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Toronto Life’s roundup of the restaurants with the biggest buzz, the longest lineups and the toughest tables to snag.
The city’s most powerful restaurants stayed busy despite storms and frigid temperatures. Below, Porzia makes a dramatic climb to second place and a drop-in from a UK food celeb nabs Momofuku Noodle Bar its first appearance on the list.
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Wvrst Sausage Hall on King West
In the ’60s, Toronto had a bustling Eastern European food scene. Polish, Hungarian and German immigrants opened up humble cafés and grocery stores along Schnitzel Row (the stretch of Bloor between Spadina and Bathurst), in Kensington Market and on Roncesvalles Avenue, servicing mostly the expat community, and a few WASPs who fancied themselves adventurous for ordering fried chicken livers or cabbage rolls. By the ’80s, much of that first wave of Eastern Europeans had retired to the suburbs, taking their goulash and spaetzle with them (RIP Hungarian Goulash Party Tavern). The remaining downtown restaurants, like The Prague on Queen West, have turned into haunts for hungover students scarfing cheap smoked salmon palacinky or doughy pierogies.
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A party like the Power Plant gallery fundraiser Power Ball: Quarter-Life Crisis hasn’t happened in Toronto since the Dangerous Method fete at Soho House last TIFF. The celebrity presence may not have been there, but the attitude was the same: old biddies, artists, hipsters, PR gals and banker bros all partied together, taking in unusual art while drinking a lot (a lot) and eating wild bison sandwiches prepared by celebrity chef Marc Thuet in between emergency dance breaks. A party of such esteem isn’t without its boldface names, and we saw Belinda Stronach, writer Victoria Webster, the Globe and Mail’s Gabe Gonda, gossip columnist Shinan Govani, Zoomer’s Suzanne Boyd, artist Rui Amaral, eTalk’s Tanya Kim, designer Jeremy Laing, accessories designer Maryam Keyhani, socialite Jenna Bitove and The Society’s Ashleigh Dempster and Amanda Blakley.
This season, we’re chatting with each week’s eliminated chef after they get the boot (or, rather, after their boot-getting episode airs—this stuff was recorded months ago).
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Buca’s Rob Gentile, C5’s Corbin Tomaszeski and Union’s Teo Paul (Images: Renée Suen)
This past Sunday marked the 22nd edition of Toronto Taste, which saw 2,000 food enthusiasts gathering at the ROM to meet some of Toronto’s top chefs while munching on their creations. Over 60 restaurants and 30 beverage purveyors were present at the annual fundraiser, which raises money for Second Harvest, a food rescue program that delivers to various social service agencies. This year, guests were greeted with everything from house-cured meats and fish to lobster and steak (not necessarily together). We caught up with Buca’s Rob Gentile, Nota Bene’s David Lee, Petite Thuet’s Marc Thuet and Biana Zorich, Splendido’s Victor Barry, Top Chef Canada judge Mark McEwan and many more for the latest on their various ventures.
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Jennifer McLagan joins the regular crew at the Shops at Don Mills (Image: Courtesy Top Chef Canada)
With only four chefs remaining in the competition, last night’s episode of Top Chef Canada started in style—with Carl Heinrich, David Chrystian, Trevor Bird and Jonathan Korecki suiting up at their condo, accompanied by appropriately gladiatorial music. Over the next 43-odd TV minutes they’d be confronted with a legendarily tough (and foul-mouthed) guest judge, and one of those perplexing elimination challenges that leaves a chef between a rock and a hard place. Find out who makes it to the final and who gets sent packing, below.
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It’s only fitting that the birthday bash for a restaurant that describes itself as a spot for “international influential tastemakers, money-makers and scene stealers” would last for several months. To mark its 25th anniversary, Centro is holding an alumni dinner series, featuring seven of the chefs who’ve passed through the place’s doors since it opened. The series’ first instalment is this coming Monday and features Chris McDonald, now at Cava, who did a stint at the Cal-Ital temple in the ’80s. The pretty impressive list of other participating alums: Michael Bonacini (Oliver and Bonacini), Marc Thuet (Thuet Fine Foods), David Lee (Nota Bene), Bruce Woods (Modus), Frank Parhizgar (Frank’s Kitchen) and Jason Carter, who left Centro earlier this year. Check out Centro’s website for more details on the series.
Remember last year when Chris Cosentino, one of the pioneers of the offal revival, visited Toronto for undisclosed reasons and claimed he could smell Chinatown from three blocks away? Or when Richard Blais, the molecularly inclined winner of Top Chef All-Stars, tweeted about the interesting tasting menu he’d just lunched on in Toronto? Or when Italian food legend Lidia Bastianich dropped in at All the Best Fine Foods? Turns out they weren’t here just because they love us—they’re all guest judges on season two of Top Chef Canada. Other notable judges and tasters include—and let us be clear, this is a bit of a spoiler for those who really like to keep their Top Chef Canada viewing pure—east-coast chef Michael Smith, season one host Thea Andrews (no hard feelings, we guess!), chef-about-town Matty Matheson of Parts and Labour, Leafs assistant captain Colby Armstrong, Susur Lee and his soon-to-be restaurateur sons Kai and Jet Bent-Lee, Toca’s Tom Brodi, Roger Mooking, Top Chef Masters winner Marcus Samuelson, last season’s winner Dale MacKay and his adorable son Ayden, Keisha Chante, Rick the Temp Campanelli, Lorenzo Loseto of George, Charlie’s Burgers mastermind Franco Stalteri, husband-and-wife dynamos Marc Thuet and Biana Zorich, Odd Bits author Jennifer McLagan, Vancouver Indian restaurateur and chef Vikram Vij and assorted competitors from last season, not to mention the somewhat bizarro guests we already told you about, like Alan Thicke and Mike Holmes. (Whew!) Not bad.
(Image: Michelle Easton)
Loblaws is set to launch a line of gourmet products meant to compete with the likes of Pusateri’s or Mark McEwan’s grocery store McEwan, the auspiciously named President’s Choice Black Label. Indeed, they’re working with Toronto chefs like Marc Thuet and Anthony Walsh and macaron pushers Bobbette and Belle to introduce a tasting menu based on the products to 40 or 50 food writers and “influencers” at Parkdale’s Neubacher Shor Contemporary gallery on September 22. We got a sample at this week’s TIFF Tastemakers gifting lounge at the Intercontinental, where celebs were offered ginger-spiced chocolate, hickory-smoked olive oil, sweet chipotle dip and bacon marmalade.
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A modern beer-and-sausage hall on King and a quintessential wine bar on Queen
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WVRST 
609 King St. W., 416-703-7775
Chef Aldo Lanzillotta’s modern “sausage and beer hall and other wonders,” as he’s called it, is exactly what it sounds like: long plywood communal tables and bench seating run the length of the stripped-down space that used to be Marc Thuet’s convict-run restaurant, Conviction. There are 18 house-made sausage options, from traditional (Italian, boerewors, kranjska) to vegetarian (tofu kolbasa that tastes like malnutrition) to game (venison, kangaroo and duck, which tastes like chicken liver). The crowd is young and worldly, for the most part: plaid shirts and Topshop playsuits who see the delicious irony in conservative Bavarian-Italian fare served on King West. The food is good, though limited—fennel-rich pork sausage, for instance, grilled over a gas flame and topped with caramelized onions on a grilled bun. The duck fat–fried French fries are crispy and intensely potato-y, though they’re only marginally different from the ones fried in plain vegetable oil. The beer list, curated by Stephen Beaumont of Beerbistro, is one of the best in town and includes bottlings from Quebec’s outstanding Dieu du ciel microbrewery, plus plenty of local independents like Flying Monkeys, and one-litre steins of Pabst Blue Ribbon. Lanzillotta’s self-service concept is bold and a little annoying. Customers order and pay at the open kitchen, and runners then bring out the food when it’s ready. You have to leave your credit card at the bar or settle your bill each time you get another round. If you want to order more, you have to line up again. “Please tip,” the menu nonetheless advises. “The runners who deliver your food and happily clean up after you would truly appreciate your generosity.”
Forget the fashion—Power Ball 13, 2011’s edition of the annual Power Plant fundraiser, was all about the meat. Think a pig on a spit is decadent? Well, there was an entire bison. Flocks of formally attired party-goers crowded in front of the massive spit to ooh and aah over the roasting beast like enchanted Temple of Doom acolytes as Marc Thuet sliced meat into sandwiches. “We need meat!” cried Stephen Wong of design duo Greta Constantine as he and partner Kirk Pickersgill tucked into their fat-dripping sandwiches. Also spotted: Belinda Stronach, Jeff Stober, Kenneth Montague, Shinan Govani, Loretta Chin and more carnivores (and some herbivores, lest we forget). Check out the fashion, art and meat in a gallery after the jump.
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Rob Gentile (Buca), David Lee (Nota Bene), Andrea Nicholson (Great Cooks on Eight), Paul Boehmer (Böhmer), Teo Paul (Union)
Two thousand of Toronto’s food lovers and makers gathered at the ROM on Sunday for the 21st edition of Toronto Taste. The annual fundraiser—which raises money for Second Harvest—saw more than 60 restaurants and 30 beverage purveyors offering their best to the guests. Burgers and tacos might have been the plats du jour, but new restaurant openings seemed to be the hottest item on the plates of many chefs and restaurateurs we spoke to. Here’s what we heard from Buca’s Rob Gentile, Woodlot’s David Haman, Scarpetta’s Scott Conant, Splendido’s Victor Barry, Top Chef Canada contestants Dustin Gallagher and Andrea Nicholson and many more.
Wvrst’s dining room features long, communal tables (Image: Signe Langford)
More and more, it seems as though Clubland is outgrowing its old epicentre at the Richmond and John area and oozing west along King Street into what was once a much more sedate dining destination led by Susur, Lee, Marc Thuet’s nom-de-jour resto, Brassaii and Rodney’s. As we reported back in April, it’s into this shifting scene that chef and simple food enthusiast Aldo Lanzillotta has opened his first restaurant, Wvrst, which serves up artisanal sausages and brews in a casual beer hall setting.
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One Thousand and One Nights director Tim Supple; Scaramouche’s Keith Froggett at last year’s Toronto Taste; and Glee’s Lea Michele
1. LUMINATO
Luminato No. 5 kicks off this Friday with a free concert at Metro Square featuring Beast and the Joel Plaskett Emergency. Other offerings we’re dying to see? Malcolm Gladwell’s talk at the Bluma Appel theatre and One Thousand and One Nights, a multilingual, interdisciplinary retelling of Shahrazad’s tales, by British director Tim Supple and Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh. June 10 to 19. luminato.com.
2. TORONTO TASTE
Second Harvest’s annual fundraiser isn’t just about raising the cash to support the organization’s good work (over the last 21 years, it has provided on the order of eight million meals to the city’s hungry, and each ticket purchased for this event funds 250 meals). It’s also one of the most anticipated foodie events of the year. Toronto’s culinary boldface names—Marc Thuet, Mark McEwan, Roger Mooking, Teo Paul, Paul Boehmer and more—whip up some seriously gourmet eats at and around the ROM, while this year’s host, Food Network’s Bob Blumer, promises to be extra entertaining. Although tickets are usually available at the door, they’re going fast this year. June 12. $250. Royal Ontario Museum, 100 Queen’s Park, torontotaste.ca.
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A couple weeks back, news broke that the space that once held Marc Thuet’s Conviction (which closed last fall and was previously Bite Me! and Bistro and Bakery Thuet) was turning into a loosely interpreted Munich-style beer hall called Wvrst. Recently, we caught up with chef and owner Aldo Lanzillotta to ask him about joining Hogtown’s sausage party.
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