Category: restaurants

Sunday Brunch – Fire on the East Side

Fire on the East Side
6 Gloucester Street
416-960-FIRE
Brunch for two with all taxes, tip and coffee: $40

There’s a renewed interest in southern food these days – fried chicken, collard greens and even grits are showing up on restaurant menus. But for the past few years, one restaurant just steps off the Yonge Street strip has been quietly serving up some classic southern-inspired fare. We reviewed dinner at Fire on the East Side a few years ago, back before Chef Adam Baxter took over the stoves, but figured it might be time to stop by for brunch.

Like most Torontonians, we enjoy brunch, and doing a column about brunch means we’re always looking for something out of the ordinary. You can only eat so many omelettes, yanno? So we were pretty delighted to arrive and find a selection of classics with unique southern-flavoured twists.

Continue reading “Sunday Brunch – Fire on the East Side”

Sunday Brunch – Le Select Bistro

Le Select Bistro
432 Wellington Street West
416-596-6405
Brunch for two with all taxes, tip and coffee: $60

I haven’t been to Le Select since they moved to the Wellington Street West location some three years ago. Once a landmark on Queen West, the restaurant there was tiny and narrow. This new space is easily double the size indoors, plus there’s a gorgeous terrace out front (well, it’s probably gorgeous in the summer) and a large garden patio in the back. Slightly off the beaten path for those of us who travel on foot or by TTC, their website reiterates the close proximity to lots of parking, which isn’t actually endearing to me, but apparently is to everyone else who can’t live without their gas-guzzler, because on a recent Sunday morning, Le Select is packed and the parking lot across the street is nearly full, despite the ongoing rain.

Continue reading “Sunday Brunch – Le Select Bistro”

Sunday Brunch – Cowbell

Cowbell
1564 Queen Street West
416-849-1095
Brunch for two with all taxes, tip and coffee: $50

Since it opened in 2007, Cowbell has never been open on Sunday. Chef/owner Mark Cutrara set that day aside to spend with his family. The idea of Sunday being family day is a big one in the Parkdale neighbourhood where the restaurant is located, however, and brunch is possibly more popular here than anywhere else in the city, with Gen X and Y hipsters from the area looking for a way to get out of the house and have a reasonably priced meal with their kids without resorting to a fast food chain.

So Cutrara’s decision to open for Sunday brunch (with Saturday service also being considered) offered both locals (and not so locals) another brunch option; this one made with regional, sustainable ingredients; and also kid-friendly, although maybe not so much of the “frenzied daycare” vibe one might get from neighbouring brunch haunts where hipsters sit around and compare their latest tattoos while setting their kids free to terrorize staff and other customers. Cowbell is not the kind of place where you let the rugrats run free.

Instead, it’s a fun, quirky brunch spot with some seriously awesome food and just enough cuteness to not feel stuffy.

Continue reading “Sunday Brunch – Cowbell”

A Toast to the Roast

A few years ago, Toronto was all over the communal dining trend. Restaurants installed big harvest tables and hoped that customers would not just bump elbows but start up a conversation with one another. But because Torontonians are mostly of the “keep to yourself, mind your own business” variety, the communal table wasn’t a huge success when it came to the average customer.

So what to do with those big old harvest tables that customers avoid like the plague? Unless a restaurant can book a large group to take over the thing, it’s kind of like a no man’s land.

Thank heavens for the resurgence of comfort food and lots of talk in the press about the importance of family dining. The idea of Sunday dinner is often romanticized by chefs like Gordon Ramsay who once created a campaign in conjunction with his F-Word series to get Britons to go back to the tradition of Sunday dinner.

It’s not a bad idea, really – most people enjoy eating a big ol’ roast – it’s all the prep and cooking that sucks the fun out of it. So a number of restaurants are now serving up family-style meals, often on Sunday, and usually, but not always, communal. Here’s a few that we found…

Continue reading “A Toast to the Roast”

Y’all Come to Supper!

Hank’s
9-1/2 Church Street
416-504-9463

A few weeks ago, when I interviewed Scott and Rachelle Vivian about their take-over of the Wine Bar and Hank’s, the duo let me know about their plans to open Hank’s at night with a menu of southern favourites that Vivian had learned to cook growing up in Atlanta. Hank’s at Night was unveiled and opened to the public this past week, and the menu is indeed a collection of homey and stick-to-your-ribs southern comfort food.

Sourcing all beer, wine and the majority of ingredients from local growers or producers (there’s a chocolate dessert, but no stewed greens until they come back in season locally), the pair are offering up a pretty decent assortment of southern dishes, done really well.

Here’s a few of the things on the menu…

Continue reading “Y’all Come to Supper!”

Why We All Need to Wise Up

Ocean Wise celebrated its 5 year anniversary this month by announcing a number of new restaurant partners across the country. Readers who haven’t heard of the Ocean Wise program need not feel out of the loop – it’s only been a year since a handful of Toronto restaurants signed on, and while this anniversary celebration included some of the newest Toronto-area restaurants to join, the total still numbers under a dozen.

Created as a conservation program by the Vancouver Aquarium, it makes sense that the majority of restaurants involved in the sustainable seafood program are in British Columbia. While Torontonians have been on the sustainability bandwagon for a few years now, that same diligence seems not to apply to fish, an item that regularly hits our plates without any concern as to how it got there or where it came from.

Continue reading “Why We All Need to Wise Up”

Cooking With Love at the Wine Bar

 

Wine Bar
9 Church Street
416-504-WINE

It seems clichéd to start a piece about a new restaurant and roll out the “food = love” metaphors. But in the case of the Wine Bar, it seems apt, given that the principals involved are two couples who have saved what has become known as a landmark dining spot from what might have potentially been a corporate overhaul.

When word came out in the summer of ’09 that Jamie Kennedy was selling his Church Street Jamie Kennedy Wine Bar restaurant due to financial troubles, nobody knew for sure what might happen to the place. Kennedy offered the place to staff members first, and Chef Scott Vivian (who had run Kennedy’s Gardiner museum restaurant) along with his wife, pastry chef Rachelle Cadwell (who had been head of pastry for all of Kennedy’s operations) decided to take over the place and make it their own. Along with Vivian and Cadwell, Ted and Mary Koutsogiannopoulos (who had previously run Joy Bistro) came on board to remake the restaurant, now simply called the Wine Bar.

Continue reading “Cooking With Love at the Wine Bar”

TV Party Tonight!

Okay, not tonight. Thursday, actually. But if you can hold off until then, the folks at Grace (503 College Street) will serve you up a TV dinner like no other, paired with some kick-ass cocktails and a big screen TV showing old episodes of M*A*S*H and I Love Lucy.

As a follow-up to their incredibly successful summer BBQ series, owner Lesle Gibson and Chef Dustin Gallagher wanted a weekly winter event with the same fun and casual atmosphere. Something kitschy and communal that evoked the warm homey feel that Grace is so well-known for.

This past Thursday, Grace Upstairs was graced by a 33-pound brined and roasted turkey in order to re-create the first ever Swanson TV dinner, made available to the public in 1954. It was accompanied by authentic mashed potatoes (right down to the frozen pat of butter); mixed veg that included peas and organic carrots; stuffing made from mushrooms, apples, garlic, sage and onion; housemade cranberry sauce; turkey jus; and apple crumble made with apples from Algoma orchards.

And because it was bigger than your average TV dinner (we joked that it was one of those “Hungry Man” versions), a compartmentalized Indian thali tray worked perfectly.

Gallagher popped in and out (regular service was still taking place in the main restaurant downstairs), leaving the TV dinner service in the capable hands of cook Bryan Lavers.

Lavers explained that they spent a lot of time researching the various brands and types of TV dinners, right down to digging through the boxes in the frozen food section of the grocery store, and hoped to recreate them all, suggesting upcoming weeks will include pork chops with mushroom gravy and biscuits, fried chicken, roast beef, and ham that they plan on curing themselves. He said they’re still working on perfecting the Salisbury steak, which is apparently harder to recreate out of quality meat than they thought.

A slight wrench got thrown into the plan when a vegetarian showed up (old school TV dinners don’t come in vegetarian versions), but owner Lesle Gibson graciously found a replacement in the form of Gallagher’s famous mushroom gnocchi.

For $20, this hearty meal of a main plus dessert might be a bit more money than the plastic microwaveable tray from the supermarket frozen food aisle, but the quality and quantity of food certainly makes this a great deal no matter how you look at it. Paired with a glass of wine or one of Grace’s outstanding Manhattans, this might just be the coolest meal deal in town.

TV Dinner Thursdays take place every Thursday at Grace Upstairs, starting at 6:30pm. $20 gets you the TV dinner feature of the night. Tax, tip and beverages extra.

Fondue Yu

I’m not sure how, but fondue passed me by in the 70s. My folks had all the other trendy appliances of the day; crock pots, electric frying pans, but the communal dining experience of dipping bits of food into cheese, oil or chocolate never happened in our house. When Greg arrived on my doorstep in 1994 he came with a fondue set, a leftover wedding present from his first marriage. It sat on a shelf in a closet until we sold it at a yard sale.

Sure, there was the occasional party where someone put out a fondue for guests to nibble at. These brief attempts at the process were frustrating – I’d end up losing more than I managed to eat. I assumed the tradition of losing your food in the pot and buying a round of drinks meant that the fondue was just an excuse to get drunk. Because booze and fondue go hand in hand.

A classic winter comfort food, this Swiss creation was invented to use up bits of stale cheese and bread during the long cold winters. A splash of wine, or maybe beer, thinned the melted cheese enough to dip bread and other items into it. The shared pot came from not only a lack of utensils, but a need to stay close to the warm fire, as well as a sense of community and sharing. And while the food cooked, more beer and wine was consumed all around.

Continue reading “Fondue Yu”

The Charms of Buca

Buca
602 King Street West
416-865-1600
Dinner for two with all taxes, tip and wine: $150

The recession might have played a role, but Toronto seems especially caught up in the idea of rustic food. We’re uninterested in molecular gastronomy and sundaes sprinkled with gold leaf; we crave real authentic food like (someone’s) Mama used to make.

In the world of Italian food, the leader of this pack has long been Terroni, where Cosimo Mammoliti built his business on food so authentic he wouldn’t allow changes or substitutions. When Pizza Libretto opened last year, some thought (and still do) that the pizza there was better (I’m still trying to get over the soggy centres on the two pizzas I had there) but both now have some serious competition from Buca.

Continue reading “The Charms of Buca”