Last Woman Standing
The bombshell widow and her resentful sister-in-law each wanted the family business for herself. Inside the nasty, operatic feud at Pusateri’s By Alec Scott
Image credit: Kagan McLeod
The condos rising on the northwest corner of Yorkville and Bay start at $2.5 million, while those going up on the northeast, part of the new Four Seasons complex, begin at a mere $1.9 million. At the southwest corner is, of course, Pusateri’s, the purveyor of fine foods for moneyed Toronto, including the future inhabitants of these buildings. It was here that I first heard a woman speak of her cottage’s “luggage room”: she was on her cell, telling the housekeeper that she could find tennis racquets in the luggage room.
The deluxe food hall will celebrate its fifth anniversary this fall. It has become, in a short span, one of this increasingly, ostentatiously prosperous city’s icons. It signals Yorkville’s move to the next level, from local shopping hub to jet-set destination, a little island of glam in the otherwise mousy, sensible sea of Toronto. There are, within this Aladdin’s cave, more than 22 types of olives and fresh breads ranging from two-bite Ace baguettes to several subspecies of batard. A sign in the café announces, “The North American premiere of Jamón Ibérico de Bellota, the world’s most expensive dry-cured hams.” Mick Jagger’s chef supposedly shops here when the Stones are in town. I’ve spotted Kiefer Sutherland buying a prosciutto panino. Local customers run the gamut from relatively old to new money, from long-established society names to freshly minted ones.
The floors are a rich grey-and-brown marble; the columns throughout are clad in silvery terrazzo tiles; the light descends gently from glass crescents that look like they’re made of rough, white Japanese origami paper. The whole place shimmers, as if it were a grocery store rendered by Gustav Klimt.
Together with the larger, 17,500-square-foot Avenue and Lawrence branch, Pusateri’s sells as much as $50 million worth of groceries a year. The stores have made a tidy fortune for two families—two families that used to consider themselves one, before the nasty, operatic feud that split them apart.
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