Sheryl Kirby

Decades – One Down, Many More to Go

Ten years ago today, I was frantically putting the finishing touches on my wedding cake. And maybe my wedding dress. Or more likely, I was frantically cooking, which is what I do when I am stressed, and also preparing for the sumptuous party spread that I used to put on back then.

Everyone thought they were simply coming to a new year’s eve party. No one guessed of the cake hidden away upstairs, or that my Empire style red velvet frock was in honour of anything other than the new year. We stopped at five to midnight and our friend John from Boston performed the ceremony. Everyone was surprised. Greg’s wedding vows quoted Cartman from South Park. It was the perfect wedding – no gifts, no shower, no puffy marshmallow dress. Just us and our friends and a promise.

Ten years later, we’re still together and going strong. There’s been sickness and health, riches and poverty, good times and bad. I annoy him with my control-freak, perfectionist tendencies, and he frustrates me with his pokey old man ways and inability to hold a conversation first thing in the morning.

Continue reading “Decades – One Down, Many More to Go”

Feeling Brazen

brazenbar

Brazen Head Irish Pub
165 East Liberty Street
416-535-8787
Dinner for two with all taxes, tip and beer: $80

In the still-barren wasteland of culinary choices that is Liberty Village, a beacon has been lit. Yes, yes, there’s Thuet and Liberty Café, but there really isn’t a cozy place with a decent beer selection and a reasonable price tag that locals can call their local. Until now.

For months we’ve all been peering across the vast expanse of parking lot at the nearby Dominion, straining to see if there was any activity in the historic industrial building that is now home to the Brazen Head pub. Progress in the retail sector of Liberty Village is slow and plodding, and while the renovations started this past summer, the doors of Liberty’s first pub didn’t open until just a few weeks ago.

Continue reading “Feeling Brazen”

The Orange Glow of the Disco Era

Okonomi House
23 Charles Street West
416-925-6176
Dinner for two with all taxes, tip and tea: $30

Despite its reputation as “Toronto the Good”, our fair city was supposedly quite the hedonistic place during the disco era. Centred around the Yonge Street strip, beautiful young things in white suits or wrap dresses and wedge heels congregated at the dance clubs to do the hustle, the bus stop and to drunkenly sing along to Dancing Queen by Abba. Like all club-goers, they likely wandered out into the night looking for a bite to eat, at which point, like so many generations of Torontonians after them, they would follow the beacon of the orange glow down Charles Street West to Okonomi House.

Continue reading “The Orange Glow of the Disco Era”

Order Up

Service Included
by Phoebe Damrosch

With all the hype about celebrity chefs these days, we tend to overlook one very important component of any restaurant crew – the server. While cheffing is most definitely hard work, it can pay off in cookbooks, endorsement deals, TV shows or at the very least, chef groupies.

No fame and fortune awaits the humble server – the front line contact for any restaurant meal. Yes, servers generally get paid better than kitchen staff, but they’re also the ones who are forced to navigate the choppy waters of unruly customers and egotistical chefs.

Phoebe Damrosch’s Service Included tells the tale of a server at Thomas Keller’s New York restaurant Per Se, dishing the dirt on the goings on front of house where so many others have written about what goes on behind the pass.

While this is Damrosch’s own story, based on her experiences as a server, it is actually the personal bits that drag the book down.

Continue reading “Order Up”

The Number One Rule of the Buffet – You Get What You Pay For

Indian Flavour
123 Dundas Street West, 2nd floor
416-408-2799
Buffet lunch for two with all taxes, tip and lassi: $30

So it’s pretty much a given that no one actually expects great food at an All-You-Can-Eat buffet. Passable, possibly flavourful, but never outstanding. Reasonably priced, but with the knowledge that you get what you pay for.

Such is the case with Indian Flavour. Formerly located in the Atrium on Bay, Indian Flavour reopened its doors a few months ago on Dundas West, just west of Bay Street. Like so many Indian AYCE places, the new location is up a flight of stairs, lessening the draw to walk-by traffic. Yet at lunch time, the place remains busy, with local office workers teeming in, even on the rainy day we were there.

Continue reading “The Number One Rule of the Buffet – You Get What You Pay For”

And Visions of Sugarplums Danced in Their Heads

Okay, class… hands up if you actually know what a sugar plum is.

The Oxford Canadian Dictonary description is “a small round candy of flavoured, boiled sugar”, which is the oddest description I’ve ever seen. Larousse Gastronomique, that bastion of all things edible, disappointingly, contains no entry at all.

If you do a Google search on “sugar plum” you get sugar plum fairies, sugar plum balls (as in, the dance), a website for a gift basket company, and even a brand of tea. None of those have anything to do with actual sugar plums, however.

I first ate a sugar plum in Simcoe, Ontario in about 1990. Some neighbour of my ex’s grandparents discovered an old Victorian recipe and made boxes of the things to give as gifts. We had a box of a dozen to share between six or seven of us. I think I managed to score three of the things, based on a relative or two disliking dried fruit. Brilliant things these. Dried fruit and nuts, essentially the ingredients in a fruitcake, minus the annoyance of the actual cake, all soaked in booze and rolled together, coated with a sprinkling of sugar to balance the flavours. The sugar plum is so named for the inclusion of the sugar coating and prunes (dried plums) along with a variety of other ingredients.

Continue reading “And Visions of Sugarplums Danced in Their Heads”

Yes, We Have Some Bananas

Johny Banana
181 Bathurst Street
416-304-0101
Dinner for two with all taxes, tip and beer/juice: $35

So I was at one of the many restaurant opening media thingies we get invited to. And while the booze was flowing, the food was sparse, and small when it actually appeared. On an empty stomach, a couple of glasses of merlot can hit a gal (even a strapping lass like myself) pretty hard, and it wasn’t long before I was past the point of tipsy. Not quite at plastered, but in that window where Mexican food is the ONLY thing that will fit the bill.

My husband Greg had been bugging me about checking out the reworked menu at Johny Banana. We had tried to go there once when it was a lounge, but it was loud and kind of obnoxious and we’d never actually eaten there. With Suresh and Nina from Spotlight Toronto in tow, we stumbled to the corner of Queen and Bathurst in search of great Mexican food. We’d have taken passable or even mediocre Mexican food at that point, but fortunately there was no need to compromise. Johny Banana rocks in the manner of a hurricane.

Continue reading “Yes, We Have Some Bananas”

Being Tasered

I’ve been noticeably absent. Busy, in part, finishing up Christmas stuff (8 kinds of chocolates – done), but also because I’ve been having terrible pain in my hands and wrists. Numbness, too, which is scary. Numbness in one foot as well. I have enough acquaintances suffering from Multiple Sclerosis that I wasted no time in heading to the doctor.

The foot things seems to be my flat feet catching up with me. I had been seeing a chiropodist for ingrown toenails a couple of years ago, and she kept pressuring me to get orthotics, and I think I’m going to have to break down and do it.

The hands confounded the MD though, since one was numb and the other just hurt like a mofo at the wrist. They got me into the neurologists for an EMG pretty quickly, and Wednesday morning I lied around on a hospital bed while a nice lady zapped me with a mini-taser.

Continue reading “Being Tasered”

Opulence For the Common Man

cafe Taste
1330 Queen Street West
416-536-7748

Deserved or not, Parkdale has a reputation for being a bit dirty and gritty, less known as a fine wine kind of place than Fine Old Canadian Sherry. Wine guy Jeremy Day has set out to change that and for the past year or so has been running a warm and welcoming little wine bar that has not just made Parkdale a destination for good wine, but has embraced the community in the process.

I spoke with Day via email, and while I don’t normally like running straight up Q&A articles, his answers were so well thought-out and eloquent that it seemed only fair to run his replies in full.

Continue reading “Opulence For the Common Man”

Cookie Day

I have had what might possibly be the best day ever. The only thing that could make it better would be if someone were to show up at my door with a huge tray of oysters.

I hauled my butt out of bed this morning and headed to my alma mater, George Brown College, to take part in the Peace of Cake event. Every year staff, students and assorted volunteers get together and back a thousand or so fruitcakes, cookies, brownies and other treats and then package them up to be given to needy families, youth centres and the veterans in the long-term care facility at Sunnybrook hospital.

As is always the case when I leave early to give myself time to get somewhere during a storm, I arrived a half hour early. I was given an apron straight away, though, and was quickly put to work wrapping fruitcakes in saran wrap. As more volunteers arrived, I was put in charge of a group of kids from a local high school.

Many of the cakes meant for the veterans have to be diabetic-friendly, but when the baking was taking place yesterday, someone didn’t label the cakes made from Splenda properly. All that hype about how it tastes “just like sugar” is not exactly true. Sugar doesn’t make your tongue tingle.

Continue reading “Cookie Day”