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(Image: Renée Suen)
After 16 years at the top, Canoe, one of the city’s culinary beacons, closed its doors on New Year’s Day for a renovation. Unlike most restaurants, they actually completed it on schedule. Although we previewed Canoe’s overhauled space during its Winterlicious opening, the Oliver and Bonacini flagship officially relaunched last week with a completed dining room and revamped menu, so we thought we’d take a closer look.
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The Green Room: the more things change, the more they stay the same (Image: John Michael McGrath)
When the Green Room closed down last year after a series of health violations, it was an open question as to when, or even whether, the Annex dive-slash-legend would open again. Well, brace yourselves, Toronto: the old student hangout has reopened, and the city’s new media crowd is all over it. Apparently, the story was broken by a drunken post on Reddit, but OpenFile, BlogTO and Torontoist were on the story by Sunday afternoon. The news exploded on Twitter on Sunday afternoon, because, well, nobody seemed to know what was going on, and excited speculation is pretty much what Twitter is made for.
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A caribou etching adorns the wall near the soapstone bar (Image: Suresh Doss)
Last December we reported that Canoe would be closing up shop for a million-dollar facelift. Unlike most construction projects in the city, the restaurant was remodeled on schedule, and opened last night with insiders reporting (ok, tweeting) its down-to-the-wire progress. We snagged some images at the start of yesterday’s service for this first look at Canoe’s new digs.
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ADDRESS: 103 Thomas Street
NEIGHBOURHOOD: Milton
AGENTS: Bill Goodale, Don Goodale and Brad Miller, Century 21 Miller Real Estate
PRICE: $1,600,000
THE PLACE: Just blocks away from the cookie-cutter homes of Hawthorne Village, sits this classic Victorian pile, built six decades before the world was introduced to the word “ex-urb.” Old Milton’s charming Main Street—yes, the main street’s called Main Street—is just steps away, as is a massive park where the neighbourly visitors all know one another’s names. Renovations have been completed throughout to modernize the kitchen and bathrooms from their 1892 originals.
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The un-Yorkdalian Bayview Village (Image: Google)
The National Post has published a lengthy piece on the recent renovations at Toronto’s major malls. The Eaton Centre, Bayview Village, Dufferin Mall and the Scarborough Town Centre have all finished or are undergoing revamps to lure shoppers and compete with on-line retailers. Just last week, the Town Centre completed a $62-million reno job with new flooring, skylights and escalators, and the Eaton Centre (currently working on a $120-million make-over) is a jumble of scaffolding.
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ADDRESS: 7 Marshall St.
NEIGHBOURHOOD: Little Portugal
AGENT: Aniceto Gomes, Remax West Realty Inc.
PRICE: $959,000
THE PLACE: Cue the gentry. This recently renovated house offers a modern alternative to buyers who like the west end but not its characteristic cramped duplexes. With hardwood floors, glass-enclosed showers (complete with rain heads) and recessed lighting, the interior is better suited to a downtown loft than Little Portugal.
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The first time Robin Lewis saw the Corktown garage that would become his home, there was an oven in the middle of the kitchen, a bathtub upstairs in the sleeping loft and rubble everywhere. The derelict building had been a machine shop in the 1940s and then a semi-converted storage unit. Read the rest of this entry »
K’naan and Shad Forget Drake (just for a moment). No other artist has been as successful at popularizing Canadian hip hop as these two dynamos. Find out more >>
ID After two years of renovations, the Sony Centre relaunches with a serious bang, courtesy of Montreal circus troupe Cirque Éloize. Find out more >>
Flute Magic Sinfonia Toronto highlights the virtuosity of Belgian flutist Marc Grauwels in an evening that moves from classic to contemporary. Find out more >>
Brendan Flanagan Like a line cook gone mad, Brendan Flanagan squeezes paint from plastic ketchup bottles and creates works that glisten and gleam. Find out more >>
Left: top tailor Giovanni of Italy; Right: Jump Start Dog Training (Images: Jay Shuster)
Master electrician Rosarii Lannon goes by the moniker Electro Dame. Her powers are, well, powerful, and she’s been bravely confronting the dangerous under-layer of buildings for 30 years. We talked to Lannon about knob and tube, electrician superstition and how it feels to get zapped.
(Image: Carmen Cheung)
How did you pick Electro Dame as the name of your company?
My son came up with it when he was about nine. I thought, That’s really cute. Plus, it pretty much sums up who I am.
Have you felt like a pioneer in this mostly male field? Read the rest of this entry »
When I first started, in the mid-’70s, many of the tradesmen I worked with thought it would be bad luck to have a woman on-site. They were very superstitious, and they wondered why a woman wanted to do a man’s work. I went everywhere looking for jobs. The first contractor who hired me had four daughters, and he said he hoped that one day someone would give one of his girls a break.
Carl Heinrich with a companion in the newly redesigned Marben (All images: Karon Liu)
Splendido did it, then Centro, then Brassaii, and now Marben. Sure, they’ve all been renovated, but more specifically, they’ve all received make-unders.
Back in March, Marben auctioned off bits and pieces of its former self, including the famous glowing onyx bar, in order to make way for understated pieces, vintage fixtures and reclaimed wood. General manager Sarah Evans says the Wellington West restaurant’s overhaul was meant to lighten up the place and make it known for its food rather than its scene (Brassaii cited similar urges). Still, with the restaurant open until 2 a.m. every day and Bavette—a separate downstairs party space—set to open at the end of the month, Marben isn’t retiring from the revelry. “The city needs a rowdy restaurant,” says Evans.
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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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At Lynn Crawford’s new restaurant, customers eat whatever she feels like cooking that day. The concept is bold and bossy, but the celeb chef has the talent and swagger to pull it off
I had to admire their cool. With only four hours to go before the grand opening of Ruby Watchco, the restaurant’s three owners—chef Lynn Crawford, designer Cherie Stinson and her husband, front-of-house veteran Joey Skeir—were showing no sign of nerves. They were just sitting around the lunch table at the back of the restaurant, laughing and swapping renovation stories over a bottle of pinot grigio and an excellent chicken cobb salad made by head chef Lora Kirk. If this were an episode of Restaurant Makeover, the TV show that made Crawford and Stinson celebrities, there would be cussing and tears and all sorts of last-minute nail-biting melodramas to negotiate. But everything was pretty much ready, or would be once the last of the green masking tape was peeled off the front window. Even the tall boughs of quince blossom in a vase on the bar co-operated: all the buds popped open that morning, precisely on cue.
Lynn Crawford (left) and head chef Lora Kirk at their new restaurant, Ruby Watchco, on Queen East (Image: Ryan Szulc)
Plywood doors usually mean condos a-comin'. Not this time (Image: Robert Furtado)
Despite rumours sparked by its boarded-up doors—and much to the chagrin of prospecting condo developers—the Moss Park Armoury is not being demolished, it’s just undergoing renovations. The strange landmark/eyesore at Queen and Jarvis should have a new glass and aluminum façade by late summer or early fall. Until then, it will continue to provide training grounds for over 600 soldiers and reservists, and will continue to baffle people trying to get inside.
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