from purchasing expensive goods. For example, one blogger bought a $1,000 Tods handbag but kept it hidden in the back of her closet. A note to the anonymous blogger: we’d be more than happy to take the bag off your hands. [Wall Street Journal]

• Yves St. Laurent beats out Michael Jackson on the list of dead celebrity moneymakers this year, due to the sale of his massive estate. His partner, Pierre Bergé, sold some of the design legend’s treasures, including one work by Matisse for $40.9 million, netting hundreds of millions of dollars. [Forbes]

• Ivanka Trump got hitched this past weekend in a custom Vera Wang gown. The dress, with lace sleeves, was inspired in part by Grace Kelly’s wedding gown. Times reporter Cathy Horyn wonders if sleeves will become a new trend in wedding dresses, a movement that Wang would welcome. She says she has been doing sleeveless gowns for 15 years, and it’s tiring. We couldn’t agree more—no one wants to see a bride pulling up her strapless bodice all evening. [On the Runway]

Great white hope: Nadège brings Paris's cool minimalism to Queen West

Back in 2008, a for lease sign went up in the window of Trinity Bellwoods’ Art Photo Studio, making some West Queen Westers a little nervous. Would the prime location price out all the little guys? Apparently not. This spring, the studio’s decidedly dated green tiles were replaced by a white exterior and bright sign announcing the arrival of Nadège Patisserie—a high-end bakery and café that opened in early July.

It takes macaroons of steel to open a business in Toronto (let alone a bakery on the same strip as Dufflet and Clafouti). For her new eponymous shop, Nadège Nourian makes something much better: macaroons that melt in the mouth, with flavours like cappuccino, blackberry-chocolate and wasabi-grapefruit ($2 each or 12 for $20). Now in development: gin and tonic marshmallows.

N is for marshmallow (Photo by Catherine Hayday)

When Nourian came here from Paris, she was warned that Toronto is a conservative market; if she was going to open a French patisserie, she’d better be prepared to put Edith Piaf on repeat and bulk buy wicker baskets. But Nourian didn’t want her shop to be a café-by-numbers, rather she wants to bring the latest Parisian trends to Toronto. There are obstacles aplenty: Canadian butter is too watery; Toronto’s humidity messes with the recipes; the city’s patio permit infrastructure is not for the weak-of-heart.

Of great import: Nadège ships the coffee in from France (Photo by Catherine Hayday)

Pure determination has allowed Nadège to clear most hurdles (watch for a park-side patio in 2010). She wanted a refrigerated vitrine like they have in Paris, so she tracked down a European in the U.S. to make one for her. She wanted to serve (and sell) Cafés Richard coffee—absolutely no drip—so she has it shipped in from France via Montreal. Her front-of-house manager and partner Morgan McHugh gutted the Art Photo Studio, and the patisserie opened on schedule, four months after the work began.

The result is contemporary Parisian: crisp minimalism acts as the backdrop to colourful cakes (starting at $6.25 per slice) that are treated as small works of art. “If I had to make chocolate and vanilla for the rest of my life,” says Nourian, “I wouldn’t do it at all.”

Nadège, 780 Queen St. W., 416-368-2009, nadege-patisserie.com.