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Are You a Taster?

Second Harvest’s Toronto Taste is one of the biggest and most important food events of the year. In its 21-year history Toronto Taste has raised over $4 million, enough for 8 million meals. Yes, we know the $250 ticket price is out of reach for many people, even if half of it is tax deductible; and yes, we know that articles about swank expensive events like this can make some people feel bad because they can’t afford to attend. But Toronto Taste deserves to be written about because it does really fantastic work in helping to feed underprivileged people in our city. And from a food perspective, it deserves to be written about because, really, where the heck else are you going to get to eat food by 60 of Toronto’s top chefs?

Having attended a couple of Toronto Tastes now, I’m offering up a survival guide. How to get the most for that $250 ticket and have the best time possible. This takes some planning if you’re serious about it, which is why I’m offering my tips now, even though the event doesn’t take place until June 12th. You need to be planning, people!

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Digging My New Digs

Welcome to the new home of SherylKirby.com, Saveyourfork.com and LeavesandPetals.com

Actually, while the place is new and snazzy and hopefully pretty like a pastry shop, I’m not quite done moving older content from my other two blogs. Once I do, they’ll be shut down, and the domain for Save Your Fork will point here while Leaves and Petals will disappear (there’s actually a garden shop in Georgia called Leaves and Petals who I’m betting would love to have the domain name).

I decided to pull everything together because, while I like things nice and compartmentalized, keeping track of, and updating 3 blogs (besides TasteTO and my gig at Toronto.com) was a bit overwhelming. Instead, I found a nifty template where I can divide my posts into 3 main categories that loosely align with the theme of each of my 3 blogs. So people just here for the food stuff can just read the food stuff. Friends and family can just look at the Life stuff. And probably nobody will read the ranty World At Large section, but I’ll sneak some nice pictures in there occasionally just for fun.

I think we’ve got all the bugs and issues cleaned up (and big thanks to my hubby Greg Clow for all his work) but I’m still sorting through all of the old content to see what’s worth saving – I’m considering starting up the newsy Food For Thought posts again, but the old ones are mostly dead links now so I’m not dragging a year’s worth of them over here – it really is like moving and packing up an actual house.

In any case, there’s still a few small things to do, but please have a look around, read, enjoy, and stay for a visit, I’ll put the kettle on…

The Gung Ho Food Race

At this moment, I am sitting on six… no, eight different bits of Toronto restaurant news/gossip that I cannot share. I can’t share them for a number of reasons, either because I’ve specifically been asked not to until the restaurant is ready to formally announce their news, or because what I know is unconfirmed gossip and I’m still working on fleshing out the story.

It is my job to find out (factual) restaurant news. And I love my job; I love the excitement that chefs and customers have when a new place opens, I love watching the buzz spread, I love seeing the reviews roll in. What I don’t love – and this is why I’m sitting on all of these secrets – is when we all jump the gun, or get way too excited about a potential new restaurant or project before it’s even opened.

Case in point: the David Chang thing. I’m as enthusiastic as anyone for a David Chang restaurant; he’s considered one of the best chefs in the world. But didn’t we all look pathetically desperate a couple of months back when gossip spread and then the news was confirmed that Chang would be opening restaurants here… in late 2012? Standing back and watching the frenzy from a safe distance, anybody would think that Torontonians had never eaten anything fancier than Kraft Dinner and bagged salad, so desperate were we for Chang’s noodles and pork buns. Could we even be trusted in a fine dining restaurant? Were we familiar with those crazy things they call “utensils”?

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Parkdale is Set to Get a Food Co-op

There was a piece in the Post a few weeks back about the condo development going in on the south-west corner of Queen and Dufferin. It was lots of the usual fluff about shops and restaurants, plus some whacked out idea about how the park across the street where the skateboarders hang out is being turned into a cinema. The most amusing part of the story though was what it didn’t include; like the fact that the train route to the airport (with all those additions diesel trains) runs about 50 meters from what would be the building’s front door. Or that the next door neighbour to the west is a huge community health centre with a meth clinic.

The Parkdale Community Health Centre is a large building with a small park adjacent to it. It serves the community well with a number of programs for lower income people (no health card is needed to obtain the free services offered) and they have everything from primary care doctors to chiropodists and nutritionists to mental health workers. Being such a community hub, it would make a perfect place for some food-related services. Especially because the 7,000 square foot basement space has been sitting empty since the building was erected a few years back.

Which is why it was so awesome to hear that the Westend Food Co-op has partnered with the PCHC to install their food store in the lower level by the end of the year.

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Lahore Tikka House Trades a Trailer for a Tent

They’re gone. After years of construction delays and flapping tarps, the two trailers that served as a makeshift restaurant have been torn down as the main floor of Lahore Tikka House (1365 Gerrard Street East) opens for business. I was there on the weekend to take a photo to go with my piece on Toronto.com and happened to run into owner Alnoor Sayani, who happily showed me around.

The space directly east of the building where the trailers once stood is now home to a giant tent and patio area. Decorated with saris and colourful fabric as well as thousands of tiny lights, it’s already easy to imagine dining here on a hot summer night. Sayani points out where landscaping is still to be added, as well as a spot out front that will house a fountain. Large glass garage doors on the east side of the building also open up to make the whole indoor space feel like a giant patio.

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They’ve Got Sausages at Marben and They’re Happy to See You

It seems as if every chef worth their weight in pork belly has been playing around with sausage-making lately. And with sausage and hot dog restaurants showing up as the next big trend, we’re all going to be eating many more of the things in the near future. So why not pit local chefs against each other to see who truly makes the best wurst.

Ryan Donovan and the gang at Marben (488 Wellington Street West) have decided to do just that. Throughout the spring and summer, select Wednesdays (2 each month) will see Sausage League take over the restaurant. While Marben’s regular menu will still be on offer, guests will have the option of ordering the sausage special for $25. What they’ll get is two dishes – one prepared by each chef – and they’ll get to choose their favourite. The chef who gets the most votes each night will move on to the next round of competition.

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I Will NOT Buy That for a Dollar

Way back a decade ago, before people had their own personal food blogs and everyone just hung out on LiveJournal, there was a group blog on that site about food. The premise of this group was the same as your typical food blog today – people wrote posts about food, shared recipes, etc., the only difference being that there were hundreds of people who all posted to the same blog. One of the regular contributors to this LiveJournal group would post recipes and photos of the dishes he made, and always, somewhere in the photo of the dish, was his cat. It was his “thing”. Sometimes the cat was sitting on the dinner table, next to the completed dish. Often the shot showed the cat on the counter, next to a rolled out pastry or a bowl of batter. These posts elicited two types of responses; those of us who were utterly grossed out by the proximity of dirty kitty feet to a food preparation surface, and those who thought it was perfectly okay.

It’s that second group that worries me.

There have been various articles in the media over the past week or so about one Toronto woman’s idea to hold a copy of an “underground” food market that originated in San Francisco. The premise being that people bring food that they have prepared in their homes and gather in a market-type setting to sell their wares. Hassel Aviles thinks that this is something the city wants and needs. She thinks it’s such a great idea, in fact, that she’s already created a website, despite not having anything confirmed with regards to venue, licenses, insurance, or, oh yeah, those pesky health and safety regulations.

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SalivATE – April 2011

Okay, so I’m a little bit late with this one, but we surely ate some good grub in April. Check it…

Cardinal Rule (5 Roncesvalles Avenue) is a cool new diner on Roncesvalles just north of Queen, where comfort food really does get a fun twist. Above, meat muffins are wee meatloaves in a phyllo cup.

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The Special Treatment – Just For Girls

I’m not sure who to blame for my outrage. The subject line in my RSS feed says “France’s Anne-Sophie Pic Named World’s Best Chef”. And the post it represents says the same thing. But the website The Food Section really only aggregates posts from other places, and clicking through to the full article at The Independent makes for a very different story. Anne-Sophie Pic is, according to the bottled water company that decided the contest, the world’s best FEMALE chef.

And what pisses me off is – why should there be a distinction? Why are we still separating our chefs by gender?

Sure there are fewer female chefs, for a whole variety of reasons ranging from family choices (men can’t have the babies) to history (hundreds of years ago, because men were always paid more, male chefs were seen as status symbols), but it doesn’t mean that the female chefs who are working and running kitchens and restaurants aren’t every bit as good as the men.

Is the gender segregation meant with good intentions – to level out the playing field? Or is it misogyny, pure and simple?

Pic, like her father and grandfather before her, holds 3 Michelin stars. To my knowledge, Michelin doesn’t have a separate set of stars or awards for restaurants run by female chefs versus male chefs. So why the segregation for this contest?

Image: Anne-Sophie Pic photo: Jeff Nalin/Maison Pic