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The Financial District is loosening up. Just as stuffy power restaurants have given way to trendy, cocktail-fuelled eateries, stiff suits and dour dresses have been replaced by unbuttoned collars, floral prints and statement accessories. After all, in the modern office, professional no longer necessarily means staid. Here, our favourite looks from a recent trip to the downtown core.
(Image: Gizelle Lau)
It wasn’t long ago that we watched as Ryan Gallagher brought his good-natured competitive streak to season two of Top Chef Canada, making it all the way to episode nine. In August, SIR Corp. announced that Gallagher would be leaving Ruby Watchco to find himself back in the Financial District (he worked as an insurance broker at Brookfield Place many years ago), as the executive chef at the relaunched Reds Wine Tavern. The two-storey restaurant, which opened back in 2000 as Reds Bistro and Wine Bar, shut down briefly in September for renovations. The result: a lively space full of—you guessed it—exposed brick, warm lighting and communal wooden tables that’s nevertheless still sophisticated enough for the district’s businesspeople.
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Soho House, the exclusive London-based members’ club, has gambled $8 million on a Simcoe Street outpost that’s the surest place in Toronto to bump into celebs
On Wednesday, July 25, a group of 30 people gathered for a secret meeting in the boardroom of a nondescript office building on Adelaide West. Among them were the heiress Trinity Jackman, indie record exec Jeff Remedios, TIFF artistic director Cameron Bailey, interior designer Anwar Mukhayesh, Sony Music president Shane Carter and the society queen bee Ashleigh Dempster. Together they represented a cross-section of the city’s new establishment—a group that had been carefully corralled by the organizers of the London-based Soho House to help decide who deserved to be a founding member of the private club’s new Toronto outpost.
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The seasonal butternut squash hot box at I.Q. Food Co.
I.Q. Food Co. opened its modern spin on the classic cafeteria at the T.D. Centre food mall last March to provide busy Bay Streeters with a rare and valuable commodity: healthy lunchtime takeout made with whole grains, lean proteins and good fats (nothing fried). Their website even provides a nutritional breakdown of the wraps, salads and hot boxes on the menu—though there are also cookies and muffins if you’re not counting calories, but only at the Brookfield location.
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The city’s great period of growth won’t continue if we don’t enlist the best and brightest minds from Bay Street, the universities and the public sector
Richard Florida believes Toronto should take a cue from innovative city-building strategies in Silicon Valley and Chicago
In 2007, when my wife and I moved here from Washington, D.C., Toronto was ascendant. I’d been offered a job at the University of Toronto’s Martin Prosperity Institute, a think tank investigating the competitiveness of cities. Toronto, it seemed to us, was an open, tolerant place offering a superb quality of life for its wide range of citizens. It was a destination of choice because of its thriving, stable economy, world-class banks, medical centres and cultural institutions, safety and livability, and diverse neighborhoods. It appeared a model of social cohesion, where people from across the globe were attracted to the prospect of a better future. Toronto’s best days were ahead.
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News of big changes at Reds Bistro and Wine Bar, SIR Corp’s signature Bay Street power restaurant: Michael Steh, who left a sous-chef gig at Splendido to take over Reds’ kitchen in 2006, is out as executive chef. Replacing him is Ryan Gallagher, who made it to episode nine in the last season of Top Chef Canada and worked until recently at Ruby Watchco (there’s a studly-chef photo of him, tattoos and all, on Reds’ new website). But the changes go further than that. The restaurant will be shutting down on September 1 for three weeks of top-to-bottom renovation. When the dust clears, the restaurant will have a new feel and a new name: Reds Wine Tavern. We spoke with assistant general manager Ayla Neilly to get the details.
Jan Gandhi and Omar Jabri share a love of big-city life: the people, the architecture, the fashion, the logarithmic bustle of human energy that comes from high-density, high-rise living. They first met as articling students with different Bay Street law firms, introduced by mutual friends. Together they moved to New York, where Gandhi worked as in-house counsel for MTV and Jabri as an intellectual property lawyer, and they lived in an apartment in Chelsea. Gandhi became addicted to flash-sale websites, filling her wardrobe with deeply discounted designer fashions. Flash sales are enormously popular in New York. She saw an underserved market in Toronto, so she hatched a plan to return and launch her own site.
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A mega-retreat planned for the shores of Lake Simcoe has pitted developer Earl Rumm of Markham-based Geranium Corporation against a group of millionaire Bay Streeters who have long owned cottages in the area and don’t want newcomers messing with their idyll. In the past 10 years those heavyweights have spent tens of millions of dollars (!) fighting the 242-hectare development, which would include 2,000 lakeside units, a golf course, a hotel and dozens of shops and restaurants. Now, they’ve teamed up with locals and environmentalists in a last-ditch effort to stop the province from selling a key piece of land that Rumm wants to use to build an artificial shoreline. If that effort fails, the resort—which has already received approval from the city and province—would be a done deal. Though Rumm is already working on that assumption: the site is being stripped of trees to prep for construction, and a sales centre is set to open in the fall. [Globe and Mail]
(Image: UrsaSharp)
Conrad Black must love lawyers as much as Barbara Amiel loves her Hungarian kuvasz dogs. In the midst of working through a few leftover Hollinger lawsuits—and one of his own against British author Tom Bower for his
biography
Turner outside his Caledon home, a former inn built in 1855
If the Toronto real estate market has nine lives, so, too, does its most famous prophet of doom, Garth Turner. Over a 40-year career, Turner has worked as a journalist, a broadcasting entrepreneur, a newspaper chain proprietor, a hotel and restaurant operator, twice as a federal MP (including a stint in Kim Campbell’s short-lived cabinet), a PC leadership candidate, and a financial author and speaker (or, as his critics put it, “seminar shill”). Most Canadians still know him best as the rebellious member of Stephen Harper’s government who was kicked out of caucus in the fall of 2006 for blogging about party business, then crossed the floor to join the Liberals.
Turner, you may be surprised to learn, is also a self-professed real estate junkie who over the years has bought and sold—very profitably—about 50 commercial and residential properties; he moved four in 2011 alone. But as he has watched prices and consumer debt levels soar, especially in Toronto and Vancouver, he has come to see the housing market as a grossly distended balloon that will—any day now—explode, raining debt and misery on the Canadian populace. Each delay to the inevitable reckoning, he argues, more deeply entrenches our delusion that the real estate boom—“the biggest bubble economy in history,” as he puts it—can continue forever, and leads a few thousand more naive young couples to sign five-per-cent-down mortgages on wildly overpriced fixer-uppers in Leaside or Riverdale. “The real estate correction will hurt,” he warns, “and the longer this thing goes before it tips, the more pain there will be.”
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The old Four Seasons Hotel, which will soon be converted to a condo building (Image: Danielle Scott)
The storied Four Seasons Hotel in Yorkville is going condo, but not without a snag or two: several laid-off banquet servers are accusing management of cheating them out of some of their severance pay. Most of the employees involved worked at the hotel for decades and pulled in some decent paycheques once their tips and service charges (paid by clients up-front to the hotel and fully taxed as income) are factored in. But in talks with the servers’ union, the hotel excluded the service charges from the severance agreement, basing the pay-outs solely on wages—meaning there are some massive gaps between what the workers were earning, and what they’ll be getting as severance. An example: Alex Litkowski worked for the hotel for 26-years and made a whopping $80,000 last year; but, because his hourly wages added up to only $19,000, that’s all he’ll get from the hotel, which is obligated to provide a year’s pay to longtime employees. The dispute, now in arbitration, is another sign that hotel workers are aggressively looking out for their interests. That said, the unionized workers at the new Four Seasons on Bay Street, which will open this summer, will be paid less than the workers at the old location—and the three other new luxury hotels in Toronto are all non-union. [Toronto Star]
(Image: Erin Seaman)
Trust business types to figure out how to cram an entire awards gala into the length of a standard business lunch. Yesterday at noon, the 27th annual National Business Book Award presentation at the Ritz-Carlton drew a crowd of authors, Bay Streeters and media veterans, including Conrad Black, Peter Mansbridge, Metro Morning’s Matt Galloway and Globe and Mail editor-in-chief John Stackhouse. The neck craning and whispers started when Black, nominated for his memoir, A Matter of Principle (which he says he will update now that he’s out of the slammer), arrived for the pre-luncheon cocktail hour. However, one press photographer didn’t seem intimidated by the Baron Black of Crossharbour: he chided Black for posing with his book shoved under his arm, instructing him how to hold it in a suitably promotional manner.
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(Image: Renée Suen)
The latest addition to the downtown grab-and-go market is housed in a new condo building built on what was once the rundown Bay Street Motel. Although dine-in options include four hot-pressed sandwiches, many instead head to the back refrigeration case for the freshly made and cardboard-packaged wedge sammies.
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Last fall, the Royal Bank of Canada—with $27 billion in annual revenue, $752 billion in assets and 74,000 employees, the biggest and most prudent bank in the world’s safest banking system—announced that new employees would no longer be eligible to receive what is probably the company’s most important workplace benefit: the comprehensive retirement insurance plan. It insures the Royal’s Canadian employees, or at least those hired before January 1, 2012, against all sorts of risks. The risk of reaching retirement age at a time when stock markets are down, or interest rates are low. The risk of outliving one’s retirement savings. Inflation risk. Risks you’ve probably never even heard of, like reinvestment risk and liquidity risk. Even the risk of earning below market returns.
This generous program wasn’t unique to the Royal. Many employers, particularly big companies, once offered similar plans. Some still do, though their numbers are dwindling. You may be wondering, “Why have I never heard of retirement insurance?” You have. It’s called a pension.
We’re heading for a pension crisis. The federal government says so. The opposition says so. Most provinces say so. The library shelves of the land groan beneath the weight of studies. The first class of baby boomers hit 65 this year, and we’re still not ready. The economist Michael Wolfson, formerly the assistant chief statistician of Canada and now at the University of Ottawa, estimates that half of all Canadians born between 1945 and 1970 who have average career earnings between $35,000 and $80,000 are facing a drop of at least 25 per cent in their post-retirement standard of living. Which is perhaps not surprising given that most of us don’t have a pension plan.
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Toronto is a hard-working city, but skyscrapers and cubicles aren’t for everybody
By Alex Bozikovic | Photography by Michael Graydon
1| An 1800-square-foot converted warehouse near Dundas and Dufferin
2| A one-bedroom apartment in the new Artscape Triangle Lofts near Queen and Dufferin
3| A massively renovated Victorian near College and Ossington
4| A five-storey landmark house in Corktown
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