Baldwin Street takes a siesta in the middle of a sunny afternoon. The lunchtime crowds have gone back to work, leaving the sidewalk to the locals. Some of the restaurants along the broad, tree-lined avenue have closed for a couple of hours, hanging chains across the entrances of their patios. Cars are few; you can hear the birds. I’m on my own in the front garden of Bodega, one of the street’s keystone restaurants, enjoying the hint of a breeze that stirs the leaves of the creepers on the old brick house and makes the stippled sunlight dance on the tablecloth. A small glass of cold late-harvest riesling, a slice of foie gras terrine as smooth as cool butter to spread onto crisp toasts—it doesn’t count as self-indulgence when the flavours are this delicious.

Besides, I reckon I’ve earned it after a week spent exploring this unique little enclave. The single block of Baldwin running east-west between McCaul and Beverley boasts 23 restaurants of a dozen different ethnic persuasions—26 if you count the ones round the corner on McCaul (some residents do; others, quite vehemently, don’t)—plus a health food store, a video shop, a used record emporium (I left a lot of the jazz vinyl of my youth there last year, and with it a little of my soul), a locksmith, a laundromat, an artist’s gallery, the Baldwin Village Inn (a charming bed and breakfast beloved of foreign doctors visiting Toronto) and a convenience store. And Chada, David Lloyd-Hughes’s 17-year-old gallery that sells everything from candles to puppets and furniture to sarongs, all imported from Southeast Asia. The businesses are a close-knit group, though they have so far resisted local councillor Adam Vaughan’s suggestion that a merchants’ association might be a useful idea. “We’re all independent entrepreneurs,” says the affable Lloyd-Hughes, Cardiff still evident in his accent, “which means we’re basically unemployable anywhere else.”

Vaughan may have a point, however. Sooner or later, some developer with deep pockets may notice the happy-go-lucky hamlet in the heart of downtown and make the landlords an offer they can’t refuse. They’ll have a fight on their hands. The locals are proud of the fact that there is no cuckoo of a Starbucks or McDonald’s in their nest. Many of those entrepreneurs are also residents living above (or, in the case of Lloyd-Hughes and his family, behind) their premises, which gives cohesion to the community, as well as character. “It creates the Coronation Street effect,” says Andrew Inman, the eloquent young Englishman who manages John’s Italian Caffe, another keystone of the neighbourhood. “When I first started working here three and a half years ago, I found it quite odd that locals would walk into the kitchen from the back alley to pick up their pizzas, and that others simply used the café as their living room—had done so for decades.”

For once, Toronto’s insistence that neighbourhoods should be called “villages” makes perfect sense, but for all its proudly parochial spirit, Baldwin is intimately connected to the city that surrounds it. The restaurants’ lunchtime clientele is drawn from the offices and hospitals of University Avenue, from the Ontario College of Art and Design, one block to the south, and the University of Toronto, one block to the north. There’s a daily lineup of cops, nurses and Citytv personnel outside Yung Sing, eager for the Cantonese buns (which are baked and therefore less soggy than the typical steamed variety) and the weekend specials of freshly made har gow and shiu mai. Chu Ko and his wife, Ngan, have been making them since 1968, toiling away in a basement; occasionally, customers glimpse them through a floor-level service hatch.