Read the rest of this entry »
Eat well and feed the hungry along the way—that’s the concept behind the annual What’s on the Table benefit being held this year on November 2. Since 2005, the fundraiser has gathered $1.5 million for The Stop, the innovative community food centre whose goal is to increase everyone’s access to healthy food (check out our interview with chef Chris Brown from shortly after he joined The Stop). Dining stations open at 6:30 p.m., and patrons won’t be starved for choice; the event features offerings from over 30 chefs, including Lynn Crawford of Ruby Watcho, Anthony Walsh of Canoe and pâtissier Nadège Nourian (see below for the very impressive full list).
The comprehensive index of every blog post, magazine story and restaurant review that appears on Torontolife.com
All stories relating to Starfish
Two Torontonians duked it out for national oyster shucking title last Friday
In what must have been acutely embarrassing for shuckers from the east and west coasts, the final round of the Canadian Oyster Shucking Championship in P.E.I. last Friday came down to two monster shuckers from non-coastal Toronto: Eamon Clark (son of Rodney Clark of Rodney’s Oyster House) and Patrick McMurray (of Starfish and Ceili Cottage), both of whom have previously won the championship multiple times. As reported by the Summerside Journal-Pioneer, the two former champs made it to the last round in a dead heat, which necessitated a shuck-off of 18 Malpeques (captured in this immortal slideshow). In the end, it apparently all came down to speed versus finesse (we won’t spoil the result). Read the whole story »
We called the 10 most clicked Summerlicious restaurants to scope out their experience—and availability
Toronto restaurants are firmly in the grip of Summerlicious, which continues to this Sunday, so we decided to find out how the annual prix-fixe fete has treated them. The consensus? It’s been a wild week-and-a-half. “It’s definitely crazier than normal,” the folks at Brassaii told us. “Crazy busy,” echoed the people at Starfish Oyster Bed and Grill, who also had some sage advice for those spurned by packed houses and peculiarly empty tables: “If you’re unsure [of availabilities], call in or swing past, because there are always no-shows” (ah, the infamous Summerlicious no-shows). With less than a week left before the summer food fest wraps up, we got in touch with the 10 restaurants whose menus got the most hits from our list of the 63 best bets to find out whether and when tables are still available.
Read the rest of this entry »
11 best bets for Summerlicious 2011: our chief critic Chris Nuttall-Smith makes his picks
The imported Neapolitan pizza oven at Fabbrica (Image: Karon Liu)
Now in its ninth season, the city-run ’Licious phenomenon (there are both summer and winter incarnations, in case you’ve been living under a pizza stone all this time) shows no signs of tiring, even if every year it seems to enrage more and more curmudgeonly downtown diners who don’t much like sharing their favorite restaurants with the plebes. Summerlicious succeeds precisely because it makes inaccessible restaurants accessible, even if it’s only for two weeks each July. The big list (there are 150 participating restaurants this year) will never include the hottest, newest, most interesting restaurants in the city—those places don’t typically need the help. It typically does include more than its share of dogs. But there are plenty of places in between: proven, well-run, inviting rooms with committed kitchens. We’ve picked a few of the best.
Read the rest of this entry »
Summerlicious 2011: Toronto Life’s favourites for the Financial District
Power lunchers and after-work diners are the bread and butter of Summerlicious. Here, 22 Toronto Life picks for where to go. Read the rest of this entry »
Weekend Luminato picks: Incendies, 1000 Tastes, One Thousand and One Nights and more
Ammar Haj Ahmad, Asaad Bouab, Ramzi Choukair, Tewfik Jallab, and Saad Al Ghefari in One Thousand and One Nights. (Image: Cylla von Tiedemann)
The fifth edition of Luminato, the city’s annual everything-culture fest, kicked off last Friday and goes until Sunday. Here, five events to fill out your weekend.
Read the rest of this entry »
With Sausage Partners, Kyle Deming plans to contribute yet another chef-run fine food shop to the Leslieville strip
The Sausage Partners: Lorraine, Lilly and Kyle Deming (Image: Signe Langford)
First there was the Leslieville Cheese Market, then the Foodist Market, then Hooked, and now Sausage Partners. Leslieville is rapidly becoming the east end’s go-to ’hood for gourmet food shopping, and with many of these places being run by pro chefs, it’s easy to see why. This new meat shop will open in June in the former Inspired Cook space, with Kyle Deming (head chef at Starfish and Ceili Cottage) and his wife Lorraine at the helm. “We’ve been thinking about doing this for a long time,” explains Lorraine, “but we really got the push about two years ago when we made sausages for Patrick [McMurray]’s 40th birthday. Everyone was asking, ‘Where can we buy these?’ So we just kept thinking about it and it feels like the right time now.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Alternalicious: a roundup of this year’s Winterlicious rebels
Read the rest of this entry »
Few subjects are as divisive among Toronto diners and industry people as the merits of Summer- and Winterlicious. While the biannual culinary event may help restaurants fill empty tables during an otherwise slow season, as we’ve explored before, participation in the city-run festival can have its limitations (dining rooms filled with stingy tippers, owners bound by the city’s rules). As in previous years, a number of restaurants have decided to strike out on their own with prix fixe specials.
Today in Toronto: Seafood for Thought
Seafood for Thought: Ted Corrado (C5), Patrick McMurray (Starfish), Alida Solomon (Tutti Matti) and other city chefs prepare tasting dishes with sustainable seafood for this Toronto Zoo fundraiser. Find out more >>
Best new restaurants 2010: James Chatto names five honourable mentions
(Image: Renée Suen)
Toronto Life‘s annual ranking of the city’s 10 best new restaurants is in our April issue, on newsstands now. Despite the lacklustre economy, it’s been a banner year for eating out. Here, James Chatto picks five more new restaurants are worth lining up for.
Starfish restaurant is serving rare species of abalone
Starfish serves the abalone raw in thin slices and with the incredibly rare roe (Photo courtesy of Patrick McMurray)
Toronto restaurateur and champion oyster shucker Patrick McMurray has tracked down a sustainable source of extremely rare pintos, Canada’s only naturally occurring abalone species, for his Adelaide Street seafood restaurant Starfish.
The large sea snails are prized for their luscious meat but cannot be legally caught or served in Canada unless grown on a farm, so McMurray tracked down the six-person-run, British Columbia–based Bamfield Huu-ay-aht Community Abalone Project, which aims to replenish wild stock of the mollusc and get it off the Canadian government’s threatened species list. Starfish is the second restaurant in the country to serve Huu-ay-aht’s abalone (C Restaurant in Vancouver was the first).
Read the rest of this entry »
Just Opened: Ceili Cottage
Irish times: Patrons live it up at Leslieville's Ceili Cottage (Photos by Signe Langford)
“We did this totally back-asswards,” says Patrick McMurray of Ceili Cottage, the Irish pub he opened in Leslieville, and the series of snafus that kept its doors closed until the end of June.
The last snag was the threat of an LCBO strike, which was scheduled to begin the same day McMurray planned to serve his first drinks. He sent his wife and a friend to the liquor store to fill four carts before he officially received his licensee number. As he tells it, the carts of booze were just approaching the cash at the same moment as his license was confirmed. The kegs of beer had yet to be delivered, but Leslievillians—having developed quite a thirst after months of watching the glacial progress on their new local—were pounding on the cottage’s red door, demanding refreshments. McMurray opened without kegs, serving cans of Guinness and bottles of Harp from a nearby Beer Store.
Read the rest of this entry »
Chefs make better lovers, threatening T.O.’s culinary superiority, cell phone credit cards
Go zest: Vancouver and the rest of B.C. want to be Canada’s premier food destination (Photo by Small)
• Could this be the end of the Toronto-Montreal axis of culinary superiority? We doubt it, but a new initiative between the British Columbia government and restaurateurs in the province is aiming to put Lotus Land on the culinary map. [Vancouver Sun]
• Longtime New York food critic Gael Greene argues that chefs make better lovers, and that celebrity chefs in particular should spend less time cooking and more time reaping the fruits of celebrity—especially sex with willing young food groupies. As if Rachel Ray needs another reason to smile. [Daily Beast]
Read the rest of this entry »
Where to eat during Pride 2009
The Gay Village is buzzing as it gets ready for Pride’s climax this weekend. As any yearly attendee knows, Church Street’s focus during the last weekend of June is on fun and drinking—not dining. For Torontonians and tourists looking for great food and respite from the crowds, here are our picks for where to eat during Pride 2009. Read the rest of this entry »
BYOB: Toronto restaurants drop corkage fees
Bottle shock: corkage fees are falling all over Toronto (Photo by Quinn Dombrowski)
Along with prix-fixe menus and pink slip parties (we’re looking at you, Globe), reduced corkage fees have become a popular recession-era tactic for restaurants trying to attract diners. Ontario jumped on the BYOB bandwagon in January 2005, it has never had the same success as similar programs in Quebec. That is, until now.
Read the rest of this entry »
Follow Toronto Life on Twitter, Facebook and via RSS