Toronto Life’s roundup of the restaurants with the biggest buzz, the longest lineups and the toughest tables to snag.
Bar Isabel holds strong at the top and Jack Bauer’s presence pulls a normally buzz-free tavern into the number ten spot.
All stories relating to Chantecler
Slideshow: Claudio Aprile hosts a farewell dinner for Colborne Lane with six of his top alumni
Claudio Aprile closed Colborne Lane in February with little notice in order to focus on his growing stable of Origin restaurants. Last night, at Origin Liberty Village, Aprile enlisted six of the top chefs who’ve passed through Colborne’s kitchen—Matt Blondin (Momofuku Daishō), Steve Gonzalez (Top Chef Canada), David Haman (Woodlot), Ben Heaton (The Grove), Jonathan Poon (Chantecler) and Andrew Wilson (Colborne Lane’s final chef de Cuisine)—to join him for a tribute to the pioneering modernist restaurant. Each chef created one hors d’oeuvre and one course, revealing the ways they’ve diverged since their time at Colborne but also betraying debts to Aprile’s style—right down to his idiosyncratic way of describing dishes on the menu.
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Friday Night Bites: tables for two at Canoe, Chantecler and Acadia
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It’s 4 p.m. on Friday, and you don’t have a dinner reservation. Still, there’s no need to fret (or waste your night waiting for a table). We just called some of the city’s hottest restaurants and found three that can squeeze in two for dinner tonight. Now it’s up to you to get dialing and snag a table before they’re all gone. Today: Canoe, Chantecler and Acadia.
Flavour of the Year: Five twisted takes on steak tartare
The steak house app has gotten freaky lately, with everything from raw beef heart to pine bark and elderberry mustard. Here, the top five.
The Dish Power Rankings: Top Chefs and Bieber power
Toronto Life’s weekly assessment of the restaurants with the biggest buzz, the longest lineups and the toughest tables to snag.
On Monday, the contestants for season three of Top Chef Canada were announced, catapulting their respective restaurants onto this week’s power rankings. Meanwhile, the mighty power of the Biebs bumps up the hype for an Annex diner, and the depth of Toronto’s appetite for brunch tacos is revealed.
The Dish Power Rankings: The Valentine’s madness edition
Toronto Life’s weekly assessment of the restaurants with the biggest buzz, the longest lineups and the toughest tables to snag.
Edulis’s charming (and tiny) dining room propels the restaurant to the top this week on the strength of its Valentine’s bookings. Lower down, a couple new sold-out tasting menus debut, as does College Street’s next hot brunch destination.
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GALLERY: Chantecler launches its new tasting menu
(Images: Renée Suen)
Chantecler announced in December that it was dropping its à-la-carte menu and expanding its popular lettuce wrap Sundays to rest of the week. Although the move helped attract diners, it also meant that chef and co-owner Jonathan Poon was no longer able to cook the sort of inventive Asian-Canadian fusion dishes that had started to attract attention—which is why, like Yours Truly and Actinolite, he followed through on plans for a new tasting menu last Friday. “I love cooking things like crispy, soggy calamari,” Poon told us, “but I also have a desire to cook food that’s more refined.” The $40, four-course menu alternates between small bites and larger composed plates (which means that about 10 dishes come out in total), and is limited to two seatings a night on Fridays and Saturdays, which must be booked at least four days in advance. For an extra $45, co-owner Jacob Wharton-Shukster will pour a series of natural wines paired with each course. Here’s what Poon served for the menu’s first run.
Friday Night Bites: tables for two at Chantecler, Marben and Bestellen
Read the rest of this entry »It’s 4 p.m. on Friday, and you don’t have a dinner reservation. Still, there’s no need to fret (or waste your night waiting for a table). We just called some of the city’s hottest restaurants and found three that can squeeze in two for dinner tonight. Now it’s up to you to get dialing and snag a table before they’re all gone. Today: Chantecler, Marben and Bestellen.
Glas is launching a vegetarian tasting menu
Local beets with black olives, pea shoots and horseradish foam (Image: Courtesy Glas)
Leslieville’s Glas Wine Bar is getting in on the tasting menu trend that’s been sweeping Toronto restaurants. Yours Truly led the charge with their Carte Blanche menu last year, followed by Keriwa (which later reversed course), Actinolite, Buca, Farmhouse Tavern and Chantecler, whose menu launches this weekend (stay tuned for more on that).
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The 15 Toronto restaurants recommended in Where Chefs Eat, a new culinary guidebook
Where Chefs Eat is a new 633-page collection of answers to a very simple question: where to go for a good meal? Those answers are from some 400 of the world’s top chefs, including Ferran Adria, Daniel Boulud, David Chang, Fergus Henderson and Rene Redzepi, as well as Toronto chefs Michael Steh, formerly of Reds, and Claudio Aprile, chef and owner of Colborne Lane and Origin. The guidebook is edited by Guardian critic Joe Warwick, who also co-founded the World’s 50 Best Restaurants awards. It’s not only an inventory of the flashy big-name places in a city, but also of regular neighbourhood and cheap eats spots. There’s even a category for places the chefs wish they opened. We flipped through the tome to pull out the 15 restaurants in and around Toronto recommended by the world’s top chefs.
Cheap Eats: 11 Toronto restaurants (and bars and food shops) where you can eat well for less
2013 is shaping up to be the Year of Cheap Eats in Toronto. Lobster prices are at record lows. Delicious Asian street food is plentiful. And every fancy restaurant is tripping over itself to offer a sandwich deal. (Some bars are even serving inventive cocktails for $10 or less, a steal in the age of the $18 Manhattan). Below, 11 of the best deals in town right now.
The Dish Power Rankings: feasting menus and Maple Leafs edition
Toronto Life’s weekly assessment of the restaurants with the biggest buzz, the longest lineups and the toughest tables to snag.
The biggest movement this week was lower down on the list, where over-the-top feasting meals at Catch and Dyne managed to knock off a few restaurants that weren’t quite buzzy enough (see last week’s rankings). Café Boulud took the biggest hit, slipping three places after Jared Bland took the New York superchef’s bistro to task for its lack of ambition in our February issue. Real Sports Bar and Grill makes its entry in the list thanks to the long-awaited return of the Leafs this Saturday.
The Dish Toronto Restaurant Power Rankings: game on
Toronto is in the middle of a great restaurant boom. Over 150 restaurants opened in the last year alone, most of them hyped on Twitter, deconstructed on blogs (like ours) and ranked in countless year-end roundups. Tracking the ups and downs—the praise and the pans—has never been more entertaining. That’s why we’ve decided to launch our first-ever Power Rankings, a list of the restaurants with the biggest buzz, the longest lineups and toughest tables to snag. Below, the 20 restaurants that are dominating the foodie conversation in Toronto right now.
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Year in Review: 2012’s biggest food trends, from the shadow return of fusion to the reign of ramen
Taste moves in waves: one year tall food is on every menu in town, and the next year, it’s a half-forgotten embarrassment. Sometimes, though, those embarrassments come back in a new guise. This year saw the quiet return of certain tendencies that we thought were long-buried, like fusion cuisine and wine bars, as well as the full-blown emergence of others that were bubbling away just below the surface, like tacos and, of course, ramen. Below, a roundup of what was hot in 2012.
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The Momofuku Effect: How David Chang took over the city’s menus long before Momofuku even opened its Toronto doors
(Photographs courtesy Momofuku)
The New York mastermind behind Momofuku is one of the most copied chefs of the last decade. His brand of fusion—Asian street food elevated to fine dining—has been inspiring Toronto chefs for years. In fact, if you’ve eaten at the restaurants below, chances are you’ve already tasted Chang’s influence. Here, eight Momofuku signatures and their Toronto counterparts.
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