Category: toronto

Sunday Brunch – beerbistro

beerbistro
18 King Street East
416-861-9872
Three course brunch for two with all taxes and tip: $90

There’s an old cliché about the difference between night and day, but I’ve actually found a good example for which to apply it. I guess you could say I’m one of those “sensitive types”, or maybe my hearing is shot from too many industrial concerts in the 90s, but I hate, hate, hate loud restaurants. All that clinking of cutlery and loud music and raucous laughter. When you’re out for a quiet dinner or actually want to talk to the people you’re with, many restaurants are just not conducive to that situation.

Thus, I’ve become a bruncher. Even though I know how kitchen staff across the city, yea, around the world, hate the concept of getting up early after a night of busy service to poach eggs for those too intimidated to do it themselves, I really do prefer the usually quiet solitude of brunch over dinner.

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Totally Fun

I have a friend who is a music journalist. Over the years, she has become quite respected in her field and is often asked to give quotes and interviews on certain bands or music-industry-related issues. She once told me that she refuses to do any interviews for print media, and will only do radio or television, preferably live. This is not, as I had joked to her, that she thought especially highly of herself, but rather that she was frustrated with her words being used out of context in print. Radio and TV allowed her to have more control over how her comments were used. And remember, she is a print journalist herself.

Which makes me wonder if they offer a course at journalism school called “How to make your subjects look like idiots through the wonders of selective editing.” Because the Globe and Mail interview I did is up, and man, did they ever do a fantastic job at making me look like an airhead. (At least in the online version you’re all spared the scary photo that makes me look like I have no neck.)

But, just to set the record straight, here are some “corrections”…

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Good Phở Fo’ Shizzle

Phở Asia 21
1208 King Street West
647-436-0680
Dinner for two with all taxes, tip and beverage: $30

My immediate neighbourhood is not well known for its fine dining. Sure, there’s a couple of awesome Ethiopian places within walking distance, not to mention The Gladstone, The Drake, Beaver Cafe, and some interesting Tibetan restaurants if I’m willing to trek a bit. But anyone who’s ever found themselves at King & Dufferin looking for good food will know it’s a bit of a wasteland.

Once you rule out the two fast food burger joints and the two fast food sub chains, what you’re left with is a pretty awesome roti shop (Island Foods), a decent greasy spoon (The Gate) and a passable sports bar (Shoeless Joe’s). Which is why we were happy to see that a Vietnamese place had opened up around Christmas.

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Buffalo Gals

First, an admission. I am not as well-travelled as I’d like to be. While I’ve been to most major cities in the US and Canada, I’ve never been across the big pond. Given my feelings about the environmental impact of travelling for pleasure, not to mention the fact that I just hate the process of travelling in general (waiting in airports, jammed onto a plane for hours next to someone with toxic perfume, etc) it is unlikely that I will end up seeing a lot of the world in my lifetime. Living in Toronto, that’s not really a big issue, as I’m lucky enough to be able to hop on a cross-town streetcar and be transported to Athens or Seoul or Bombay for the very reasonable cost of $2.75, but there are occasional things that even the wonders of globalization cannot bring to the most multicultural city in the world.

Things like buffalo mozzarella, that are consumed near where they’re made and generally are past their prime by the time they reach a destination on another continent. I always figured that until I was able to travel to Italy, I’d never get to enjoy the real stuff.

Oh, I’d eaten bocconcini, made locally from pasteurized cow’s milk and sold in tubs. Slightly softer than regular mozzarella, I found the stuff to be pretty bland and tasteless, although the various sizes of little cheese balls were fun to put in salad. I never really got the “silky” description though – most of the stuff I ended up with had the consistency and bounce of one of those hard little superballs you could get in gum machines as a kid. You’d whip them at the floor and they’d bounce forever off of every surface, until your Mom would come and yell at you lest the thing took out a piece of the Royal Doulton collection. Suffice to say that in the grand realm of cheese, bocconcini really wasn’t near the top of my list.

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The Hidden Treasures at the Total Health Show

We approached the Total Health Show this past weekend with a bit of trepidation. Although it’s a well-respected event, now in its 30th year, and despite the focus organizers put on the more credible aspects of its participants, featuring things like massage and natural foods, there’s still an element to the world of holistic health that provokes me to peruse the schedule for the tinfoil hat fashion show.

We went with the intention of checking out the food vendors, since people are finally cluing in to the fact that good health is directly related to good nutrition, but were consumed with the fear that we’d get roped into trying some bio-feedback aura testing or buying the $30 bottles of magical juice that purports to cure everything from halitosis to cancer.

There were some of those folks there, to be sure, and we tried to keep our cynical comments to ourselves, but we were actually very pleasantly surprised to find a great number of vendors with really interesting, and tasty, products.

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Cafe Bernate – What Have I Been Missing All These Years?

Café Bernate
1024 Queen Street West
416-535-2835
lunch for two (including a cookie) with taxes, tip and coffee: $30

Regularly for the past ten or twelve years or so, I’d pass Café Bernate and say to myself, “We’ve really got to go there sometime!” Located on Queen West at Ossington, I’d be reminded of it twice a day as I rode the streetcar back and forth to work, yet somehow I never made it over there. Not for lack of trying through – a couple of times Greg, the husband, and I set out with the express intention to have lunch at the little gem of a café only to find it closed or packed.

So when we were walking along Queen Street a couple of weekends ago and both of us found our stomachs rumbling for lunch, we were surprised, astounded even, to find the place open. Finally, we would get to eat at Café Bernate.

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Ginger – Is This What Health Tastes Like?

Ginger “Taste of Health”
521 Bloor Street West
416-536-3131
Lunch for two with all taxes, tip and bubble tea: $35

I never liked this location when it was Juice for Life. I found the place cramped and loud and terribly claustrophobic, the chance for any type of conversation that didn’t involve screaming an impossibility over the noise of the juice blenders. So when we stuck our heads in the door while cruising Bloor Street for a place to eat, the décor won us over immediately. Shiny white tables actually had space between them, walls of orange light panels gave the place a warm glow and futuristic ceiling fixtures made this once stuffy room feel sleek and spacious and clean.

Despite the weird name – what exactly does “health” taste like? – we were hoping for the same from the food.

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Have You Got the Balls?

Somehow during Chinese New Year celebrations last month, I missed out on the sesame balls. I had Dragon’s Beard candy and dumplings and many other traditional foods, but no sesame balls. As deep-fried sesame balls are one of my favourite treats, regardless of the time of year, I set off to Chinatown one day last week to rectify the situation. But I was curious – who had the best sesame balls? In recent years, I swore by Furama Cake and Desserts Garden on Spadina Avenue, mostly because it was the place I passed most often, yet my husband Greg frequented Yung Sing Pastry on Baldwin Street, as it was close to his office, and was adamant that the best sesame balls could be found there. So, we did a taste test – each of our favourites plus two others thrown in for good measure. I did my taste test knowing which ball was which, but Greg tasted each dessert “blind”, not knowing which ball came from which bakery. Our results were the same.

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Mostly Meaty at Shoeless Joe’s

Shoeless Joe’s
1189 King Street West (and other locations)
416-534-3666
Dinner for two with drinks, dessert, taxes and tip: $60

Okay, stop me if you’ve heard this one… two vegetarians walk into a sports bar, what do they end up eating?

Yup, salad. Hold the bacon bits.

I’m not quite sure what came over me, but I’d been craving a meal at one of those family-type chain restaurants. Some place inoffensive, with the 20-page menu, and massive cocktails where you get to take home the glass. Yes, I know, I’m a food writer; I should be craving tiny little bits of exotic tasting menus or expensive wines. But the belly wants what the belly wants, and in this case the belly wanted a really good Caesar salad.

The belly also didn’t want to venture too far, which is how we ended up around the corner at Shoeless Joe’s on a Saturday afternoon.

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Manic Organic – Part 2

Today we’re looking at the organic options in the higher-end grocery stores in my ‘hood. And the options really appear to be all about location. In Parkdale proper, even the prepackaged organic items can be hit or miss, but once I headed over to Roncesvalles Avenue where the supermarkets face stiff competition from a plethora of greengrocers, the organic options were overwhelming.

Loblaws
2280 Dundas West

With 300 products in the PC Organics line, I’m not about to list them all, and I’m going to go with the assumption that the Dufferin Mall No Frills offers a good cross-section of the prepared organic products. Instead, at Loblaws I concentrated on the produce section where there was, indeed, a decent amount of organic options to choose from. Organic strawberries were posted as being $5.99 compared to $4.99 for conventional and that price must have been attractive to customers as there were no organic strawberries left when I was there.

Of the organic cabbage, beets, radish, kale and carrots, all were imported. Pineapples, grapes and pears were also sold bagged, so there was no picking and choosing. Organic onions and sweet potatoes were sold in bags only, which might make the conventional versions of those items more of an option for anyone who needed only one or two of each. There was a decent selection of loose organic fruit, however, with mangoes, oranges, pears, lemons, avocado and kiwi all represented, as well as 5 varieties of organic apples.

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