Infection by the mumps virus can be prevented with a common vaccine (Image: Centers for Disease Control/Dr. F. A. Murphy)

Ki, best known as the go-to sushi joint for suits in the Financial District, became famous this weekend for something only slightly less unsettling than poorly prepared fugu: the mumps. Toronto Public Health warns that four employees at the Bay Street eatery had been diagnosed with mumps, which presents with symptoms like swelling and pain in the salivary glands, fever, headache, fatigue and a loss of appetite. Anyone who dined there between July 7 and July 18 is advised to watch for such symptoms. Despite this, the restaurant is expected to be open for business today.

From the Globe:

“The restaurant has been co-operative working with us, they were helpful, they provided a list of all their employees,” TPH’s associate medical officer Dr. Irene Armstrong said. “We have public health investigators calling every employee to advise on signs and symptoms, how it spreads, telling employees to contact them immediately if they develop symptoms. If they do, we tell them to stay home.”

Mumps hasn’t been a big issue in Canada since the development of a vaccine, but it remains a health threat in developing countries. The origin of this outbreak remains unclear. The four infected employees at Ki didn’t even know they had the mumps until they were asked to check for symptoms. With the long weekend coming up, we predict a spike in symptoms amongst cottage-owning Bay Streeters starting sometime around Thursday afternoon, with a swift recovery by Tuesday—it’s amazing what a weekend of tubing and barbecue will do for one’s health.

• Bay St. eatery to re-open after mumps warning [Globe and Mail]

(Image: Laura Cameron)

If Toronto’s growing number of fromageries, pizza joints and restaurant cheese caves is any indication, the residents of this city love their cheese. It’s fitting, then, that Obikà Mozzarella Bar made its Canadian debut in downtown Toronto. After meeting with strong reviews in Rome, L.A. Tokyo and New York, Obikà opened this week at Brookfield Place in the heart of the Financial District. The sushi bar–inspired concept centres on one key ingredient: mozzarella di bufala from the Campagna region of Italy.

“I think, globally, there is a cheese revolution right now,” said Lorenzo Sibio, the president of Obikà Canada, who explained that the mozzarella bar is a product-oriented, rather than a chef-oriented, restaurant. Deliveries of the hand-kneaded cheese arrive twice a week from Italy to ensure freshness. Many of the other ingredients are locally sourced, including prosciutto and organic tomatoes.

The trio of mozzarellas ($34) includes the smooth classica, which dissolves on your tongue; the affumicata, which gets its unique flavour from a traditional hay smoker; and the stracciatella di burrata, a creamy cheese made from cow’s milk that is pulled rather than kneaded. The tasting platter of all three cheeses can be paired with a selection of cured meats ($12) or grilled vegetables ($8). Sushi-inspired rotoli are rolls of mozzarella prepared in front of you at the bar with salmon, prosciutto or beef fillings (platter of three, $24).

The restaurant, which specializes in light meals, is aimed squarely at nearby office workers. There are no onions or garlic on the menu—unusual for an Italian restaurant, but good for someone who is conscious of not offending co-workers with their breath.

Wood tables and chairs with steel accents are consistent with the Japanese aesthetic, and an olive tree is a nod to Obikà’s Italian roots. Between the regular seating, the communal table, the bar seating, and the private dining rooms, the restaurant seats 110.

Obikà, 181 Bay Street, 416-301-6870, obika.ca

Enoteca Sociale’s octopus and fava beans

The 25 most delicious dishes Chris Nuttall-Smith tasted this year, ranging  from lowbrow comforts (potato puffballs) to high-minded masterpieces (tea-smoked duck)*

See the list »

*Availability of dishes varies according to season and changing menus

(Images: All photographs by Ryan Szulc)

Chef Anthony Walsh of Canoe, along with Markus Bestig of O&B Café Grill, will oversee the revamping and O&B-ification of the hotel’s culinary offerings, which include: Rosseau Grill, a fine dining restaurant; Windermere Pub and Patio, a casual eatery; P.J.’s Lobby Bar; and the Windermere House’s popular sushi restaurant—O&B’s first foray into Japanese cuisine.

The venture into Muskoka cottage country isn’t new for O&B, which opened a location of its O&B Café Grill at Blue Mountain in 2005. Nor is the foray into meetings and event spaces a huge leap, as the company runs the Malaparte private event space at the TIFF Bell Lightbox and conference facilities at the Westin Trillium House at Blue Mountain.

The Windermere House opens for the season in May, giving the team only a couple months to bring the O&B machine up to the posh banks of Lake Rosseau.

If Bloor Street and Queen West are any indication, Toronto is flooded with a sea of all-you-can-eat restaurants serving raw fish with or without vinegared rice. Most provide a quick fix, but only a handful of establishments in this city promise unique experiences that will satisfy all senses. Here are nine gorgeous examples, from the delicate and rare to the dramatically innovative.

Start the tour »

(Image: Lorne Bridgman)

FOR A CINQ À SEPT
Devoted locavores should head to Beast after work Wednesday through Friday, when former Jamie Kennedy chefs Scott and Rachelle Vivian serve up nose-to-tail small plates—including pig’s head pappar­delle for only $4. Lovely Quebec and Ontario beers for pairing are also just $4; a number of wines are $5 a glass. 96 Tecumseth St., 647-352-6000.

FOR A ROMAN HOLIDAY
When it opened last year, Enoteca Sociale (above), the rustic Italian restaurant, earned an instant and obsessive following. In true Roman tradition, it offers Nonna night on Sundays: that’s three courses, including one of the house’s fabulous fresh pastas, served on heaping family-style platters. $35 per person. 1288 Dundas St. W., 416-534-1200.

FOR DISCOUNTED DECADENCE
After jockeying with Joe Pantalone for a liquor licence, Harbord’s Içi Bistro is finally open. J. P. Challet’s classic French style is surprisingly affordable, with smaller portions at smaller prices. That means diners get discount boeuf bourguignon ($17) and lobster thermidor ($18) and still have coin left over for brut. 538 Manning Ave., 416-536-0079.

FOR RAW HIDES
Sushi Couture, the highest-quality raw-fish destination on sushi-dense Bloor, serves up an excellent $39 omakase menu by master chef Ken Zhang. All told, it amounts to five courses of, among other delicacies, high-calibre tuna, butterfish and mussels—blowtorched, lime marinated, barbecued or hand-rolled into bites. 456 Bloor St. W., 416-538-8618.

(Image: Renée Suen, from the torontolife.com Flickr pool)

January is upon us, and for many hungry Torontonians, that means one thing: Winterlicious. The menus are less predictable than previous years—crème brûlée’s out,  lentils du Puy are in—so even the ’Licious haters might have a reason to take advantage of the festival this year. We’ve already named the 12 menus that we think are the best bets, but that doesn’t begin to cover it. Here, find Toronto Life’s 62 favourite Winterlicious restaurants, complete with menus, reviews and reservation numbers.

Winterlicious runs from January 28 to February 10. Reservations are accepted from January 13 onward (January 11 for American Express users).

(Image: Svadilfari)

When Ken Valvur first tried fresh, unpasteurized Japanese sake, it changed his life. “That’s how I fell in love with it,” he recalls. “When I tasted just-pressed sake, it was an amazing moment for me.” There are few sake breweries in North America (Canada has two on the west coast), so the alcoholic rice beverage is usually pasteurized for its transport over vast distances. Most Torontonians never get to enjoy sake the way it was meant to be. Valvur intends to change all that when he opens the Ontario Spring Water Sake Company, the first sake brewery in eastern North America. The doors are scheduled to open this spring in the Distillery District.

In won’t be the first time the ex–banking executive has brought culinary treasures from Japan to Canada. Once described as “Canada’s sushi king,” Valvur founded Bento Nouveau, the largest sushi company in Canada. He also helped get sake from Japan’s venerable Masumi brewery sold at the LCBO. And Masumi is apparently returning the favour. Valvur’s new brewery, which intends to adhere to strict Japanese traditions of brewing sake, has been consulting with Masumi every step of the way.

In a space of around 2,000 square feet, Valvur’s team—headed by general manager Kaz Hayashi, a sake veteran who was once the Ontario representative for Japan’s largest sake brewery—will set up a traditional koji-muro, a “magical sauna-like room,” where rice is inoculated with the koji mould spores required to create alcohol. The brewery will also house a retail shop and a tasting bar, where fresh-pressed sake will be made available for Distillery District–goers on a weekly basis.

A variety of different sakes, including nigori (sweet and cloudy due to being partially filtered), genshu (undiluted and potent at around 20 per cent alcohol) and traditional junmai, both pasteurized and unpasteurized, will be brewed for sale in restaurants and, potentially, at the LCBO. As operations within the brewery smooth out, operators will also begin to experiment with different degrees of rice grinding. (The best sake, Valvur says, is made from rice that’s had its exterior ground away, leaving the just the pure centre.)

As any master sake brewer will freely disclose, high-quality water is a crucial element in the brewing process. So, part of the draw of setting up in Ontario, Valvur says, was access to some of the best spring water in the world (hence the company’s name). He’s excited about bringing the complex drink to Ontario, where it’s gone largely unexplored. “Sake is a very deep, broad and rich product,” he says. “Here, we’re only starting to get higher quality sakes brought in from Japan.” And soon, Toronto will be getting them from its own local brewer.

Rolo, 24 Bellair St., 416-920-0100, rolostore.com.

Move over, sushi. Now there’s something sexier. The new Korean cuisine is exciting, modern and worth crossing town for
By Chris Nuttall-Smith

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.

Tofu Village-House of Soon Tofu opened a few months ago on Bloor ’s Korea­town strip, just east of Christie, tucked innocently between a cellphone store and the Metro Theatre, the city’s crumbling home of vintage porn. The restaurant’s simple decor is cleaner and fresher than its competitors’, and its culinary aspirations are significantly higher, as well. Where much of the food on the strip caters to a quantity-focused crowd (nearly everything at a place a few doors down, for example, costs exactly $8 after tax), at Tofu Village the owners have thrown presentation and quality into the mix.

We start with thin, golden haemul pajeon—seafood and scallion pancakes stuffed with chopped octopus and shrimp—that come crisp and sizzling on a cast iron plate. The flavours and textures are exhilarating: the meaty, chewy-tender octopus, the slap of onions, the savoury depth from the seared egg and rice flour batter, the liquid-centred crunch of the just-picked watercress served with them. The kimchee is made fresh every day, so it’s gentler than the usual, and the spicing is geared more to western palates than gojujang-accustomed ones. We eat clear, nutty, refreshing chapchay—sweet potato noodles—stir-fried with vegetables and sesame oil, and an incredible cold soup served in a stainless steel bowl with buckwheat noodles. It’s the best Korean on the block.

A week later, I’m driving with a couple Korean friends up Yonge Street north of Steeles, where the strips of half-empty hookah lounges and over-illuminated kebab shops give way to ESL schools, bars filled with jet-setting Asian kids, and long stretches of tiny restaurants fronted only with blocky Hangul script. Every new immigrant community moves out to the suburbs over time, and in the case of Korean-Canadians, north Toronto and Thornhill have been the beneficiaries of the demographic rule. The GTA’s 60,000-strong Korean population is growing far faster than the overall average, and the Korean restaurant scene in the city’s north, like the people, is hybridizing and modernizing. The area is an enormous lab, with new micro-restaurants opening too quickly for even the most hard-core Korean junkies to keep up.

We pass a shop that specializes in tiny grilled squid, and another that does buckwheat soup. There’s a ginseng chicken stew joint, a hand-cut noodle shop, a seafood pancake place, a storefront advertising bacon-style grilled pork belly, a couple of shops that do only Korean bar food—izakayas, sort of—and another where people go for the tabletop charcoal grills. A few of the restaurants here serve Korean moonshine from plastic jugs, if you know how to ask (it’s called makali; best to go with a Korean). Turbo Lounge plays CFL and UFC matches and serves green tea cocktails and Chivas, creamed corn and kimchee. There’s a sports bar called Hell’s Chicken that’s known for its Korean fried wings. Most of the best places are less than two years old.

Sang Kim teaches the hungry to make sushi (Image: Karon Liu)

While news of the Drake Hotel’s barbecue pop-up shop has been circulating around the city, the hotel’s restaurant has introduced something else that’s equally intriguing: make-your-own sushi. Known as temaki, this process involves a platter of sashimi, vegetables and garnishes presented in front of diners who each have a plate of nori and sushi rice to make their own rolls. “As far as I know, no one else is doing this in Canada,” says Sang Kim, the hotel’s director of food and beverages.

The platter serves two (or one really hungry diner) and costs $50 ($70 with lobster).

Pulled pork (left) and brisket sandwiches

While we were there to try the sushi, we also got to sample the BBQ sandwiches that are set to be available from the pop-up shop on the 22nd. They’re small sandwiches packed with pulled pork and brisket. Chef Anthony Rose says the goal is to put the focus on the meat so he’s using “generic” buns. Apparently, Rose and Drake GM Bill Simpson considered many foods for the pop-up shop before settling on BBQ. A seafood joint selling lobster rolls was considered and tacos were also in the running, but the idea was thrown out because all the various toppings would slow down production.

Simpson says there isn’t a specific end date for the BBQ pop-up shop; if the demand continues, it just might stay beyond the wintertime.

Minsoo Kim proudly sets one of his sushi creations, the South Beach roll, on the table. Nestled next to a set of rice-free rolls wrapped in cucumber are two slices of bluefin tuna, the sashimi mother lode, marbled with fat like a steak. “That is the best tuna in the entire world,” Kim says of the rare, contentious delicacy. “As soon as it’s available, I get the first phone call.” Kim is a schmoozer, clearly, as well as a former minor league pitcher and the owner of Wabora, the latest addition to the Thompson Hotel’s arsenal of restaurants.

Opened earlier this month, the place is a culinary playground for Kim, who says that he could be struck with inspiration for a new sushi creation at any time. He’s been known to offer his customers samples of his decadent inventions (he’s not afraid to add cream cheese or all five of Wabora’s secret house-made sauces) before putting them on the menu. When he brought Wabora’s first incarnation to Bracebridge in 2005, the selection of rolls was around 30. Now both restaurants offer over 60.

Wabora is not just sushi. The restaurant features one of the only Robata grills in the city, stocked with bincho; the meticulously crafted and highly sought-after white charcoal from Asia burns longer and more evenly than its black counterparts. On it, such fare as duck breast ($25, served with foie gras) and whole calamari rubbed with salt ($18) sizzle away.

Decor is suitably opulent for a Thompson restaurant (limestone masonry, original artwork from Shawn Westlaken and Young-Moon Kim), and so is the wine selection: manager and sommelier C.C. Simmons spent two months at the Muskoka location coming up with a matched wine list. As for Kim, his goals are high. Not only does he aim to have the city’s best bubbly selection (nothing’s better than a beautiful champagne with a nice spicy roll, he says), but he wants to have the city’s best sushi lists, too. With competitors like Sushi Kaji and Ame, it’s a good thing he has ambition to burn.

Wabora, Thompson Hotel, 550 Wellington St. W. (at Bathurst), 416-777-9901.

Sticky situation: eating implements create environmental problems (Image: Mykl Roventine)

Toronto loves Asian food. Witness the city’s endless supply of sushi restaurants and packed Chinese eateries— declared some of the best in North America. But all that glory and love comes with a hefty price: the burgeoning ecological disaster that is the disposable chopstick. In China, a jaw-dropping 100 acres of trees are felled per day to keep up with demand for the disposable utensils, according to Greenpeace China. That works out to about 16 to 25 million trees per year.

The situation has become so serious that the Chinese government—the same body that has done pretty much nothing to curb greenhouse gas emissions—has actually taken steps to cut back on chopsticks. The country is being predictably vague in how it intends to deal with the problem, saying only, “Companies making disposable chopsticks will face local government restrictions aimed at decreasing the use of the throwaway utensil.” Change could be a long time coming, considering that around 100,000 people are employed by China’s chopstick industry. Not only that, but disposable chopsticks cost about a penny apiece, while sterilizing and reusing chopsticks could cost anywhere from 15 to 70 cents each.

Some foresighted tree huggers have already initiated the BYOC (bring your own chopsticks) movement in an attempt to cut down on chopstick waste. It has yet to take hold in Toronto, so those of us eating here can either start our own chopstick revolution or suffer the ding to our street cred and just use a metal fork.

• China’s fight against disposable chopsticks [L.A. Times]

The season’s most anticipated openings are two seafood-centric spots By Chris Nuttall-Smith

Maléna at Av and Dav (Image: Ryan Szulc)

Toronto is a raw bar town. We’re over-served by excellent oyster houses, and we probably consume more sushi per capita than any city east of Vancouver. But cooked fish is a problem here; we’ve never had a standout seafood spot. This spring, Nathan Isberg, of Czehoski and Coca fame, opened what early adopters described as a nose-to-tail disciple’s take on the life aquatic on Dundas West. And in Yorkville, a neighbourhood that’s desperate for a few more decent places to eat, front-of-house kings David Minicucci and Sam Kalogiros launched Maléna, a flashy fish spot. It looked like Toronto might finally turn into a seafood town.

Kalogiros and Minicucci, who also run L’Unità, the casual Italian place near Av and Dav, are masters of engineering atmospheres that are loud, exclusive and democratic all at once, with service staff who are expert at navigating it all. Maléna is done up in high-homely style, with barnboards, glossy-framed mirrors and Hellenic-themed dinner plates on the walls. The two-storey space is jammed most nights with a mix of middle-aged glitter girls, criminal lawyers (Clayton Ruby and Brian Greenspan one night, dining separately) and boldface names both minor (Senator Pamela Wallin, designer Sarah Richardson) and major (Jessica Alba, who, one blaspheming regular noted, looks a lot like an ugly version of Jessica Alba in person). It has quickly become one of the toughest reservations in town.

Kalogiros learned the trade in New York, where he was captain at Jean-Georges Vongerichten’s Mercer Kitchen. Minicucci, mean­while, managed Xacutti and Annona at the Park Hyatt. And no one is better than Zinta Steprans, Maléna’s young, disarmingly down-to-earth sommelier, who patrols the room in a cotton boyfriend blazer, working from an oddball-fabulous list that’s strong on fish-friendly Greek and Southern Italian wines (I loved the northern Greek sparkler made in the French style from moscophilero grapes) and making a point of stopping at every table.

The kitchen gets a lot of things right. The menu is Greek, mostly, by way of Sicily and Puglia, so the tzatziki is seasoned southern Italian style with only a little garlic, and the sheep’s milk feta salad gets fennel and white balsamic vinegar. Chef Doug Neigel marinates fat sardine fillets in lemon and good vinegar so they’re bright, balanced and nicely punchy, and then stacks chopped romaine on top as a smart, if trashy, refresher. Soft-shell crabs—not Greek, exactly, but no one’s complaining—get the tempura treatment, sizzling from the fryer; only Nota Bene’s David Lee, who was eating at Maléna one recent Friday, does them better.

Neigel sources fish so fresh you’d think you were in a seaside town. Though the cooking is inspired by the shores of the Ionian Sea, he forgoes the usual farmed and dubiously sourced southern European seafood for an Ocean Wise–approved list that few other east-of-the-Rockies restaurants could match. Neigel buys live spot prawns, firm-fleshed wild salmon and line-caught ling cod direct from Organic Ocean, a B.C. fishermen’s co‑operative, plus impeccable soft-shell crabs from the East Coast, and mackerel that tastes mild and delicate instead of the usual funky and badly in need of a shower. Plenty of other restaurants feature one or two great seasonal West Coast fish selections these days. Neigel seems to have them all. And then, as if to apologize for his good fortune, he does what just about every otherwise competent chef in Toronto does with seafood—he cooks the bejesus out of it.

The sushi platter for two at Yuzu (Images: Renée Suen)

The place: Tucked away in the northeast corner of the entertainment district, this slick Japanese eatery shares both its owners and its flair with the better-known Japango. The kitchen and sushi bar bustle with activity under the pretty display of the restaurant’s premium sakes.

The crowd: Aficionados park themselves at chef Bruce Bu’s sushi bar as buttoned-down business lunches take place at the tables.

The deal: From staple teriyaki plates ($10–$12) to the popular double-decker deluxe bento ($18), Yuzu’s price point is slightly higher than at the fast-food sushi spots on Yonge and Bloor West, but its quality is miles ahead. Our choice is the sushi platter for two, which comes with the chef’s choice of 18 nigiri and six maki rolls (in this case, inside-out California) for a ridiculously reasonable $31.

The meal: Highlights from the artful arrangement include delicate sea bream, served naked or dotted with a speck of Japanese red pepper paste; silky-sweet shrimp (served with its chip-like flash-fried head); salmon topped with caramelized onions; and a creamy butterflied scallop buried under crunchy seaweed. Bu also gets points for originality, blistering the skin of dense whitefish with a torch, and finishing albacore tuna tataki with strands of fried lemon grass and roasted shallot oil. Dessert—green tea crème brûlée ($6)—acts as an excellent sweet foil to the platter.

The time: 43 minutes.

The cost: $60 for two, including tax, tip, complimentary cups of green tea, and the predictable miso soup and carrot-soy-dressed greens.

Yuzu, 236 Adelaide St. W. (at Duncan St.), 416-205-9808, yuzutoronto.com.