Gone Fishin’- Restaurants taking a break in January
Restaurant news – El Jacal, Momofuku, Granowska’s
Coming soon – January openings
Chef’s House brings back the Rising Star Dinner Series
Winterlicious – more than just cheap dinner
Continue reading “Shut Yo’ Mouth – Stuff I Wrote – January 7th, 2012”
I loves me some Mexican food, so the first thing we did when we hit the Day of the Dead festival at Harbourfront Centre yesterday was to grab some grub. Our favourite folks from El Jacal were there serving up their awesome nachos, which meant we ended up ignoring the tasty-looking tacos from Mariachi’s, but we were just too full to eat any more.
Seating indoors was packed, so we ended up on an outdoor patio in the cold, but even that couldn’t quell our desire for nachos and tortillas and flautas and oh… the lovely wonderful churros. They weren’t hot from the fryer and I had to ward off hungry sparrows, but they were still amazingly fluffy and sweet, rolled in cinnamon sugar and doused in chocolate.
One of the coolest things about Toronto’s many cultural neighbourhoods is how they’ve evolved over the years. One group of immigrants moves out, another moves in to create their own community in their new home. During years of overlap, communities exist side by side and somewhat intertwined.
The most recent example of this cultural mosaic is Bloorcourt Village. This short stretch of Bloor Street West from Christie Pits park to Ossington Avenue was at first a predominantly Greek neighbourhood, pre-dating Greektown on the Danforth. Some vestiges of this still remain in the area today with restaurants such as Menalon (841 Bloor Street West) and Astoria Athens Restaurant (865 Bloor Street West) serving up traditional Greek cuisine and the quaint Greek Corner Grocery (859 Bloor Street West) still selling tins of olive oil from home.
El Jacal
1056 Bloor Street West
416-244-4447
Diner for two with all taxes, tip and soda: $60
“Hey, what’s this place?”
It’s a steaming hot Saturday afternoon, and my husband and I are standing on the sidewalk on Bloor Street, just east of Dufferin, about to have one of those relationship meltdowns provoked by a foolish misunderstanding. Our intended destination was A Touch of Convenience to try out the brunch offerings from chef Christopher James, but both of us left the house firm in the knowledge that the other knew where we were going. The husband wanted to go south on Gladstone, I was pretty sure it was north, but there was nothing in sight that looked like a convenience store, so we wandered the hot city streets in search of sustenance like so many Mexican immigrants wandering the desert on their way to the US.