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(Image: Emma McIntyre)
This jovial new Bloordale spot is the ultimate hipster family restaurant. The room is filled to the rafters with reclaimed curios—a model airplane hanging from the ceiling, vintage bikes mounted on the wall—but the space is large, the music is mercifully low and the crowd is a mix of flannel-clad 30-somethings and toddlers. The cooks in the open kitchen sport pointy paper hats and bow ties while prepping trendy but safe bistro food.
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(Image: Courtesy The Whippoorwill)
Bloordale’s newest brunch spot deploys all the ubiquitous diner-kitsch cutery—red vinyl booths, checkered floors, Formica tables—without overdoing it. (We only noticed one taxidermied moose head.) The kitchen offers satisfying riffs on traditional brunch fare. Soft buttermilk biscuits sit under two runny poached eggs, fresh watercress and an expertly lemony bearnaise sauce. Eggs come with the crunchiest potatoes you may have ever tasted, spicy, ’nduja-chunked braised beans, and scrapple, a Pennsylvania Dutch dish of pan-fried, pork-studded cornbread. It’s crisp and salty, but far too rich to be doled out in such massive servings. Service is friendly and speedy— but make sure to get there before 11:30, when the line snakes out the door.
Sang Kim’s new Yakitori Bar (Image: Gizelle Lau)
(Image: Megan Leahy)
From the late ’60s until the ’80s, Karelia was an influential Scandinavian design store in Toronto run by Janis Kravis. Now his son, Leif Kravis, along with his wife Donna Ashley, have revived the brand with Karelia Kitchen, a Scandinavian-inspired café at Dufferin and Bloor. The 24-seat, 600-square-feet space has a clean-lined, minimalist Scandinavian aesthetic, with a ceiling panelled in locally sourced tongue-and-groove ash and naked walls painted ochre and rusty red. In fine Scandinavian style, the counter-service menu fluctuates depending on what is market-fresh, local and in-season.
Santouka Ramen was one of the many ramen shops to open this month (Image: Karolyne Ellacott)
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In a 10-day Restaurant Makeover-ish blitz, friends Shawn Creamer (Dakota Tavern) and Tyler Cunningham (Ultra) have taken over and transformed the homey Bloordale Pantry into the trendier Whippoorwill Restaurant and Tavern (consider it Bloordale’s second wave of gentrification). A regular at the Pantry, Creamer told us that he would often half-jokingly offer to take over the space from its owners, Rose Guarnieri and Anthony Menna. Eventually, the half-joke became a deal.
Jeff Garcia’s striking mural adorns one wall at Bar Neon (Image: Gizelle Lau)
When Bar Neon opened last month, it became Bloordale’s answer to the trend embodied by places like Grand Electric and 416 Snack Bar: hip, local watering holes not afraid to serve food with a little ambition. Behind Bar Neon is Niki Tsourounakis, who grew up around the restaurant business, near Montreal. She also owns Café Neon Read the rest of this entry »in just outside the Junction Triangle and Amphora Products, a company that imports organic Vlatos olive oil and fleur de sel from Crete—both of which, naturally, make a few appearances on the plates at Bar Neon.
ORTOLAN Read the rest of this entry »
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1211 Bloor St. W., 647-348-4500
By now the formula is familiar: young chefs set up small, idiosyncratic restaurant in down-at-heels neighbourhood on shoestring budget and compensate for limited chalkboard menu and no-reservations policy with good food and reasonable prices. Damon Clements and Daniel Usher, the chef-owners at Bloordale Village’s new local-focused bistro, just a few doors down from the House of Lancaster strip club, happen to do a better job with the formula than many of their peers. The cooking is outstanding much of the time: superb potato gnocchi with chopped mint, early-season asparagus, creamy, melted mascarpone and grana padano cheese, for instance, or hangar steak that’s gently charred at its edges and busting with beefy flavour on top of a caper brown-butter pan sauce. Desserts are great, none better than the tiny jam pot of chocolate mousse that tastes of expensive cocoa beans. Service is spot-on. Among the quirks here: there is no vodka or gin (the owners loathe generic white spirits). Closed Sunday and Monday. Mains $14–$20.
Manager Kaili Kinnon and owners Alex Sinclair and Andrew Helfrich
“Blansdowne,” to use the oft-deprecating moniker for the strip of Bloor around Lansdowne, may be losing traction with the recent addition of new places to eat. One such business is The Lansdowne Cone, which opened its doors a few weeks ago to an enthusiastic reception from the area’s residents.
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(Image: Catherine Gerson)
With a name nodding to a notorious old-world culinary delicacy, Ortolan quietly opened its doors two weeks ago in the space formerly occupied by Kathy’s Kitchen in Bloordale Village. Taking a little bit of Ossington with them, chef-owners Damon Clements (Delux) and Daniel Usher (Pizzeria Libretto) have pooled their respective experiences in French and Italian cuisines to branch out on their own on the quickly changing strip between Dufferin and Lansdowne.
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Toronto-focused television already has its place in fiction, from the mind-warping fantasy of Being Erica to the gang’s-all-here approach of Metropia. So when The Hills collapsed in Lauren Conrad’s absence and a trashy void needed to be filled, Toronto stepped up with the racial stereotyping of Lake Shore. Or that’s what we thought until we saw The Avenue.
Local production company Fisher/Morris had dollar signs in their eyes after meeting Gregory Gorgeous, a flamboyant, back-treading gay caricature from an undisclosed Ontario suburb, and stuck him in the show. The Avenue is a Toronto-based Web series that has generated some early interest after only five heavily scripted Webisodes (everyone seemed to be talking about its coming finale on Twitter last night). Here, we go back to the beginning to recap the first installment, following the show’s five vacuous wannabes as they tear up over snubbed non-contracts, difficult gay men and the trials transplants face when trying to “make it big” in the dark, mean streets of semi-privileged Toronto.
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The spare display at Sarah Duke’s new store (Images: Glynnis Mapp)
The place: Sara Duke’s Factory Store is a sight for sore sartorial eyes along the quietly gentrifying section of Bloor Street West between Lansdowne and Dufferin (“gentlemen’s club” House of Lancaster notwithstanding). Some vintage retail shops offer kin company—namely furniture–meets–fashion store Lost and Found and 69 Vintage—but it’s been a while since this ’hood has welcomed a new clothing hub, and a bespoke one at that.
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Follow their Drift: Matt Michrowski and Damian Gaughan's new Bloor West bar (Image: Jon Sufrin)
Bloordale? Dufferin Grove? Blandsdowne? Dovercourt Park? The local boundaries may be in dispute, but the area is on the rise. Two years ago, the list of hangout options near Bloor and Dufferin looked like this: dive bar, Portuguese dive bar, dive bar, Disgraceland. Then came 3 Speed and Holy Oak, Starving Artist and Calico—edgy places that toy with the concept of “dive” without actually being uninviting.
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