The social pitfalls and benefits of being a restaurant columnist tend to balance each other out. Friends who live in the city may never ask me home to dinner (they say they’re nervous about cooking for a critic), but friends from out of town are happy to visit me—especially after what happened to Eddie. When he was visiting from England a couple of years ago, I took him to Bistro Bakery Thuet on a night when Marc Thuet was in tip-top form. “Do you want to play?” the chef asked, then sent out an amazing procession of sumptuous, mostly Alsatian dishes—an impromptu tasting menu that Eddie declared was the best meal he had ever had. Back in London, he spread the word and suddenly people I hadn’t seen for years started getting in touch, eager for hospitality. “We’ll be in Toronto en route to L.A. and thought we might look you up! Perhaps we could go somewhere for dinner…”

Anyone hosting in their hometown wants the place to look good. It’s partly pride, in the best sense of the word, and partly insecurity. It’s also the innately competitive streak that seems to kick in with particular force when entertaining someone from Montreal or New York. We wish to delight our guests, but we want to impress the hell out of them, too, and do it Toronto style. And that’s where the complications begin. In Rome or Paris or Hong Kong, the indigenous cuisine is easily identified. In Toronto, not so much. We define ourselves by our eclecticism, our many ethnically diverse neighbourhoods. And this variety is strangely liberating. It allows me to take a foreign visitor to Thuet or to Sushi Kaji (the best Japanese restaurant in North America) or to Lai Wah Heen for avant-garde Cantonese dim sum and still feel I’m giving them a genuine Toronto experience. Theoretically, every restaurant from Anatolia to Little Tibet qualifies, but in practice, when a guest arrives, we narrow down the choices according to other more subjective standards. Looking back at where I’ve taken visitors over the past decade, clear favourites emerge—not all of them grand, but all unfalteringly consistent (an unsexy yet essential criterion), each one interesting and plangently Torontonian.

First impressions are crucial. Unless your guests are lucky enough to be flying in to the Island airport, their initial view of Toronto will likely be Etobicoke’s grey highways and grim industrial hinterlands. You could insist on blindfolding them or, better yet, turn your embarrassment at all the ugliness into unexpected triumph by taking them to Via Allegro. Tucked into a corner of a nondescript plaza at the foot of Highway 427, it’s exactly the high-energy, over-the-top palazzo to dazzle someone still in bewildered psychological spasm from the agonies of transatlantic flight. The restaurant turns 10 years old this summer, a decade that has seen it grow from a suburban pizza and pasta house with a list of 50 wines into something altogether unique, a manifestation of the exuberant passions of its creator, Phil Sabatino. The wine list has put on weight—tended by five sommeliers, it may now be the broadest and deepest in North America—and the lists of scotch (950 to choose from) and grappa (more than 200) are the stuff of legend. The beef program (animals specifically bred for Via Allegro are pampered from pasture to table) is truly state of the art, and yet the place retains a fierce pride in its humble roots. Pizza chef Joe Rodri­guez still bakes a first-class pie in his wood-fired ovens, and the menu still offers a simple dish of taglierini tossed with olive oil, basil and sweet cherry tomatoes flown in from Naples. Which may be just what your jet-lagged pilgrims crave. But try to dissuade them. Chef Lino Colle­vecchio is a master of opulence at both the traditional Italian and boldly contemporary ends of the spectrum. This is the place to feast on a roasted pig’s head garnished with its own honey-garlic-glazed tail or the notorious hundred-dollar risotto topped with foie gras and ancient balsamic and served with a solid gold spoon. Or let Colle­vecchio go mad with his “moody chef” mystery tasting menu full of seasonal goodies.

While Via Allegro’s unlikely suburban location is part of the fun—like finding a diamond in the long grass—at The Fifth, the coup de théâtre takes your guests through the throbbing nightclub and into a creaking freight elevator that emerges into the candlelit sophistication of Toronto’s only real supper club. It never fails. First-timers are always smitten by the charm and cleverness of the idea (which sprung fully formed from owner Libell Geddes’s imagination). I always enjoyed the cooking under J. P. Challet, but now that he’s moving on to a new venture, I’ll have to check out his replacement (especially before my next guest arrives).