Category: toronto

Tiny Stories – Girl’s Weekend

“You sit here, and Trish and I will share this seat, and Sally, you sit there by Loretta.”

Everyone did as Brenda said, even though it meant cramming into a space on the streetcar that left them all cramped and awkward. Of all of them, she was the only one who had been to Toronto before.

After a few minutes, Brenda jumped up. “There’s one of those cute step-up four-seater areas open! C’mon!”

Loretta, tired of walking all day, and tired of being bossed around, dared to question her friend’s demand. “Can’t we just sit here, it’s fine.”

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Short Fiction – The Black Cat and the Prince of Darkness

We would walk for miles most nights.

First we would smoke a big joint, purchased from the dealer who hung out at the Quoc Thé, the basement Vietnamese karaoke bar up the street with the dirty glassware and the overwhelming incense. Then, in search of munchies, we would head north to the 7-11, the only place in Kensington Market open after dark, other than the Portuguese billiards hall where I, a young woman of the Goth persuasion, was most definitely not welcome.

On nights when we didn’t load up with every form of chocolate then return to the flat to eat and pass out, we would walk around the city for hours. We walked because we were skint most of the time, or would rather save our money to buy drugs than pay for transit, but also because everything was within walking distance. Sort of. We thought nothing of leaving a club at 2am and walking three or four miles home, even in the freezing cold. Most stuff was closer. But on those nights when we intentionally went for a walk, we would just wander for hours. Sometimes it was down into the empty financial district, other times up to the posh enclaves of old mansions in the Annex or Yorkville where we peered curiously into windows to see people’s fancy decor.

We would come home after these walks, or any night we were out clubbing, staggering into the Market past the nausea-inducing stink of trucks full of live chickens parked and awaiting slaughter in the morning, to be greeted by a small black cat that sat at the end of the alleyway we traversed to get to our door. It would always run away before we got close to it, and over the months it never seemed to get any larger. But it was there every night, regardless of the weather, seemingly waiting for us.

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Short Fiction – The Cherry Beach Express

Shannon walked out of Nuts and Bolts just before last call expecting the air outside to be cool, or at least cooler than the soup of humidity that hung over the dance floor. But the early-August night offered no respite; no breeze with the heady scent of summer blooms, no drop in temperature from the sweltering heat of the daytime. It was hard to breathe, but she shrugged her leather jacket back on, the collection of buttons and badges of her favourite punk and industrial bands carefully arranged on the lapels clinking together as the heavy garment settled on her shoulders.

Her white t-shirt was soaked with sweat, and she hadn’t worn a bra. Usually it didn’t matter but this old shirt with The Smiths on the front had been worn so often it was getting faded and thin and while it hadn’t bothered her in the darkness of the club, on the street she felt self-conscious about the sheerness of the fabric.

Between the exertion of dancing and the temperature inside the club, what little make-up she had bothered to wear had mostly melted off her face, leaving her with only a messy smudge of black eyeliner under each eye.

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Book Review — Incorrigible

Incorrigible
Velma Demerson

The Mercer Reformatory for Females is gone now, torn down in the late 1960s and replaced with Lamport Stadium near the intersection of King West and Dufferin in Toronto. I live nearby and walk past the place a few times every week. Since reading Incorrigible by Velma Demerson, I am haunted by what transpired at the Mercer.

Demerson was arrested in 1939, at age 18, for living with her Chinese boyfriend, which was against the law at the time. Her family reported her and she was at first taken to Belmont Home, a residence for “incorrigibles”. When the home closed down, the residents were all taken to the Mercer, even though they weren’t technically criminals.

When the Mercer closed in the 60s, the living conditions were considered to be utterly unacceptable — many cells didn’t have windows or toilets. But it was the treatment of the women there that was the most horrifying. At the same time the Nazis were doing medical tests on women at Ravensbruck, the Mercer was injecting inmates with sexually transmitted diseases like gonorrhea and syphilis, and testing treatments on them. The women were not told about these tests, and were told little about their treatments. Demerson recounts being in constant pain caused by the tests done on her and it was only decades late that she was able to settle with the government for the abuses she suffered.

Incorrigible tells Demerson’s story in her own voice. It’s a rough style, told in the first person with no dialogue, and reads in places like a journal. There are details that are brushed over or left out, particularly about her later life and her relationship with the son she gave birth to while at the Mercer.

We like to think of Canada as socially aware, forward-thinking place, but it wasn’t always so. The treatments done on young women without their consent or understanding rank up there with the travesties of residential schools and the export and abuse of home children.

Demerson has written a satirical novel called Nazis in Canada, based on her experiences at the Mercer.

Summer Reading – Lunch With Lady Eaton

Lunch with Lady Eaton – Inside the Dining Rooms of a Nation
Carol Anderson and Katharine Mallinson
206 pages, Ecw Press; April, 2004

When the first department stores opened across the country, they were considered to be (as they sometimes still are now) the death knell for small Mom & Pop stores that specialized in one niche market. And while some department stores like Wal-Mart continue to expand their grocery offering, higher-end shops have all but wiped out their food and grocery departments to specialize in higher-end luxury goods. But there was a time when Canadian department stores not only sold every dry good item imaginable, but they also made and sold food, both in their restaurants and as grocery items.

Case in point would be the long-defunct Eaton’s. The beloved Canadian department store chain began as a dry goods and hardware store under the guidance of founder Timothy Eaton. Early on, the store included coffee shops and restaurants in addition to a massive food hall. Eaton’s made their own baked goods on site, they owned dairies in rural Ontario which supplied the cream for the store to make its own butter, and by the early 1900s, the lunchroom of the downtown Toronto store was serving 5000 meals a day.

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Snack Attack – A Visit to 416 Snack Bar

The day before the opening of 416 Snack Bar (181 Bathurst Street), I was standing on a street corner in Little Portugal, eating a fried codfish ball and thinking, “man, Toronto really needs a chain of international snack food stores, because you should be able to stand on any corner in the city and eat a Portuguese cod fish ball, or a Tibetan momo, or some taktoyaki…”

Adrian Ravinsky and David Stewart, who have worked in some of Toronto’s top restaurants, were thinking along the same lines when they created their bar at Queen West and Bathurst. “Only with beer!” enthuses Ravinsky when I share my story. Indeed, a month in, with a packed house almost every night, it seems that we’re not the only ones thinking that way. 416 Snack Bar seems to have hit on something special.

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SalivATE – February 2011

Yeah, we thought we’d bring back the SalivAte column, because there’s so much good food going on in our city and it’s fun to share. Above is the soon-to-be-infamous duck confit French toast from Origin (107-109 King Street East). The toast is a soft cinamon-ny brioche style bun with plenty of tender duck meat, pickled blueberries, hoisin sauce and crème fraiche. Maple syrup on the side. It’s a fantastic combination of sweet, savoury, salty and tart.

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The Rustic Rut

Do you know this man? Have you seen him recently in a food service capacity, either as a server or a chef/cook? Or possibly making your morning coffee? Do you live in a backwoods logging camp, hundreds of miles from the nearest town? Because that’s the only reason why we should be eating food served and prepared by lumberjacks. No, really, take another look at him. Minus the axe, he could pass for any Toronto barista, hipster server, or chef at a place that serves “rustic” fare.

Yes, yet another “rustic” Italian restaurant is opening in Toronto (4 since the new year). We’re still desperately trying to find more things to put on poutine. Late night comfort food now has its own cross-border trend – “stoner haute cuisine” for the after club crowd (back in my day, all we had at 2am were donairs, and we were happy to have it! /end old geezer Haligonian rant). And while all those things are good and tasty… I can’t possibly be the only person longing for a little bit of elegance and sophistication on my plate occasionally.

This rustic comfort food thing – it made sense two or three years ago when a recession loomed over our heads. The world was a scary place, high-end restaurants were shutting down with some regularity (RIP Perigee), and we just wanted something familiar on the plates in front of us. Nonna’s spaghetti, plenty of fries, some “of the people” pulled pork, piles of game meat to assuage our inner wannabe hunter, and bacon on every damn thing in sight. Like our pioneer forefathers and mothers, we ate all the parts of the animal, preferably off a slice of log, complete with bark around the outside. We canned and pickled and imagined ourselves as a modern day Laura Ingalls (or Catherine Parr Trail if you want to keep it local and Canadian). We lumbered through the spring growth of local woodlands stomping down (or over-harvesting) the very jewels of the forest we claimed to prize and revere. We rejected anything that wasn’t “local”, which meant we ate an awful lot of “white people food”, in the process making many immigrant citizens feel that their cuisine was second class.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s all been very tasty. And homey and comforting and… rustic. But man, isn’t it getting boring?

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Getting All Medieval on Your ‘Licious

Visitors to Casa Loma don’t normally get to wander around with drinks and food. As a museum and historic site, food is generally restricted to the basement cafe area. Yes, there have always been weddings and special events in a few of the larger rooms where it’s safe to have food in a seated environment, but food stations and samples throughout the castle? Unheard of.

Which is why it was so cool on Friday night when the Pegasus Hospitality Group took over the castle to offer a Medieval taste and tour as part of Winterlicious.

You might have heard the name Pegasus Group before. They run a number of restaurants in the GTA, but their hospitality division, under Executive Chef Steffan Howard, also runs the food service at the Palais Royale and Casa Loma. This normally encompasses things like weddings and special events, but as part of Winterlicious, they turned the castle into a Medieval market place.

Staff wore Medieval costumes as they greeted guests at the door. From there we were handed maps and encouraged to explore.

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The Dining Room

As a rule, Greg and I generally avoid the seasonal ‘Licious campaigns. We’d rather support our local restaurants when they’re not so busy, and ‘Licious is always crazy for most participating establishments. This year, however, we’ve been attending a few things in the Winterlicious Culinary Events Series, one of which was The Dining Room event at Campbell House.

Designed as a sort of two-step dinner theatre, guests first eat dinner in the basement dining room (two lovely rooms with fireplaces and period furniture) and then move up to the ballroom on the 2nd floor of the museum to watch Down n’ Out Productions perform the 1982 hit play The Dining Room. The play features 6 actors portraying 57 characters in 17 vignettes, all set around a formal dining room table. Playwright A. R. Gurney is said to have created an anthropological study of the WASP, and indeed, the scenes mostly feature well-to-do upper and middle class families throughout the 20th century, exploring the role that the dining room and the dining room table play in that culture. My only complaint about the play was that, for anyone not familiar with it, they’ll spend most of the first act trying to piece together the different vignettes to make sense of who is supposed to be who, and that’s quite distracting until they realize that this is indeed, vignettes, and not a linear play with recurring characters.

But of course, the food is why we were really there.

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