Dessert? Why not. Tiramisù is extinct in most of the city but almost ubiquitous on this stretch of King. I toyed with the idea, then noticed cannoli. A place with a good goombah name should have them to rights, made freshly to order, crisp pastry dissolving on the tongue, whipped cream or mascarpone mousse as sweet as an angel’s sigh. Alas, these were inedible—hard biscuit tubes piped full of some bitter, orangey putty, garnished with irrelevant mint and a token aspirin strawberry. The waiter had the grace to remove them from the bill.

The overall standard of service along King Street West is irreproachable. In each of a dozen places I found talent, patience and intelligence. Some servers were grizzled old pros, some just starting out, but they all took the time to engage with their customers and make them feel welcome.

Occasionally, attentiveness was a little over the top. At Muse, for example, the waiters circled the salubrious room like restless cats in a cage, pausing to ask if everything was to our satisfaction whenever they passed the table. Every spoonful of the piquant, garlicky broth that bathed mussels in their shells, every slice cut from the admirably well grilled rack of lamb was discreetly scrutinized by these sentinels as it made its way to my mouth. Again, dessert was a puzzle—on the one hand a wedge of dense, gooey, supersweet cheesecake, a crude confection more suited to a plasterer’s trowel than a plate; on the other, a near-perfect crème brûlée graced with a hint of orange—the difference in quality a sign of a capable kitchen forced to cut corners, therefore also a sign of the times.

But the strip continues to grow. Although Fortune Cookie and Reuben S. both closed last year, the properties will not be vacant long, despite the strip’s famously high rents and property taxes. Far from upping the competition, another explosion of restaurants farther west on King, past Spadina, has been a benefit, bringing even more people to the neighbourhood. The nightclubs of Richmond Street, however, have had little impact. “It’s a younger crowd,” explains Al Carbone. “They come to drink, not to eat.”

At 52, Carbone is one of the King West originals, in every sense. In 1989, he opened Kit Kat in a narrow, ramshackle convenience store where he also happened to live, at a time when La Fenice, Fred’s Not Here, Marcel’s and Le Pigalle were the only alternatives to Ed Mirvish’s twinkling line of restaurants one block east. Ten years ago, he bought a property just around the corner on John Street and turned it into Club Lucky, though regulars usually refer to it as Kit Kat Too. Back then, Carbone was involved in politics, running for mayor and then city councillor, leading deputations to city hall to protest market value assessment and making the case that a 300 per cent increase in property tax was excessive. “The city takes advantage of certain areas,” he rumbles in his basso profundo. “Look at the cost of parking on King Street—three bucks an hour and it runs all night long. We are stifled by bylaws.”

Carbone’s new project is far from this territory, the renovation of the old Parkdale Hotel on Queen West West—20,000 square feet, including a club and a restaurant called Maximo’s, for his son. The opening is set for April. At the rear, he adds, is private parking for at least 50 cars. “The area is like King Street in the old days,” he says. “Things were more fun then. I remember when the heads of the CBC came by for lunch and we were full. We set up a table for 12 in the laneway behind the Kit Kat and they had a great time, joking with the vans as the drivers inched past.”

Kit Kat is still gratifyingly busy, its regulars fiercely loyal to the wholesome, workaday Italian cooking, its eccentric ambience a reflection of Carbone’s warmth and passion for collecting statuettes of pigs, cats and other quisquilia. Signed photos of such luminaries as Joan Plowright, Keith Richards and Dave Stieb attest to its popularity with a broad spectrum of out-of-towners. Carbone spends his evenings there and at Club Lucky, leading the latest debate about curtain-up times for Lord of the Rings. “It’s a long show,” he concedes, “but starting at seven o’clock is bad for the restaurants. The producers have agreed to change the time to 7:30 after previews are over, which is a big plus.”

That will give audiences time to load up on no-risk, homespun Greek food at Penelope or a monotone curry at Kama. If they are early, they might go to La Fenice for vitello tonnato or a simple grilled fish, though the cooking and the attention to detail are not what they were when its creator, Luigi Orgera, was alive. Perhaps they’ll find their way to the Red Tomato, underneath Fred’s Not Here. I ended up there one afternoon and was shown to a crumb-covered red plush banquette close to the open kitchen. The mood was cozy and convivial, bright with murals and cute table lamps along the bar, each one painted with a large red tomato. Someone had booked three tables for a 50th birthday party, and the Mylar balloons were already floating above the cutlery, waiting for the guests to arrive. This time, the music was Thin Lizzy, but I stayed nonetheless, tucking into the “famous baked lobster and crab soup,” a deep bowlful of red liquid sealed with a dome of pastry, no doubt in homage to Paul Bocuse’s iconic recipe. The soup itself was rich and hearty, like a smooth bisque, but tasted as much of tomato as seafood—appropriately enough, I suppose. Seeing a wood-fired oven in the kitchen, I also ordered one of the restaurant’s many pizzas. The crust was elegantly thin but overburdened with tangy bottled artichoke hearts, green onions, olives, herbs, chili, garlic salt and unctuous grana padano cheese. Like so much fast food, it was much too heavily seasoned, the flavours blowsy and obvious. Somehow I ate the whole thing.

Had I really hoped for some epiphanic gastronomical discoveries on this beat? A flash of gold in the dark? Spoon (close to Spadina and now nearly three years old) came as one delightful surprise. I almost didn’t go in. Peering through the front window, I could see the room was completely empty (at eight on a Thursday night), and a note stuck to the glass advertising the need for a line cook did not inspire confidence. But the place looked both cool and welcoming, with candlelight flickering on whitewashed brick walls, interesting mirrors and hangings of woven copper. And the soundtrack was a distinct improvement on recent experiences—a nice mix of house and fado-like world music assembled by the guys at Budo Liquid Theatre, friends of Alan Paraie, Spoon’s owner. Paraie also describes himself as executive chef, although that evening he wasn’t in whites. Cooking for me, said the solitary server, was a man called Lance Schmidt.

The dishes he sent out were simple but beautifully executed. OK, he had nothing to do but work on my plates, and it’s true I was coming off two solid weeks of profoundly humdrum fare, but this food had real integrity. First came a careful stack of well-oiled flatbread fingers, warm, fresh and flavoured with herbs. My starter was two tender sweetbreads, each the size of a toddler’s fist, rolled in pungent chopped sage and enveloped in crispy bacon. Beside them, a salad of mixed baby greens proved a riot of bittersweet flavours. I chose halibut for a main course: a thick section of the fish, its skin crisp, its flesh parting into juicy petals at the touch of a fork. It lay on a mound of chopped savoy and napa cabbages tossed with soft morsels of sun-dried tomato, which added sweetness and a deliciously funky edge to the pure taste of the cabbages. A reduction of veal stock and apple brandy completed the dish—no starch, and I didn’t miss it.

Spoon offers a small list of French classics for dessert. I was heartened and even touched to see “pâte sucrée” spelled correctly in the description of the house lemon tart. But it’s easier to make a bad chocolate mousse than a bad lemon tart, so, perversely, I chose the mousse. I have seldom had better. The Lindt chocolate rode that delectable cusp between milk and dark; the texture found the ideal mousse spot between sticky weight and aerated foam.

Spoon’s wines seem to have been chosen with primary flavours in mind—lots of New World bordeaux varietals and thrill-the-palate sauvignons—which works with the food and doesn’t cost the earth. Indeed, the overall value for money would have pleased the most parsimonious hobbit. Just three minutes from the Princess of Wales, this is the place for a farewell supper before setting off for Mount Doom.