According to a nifty chart over at the National Post that compares the city’s new crop of super-luxe hotel-slash-condo-towers—the Trump tower, the Ritz-Carlton, the Four Seasons and the Shangri-La—it’s a tight race. While the Shangri-La earns points for scoring two Momofuku restaurants by New York chef David Chang, the Ritz-Carlton has high-definition televisions in the bathroom mirrors. Then again, a penthouse at the Four Seasons went for $28 million, more than twice the price of any suite in the other buildings. For our part, though, we give the prize to the Trump tower: as the tallest of the lot, it’ll have the largest impact on our city’s skyline. Trust the Donald to recognize that size matters. Read the entire story [National Post] »
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Weekly Lunch Pick: the sustainable trout at Pangaea
Velouté with spot prawns; Ocean Wise steelhead (Image: Renée Suen)
Although Winterlicious kicked off last Friday (see our 61 best bets), it’s still possible to secure a seat at one of the city’s top tables, especially if it’s just outside the downtown core. Pangaea’s open dining room typically caters to a well-heeled Yorkville crowd (with prices to match), but during the culinary fest, the restaurant offers a steal of a three-course prix fixe for $20 (we stopped by just before the festival commenced).
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Weekly Lunch Pick: an escape from winter at Yorkville’s Mideastro
The seafood couscous at Mideastro (Image: Renée Suen)
With Toronto’s wet, sloppy winter weather setting in, it’s nice to be reminded of warmer climes. The five-month-old Yorkville location of Mideastro does just that with its sophisticated take on Mediterranean and Israeli cuisine. It’s a particularly good bet at lunchtime, when smaller versions of many favourites from the dinner menu are available at a fraction of the cost.
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Where to Get Good Stuff Cheap 2012: 14 fashion finds
Tote
Studio Biba
2583 Yonge St., 416-921-6780
It used to be considered a travel bag, but over the past couple of years, Longchamp’s iconic Le Pliage nylon tote has become an everyday standard—celeb fans include Pippa Middleton, Katie Holmes and Rachel McAdams. Studio Biba at Yonge and Eglinton offers a deal on the sturdy, chic shoulder bag, selling it in a range of colours and sizes for as low as $99. Check out our 14-item fashion guide to living the good life for less »
Year in Review: 2011 was the year street food finally took off in Toronto
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After living through decades of delicious but pretty much uniform street meat, followed by a city-backed pilot program that ended up a complete fiasco, Torontonians finally got a glimpse of the street food promised land in 2011, thanks mostly to a clutch of feisty entrepreneurs. A selective and entirely arbitrary roundup of the highs and lows of Toronto ephemeral eating in 2011, after the jump.
Reason to Love Toronto: four new five-star hotels are about to make staycations super-luxe
Toronto is a great place to visit. Just ask the people who live nearby. Residents of Halton Region, a mere 30-minute drive down the QEW, made 153,000 overnight visits to the city in 2009, more than came from British Columbia, California, Texas or Illinois. The same goes for many of Toronto’s other bedroom communities: they could drive home after the show, but they prefer to stay the night. Tourism here is a giant house party, and our accommodations are getting a major upgrade with four new five-star hotels. Last February came the Ritz-Carlton on Wellington Street. January will mark the opening of the Trump Tower, a flamboyant structure at Bay and Adelaide whose 275-metre, 90-ton spire took 12 hours to lift into place (arguably Toronto’s greatest feat of high-rise engineering since the CN Tower). Asian Pacific–style opulence arrives next summer with the 65-storey Shangri-La on University Avenue. And our own luxury export to the world, Izzy Sharp’s Four Seasons, will finally get a hometown building worthy of its brand in summer 2012: two slender glass towers at Bay and Yorkville. The Manhattanization of our hotel industry is the result of an economy that continues to dodge the disasters befalling others. Together, the new hotels will provide 989 super-luxe rooms that are sure to be a hit with tourists. They may even resurrect Toronto in the eyes of Americans, whose impressions of us and willingness to visit are still tainted by the SARS crisis. But above all, they’ll make it more fun to splurge on ourselves.
The Star’s Vertical Toronto series on condo living continues its ascent
(Image: Daniel G.)
Last week we took a glance at the first instalment of Vertical Toronto, a three-part infographic on condo life courtesy of the Toronto Star. This week saw the tower o’ facts climb even higher, laden with some startling statistics. A very lopsided pie chart supports what we’ve reported about T.O.’s condo-building boom: since the turn of the century, three quarters of all new single-family homes purchased in the city have been condos. But more units means less space—the average new unit in downtown Toronto is 749 square feet, compared with 1,052 square feet for resale condos 10 years ago. If that sounds bad, try living in the smallest one sold this year: $166,000 for just 301 square feet in Regent Park (by contrast, the largest this year cost $28 million for 9,038 square feet in Yorkville’s Four Seasons). Also, in case condo-dwellers need to know, the graphic explains that it’s not kosher to fly kites, raise chickens, set off fireworks or raise poisonous snakes on their balconies. There goes the weekend. Read the entire story [Toronto Star] »
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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Introducing: Crêpes à GoGo on Bloor, the authentic French crêperie’s return to the Annex
Chef Véronique working a crêpe machine (Image: Gizelle Lau)
Crêpes à GoGo first started building its cult following at the corner of Bedford and Bloor in 2002, decamping for 18 Yorkville Avenue five years later to make way for a condo development. Now owner Véronique Perez—known to her customers as Chef Véronique—has returned to the Annex with a new location at Bloor and Spadina.
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Toronto’s top five Korean restaurants
If your idea of Korean cuisine is the bi bim bap listed at the bottom of your local sushi joint’s menu, then these restaurants will blow your mind
For fans of Korean comfort food willing to pay extra for slick, downtown decor, Swish by Han is a revelation. The seafood soon dubu is a spicy broth of tofu, shrimp, scallops, mussels and calamari. A raw quail’s egg adds buttery richness. 38 Wellington St. E., 647-343-0268.
Murdered millionaire jeweller was a west coast gangster, suspected hit man, police snitch and in the witness protection program
Back in October, we made note of the murder of a millionaire jeweller. The juicier details of the case involve Michael Costa, who police suspected might be involved with the murder, and his brother Daniel, a Toronto cop charged with perjury for allegedly misleading police regarding his brother’s whereabouts. Now, the plot thickens. The Toronto Star reported on Monday that the murder victim, Alexander Kucovic, led a double life: the Yorkville jeweller was also a west coast gangster, and a participant in the witness protection program. Oh, and he was a “suspected hit man and police snitch,” too. We figured the Star’s tenacity on the police beat would deliver the salacious details of this case, and so far they haven’t disappointed. We just hope they keep it up—we haven’t been this intrigued by a witness protection program commotion since Sister Act. Read the entire story [Toronto Star] »
Soon Toronto will have more condos than people
Condo city (Image: picturenarrative from the Torontolife.com Flickr pool)
New research by Bank of America Merrill Lynch suggests Toronto is building too many condos for its own good, and the booming market could bust soon. “We think investors are underestimating the wall of inventory about to come on the market in the next 12 to 24 months,” write economists Ryan Bohren and Sheryl King in the report. Indeed, last month Toronto had a third more high-rises under construction than Mexico City or New York—both of which have well over three times T.O.’s population. John Pasalis, president of Realosophy Realty, wrote on his company blog that the most important condition for a bubble is in place: blind, aggressive investors. He believes expensive condos (outside of Yorkville) are most vulnerable to a lack of demand, as shown by the poor resale figures at Festival Tower and the Ritz-Carlton. Not all signs point to disaster, however: according to sources quoted in the National Post, the rental vacancy rate in Toronto was just 1.6 percent in April (versus the national rate of 2.5), and the current building blitz could be compensating for a drop in small-scale construction. Whatever the result, the cityscape is about to get a lot taller. Read the entire story [National Post] »
The cat’s out of the bag: Daniel Boulud to open restaurant at the new Four Seasons
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Back in April, we reported that Daniel Boulud was another in the growing group of Michelin-starred chefs to snub Toronto in favour of Vancouver or Montreal. Not so, apparently: the National Post’s Shinan Govani confirmed yesterday the rumours that the lauded New York chef of Daniel fame will be opening a restaurant in the new Four Seasons hotel and condo complex on Bay Street (there’s an official announcement scheduled for next Thursday). This is the second Canadian hotel partnership in the works for the chef, who is opening Maison Boulud in Montreal in early 2012 to coincide with a $150-million renovation to the Montreal Ritz-Carlton. Previously, Boulud opened and subsequently closed two restaurants in Vancouver, DB Bistro Moderne and Lumière, after only two years in business.
Toronto ranked middle of the pack by Condé Nast Traveler Reader’s Choice Awards
Publishing powerhouse Condé Nast recently released the Condé Nast Traveler Reader’s Choice Awards—an annual roundup of the best places to visit and stay around the world—and Toronto’s showing was average at best. More than eight million votes were cast for the survey, with top honours going to exotic locales like Ritz-Carlton Shanghai, the Peninsula House in Dominican Republic and Four Seasons Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt. Toronto, on the other hand, seems to lack the allure of other far-flung (read: tropical) destinations. In fact, no Toronto-based hotels made the cut on the Top 100 travel experiences list, although a few Canadian locations did (King Pacific Lodge in B.C., Langdon Hall in Cambridge, Ontario, Emerald Lake Lodge in B.C. and Auberge Saint-Antoine in Quebec City). In the Canadian rankings, Toronto ranked fifth, behind practically every other city that matters (Quebec City, Vancouver, Montreal and even little Victoria). Although a few local spots did make the cut for the Canadian hotels list (the Hazelton Hotel was named fifth best in the country, the Four Seasons in Yorkville ranked 27th and the Windsor Arms and the Toronto Marriott Downtown Eaton Centre Hotel took 31st and 35th place, respectively), the results prove that the CN Tower has nothing on historical clout, mountains or waterfalls. The verdict: we could really use an ocean view and year-round sunshine. Read the entire story [Condé Nast] »
Old-timey photo of Joseph Bloor provokes terror (and a history lesson)
Someone on Reddit dredged up a chilling photograph of Joseph Bloor, the 1800s innkeeper, brewer and entrepreneur who lends his name to Bloor Street (although whether his name was Bloor or Bloore is hotly contested). He’s also the man responsible for founding Yorkville along with a member of the Jarvis family (yes, that Jarvis). Now, we admit, Mr. Bloor does look rather angry in the portrait, but we’re not surprised—Spacing informs us that his memorial tablet has been stuck in storage for years, and attempts to have it erected at the site of his old house have failed. We’d rather not have this particular ghost haunting us, so perhaps the city should get that resolved. See the photo [Reddit] »
