Tag: TasteTO

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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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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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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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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Manic Organic – Part 1

A few months back I read something in one of the newspaper food columns about how relatively easy it was to get organic produce at local supermarkets. The article specifically mentioned the No Frills in Dufferin Mall, and it left me scratching my head. See, I shop at that No Frills and I can’t really recall seeing a whole lot of organic produce there.

This provoked the desire to start exploring. Maybe there were hidden gems in my local shops that I wasn’t even aware of. So over the past few weeks, I’ve been wandering the supermarkets of the west end of downtown to see exactly what there was out there in terms of organics.

You’ll notice that I stuck to supermarkets and chain grocery stores, as this is where most people shop. My own grocery shopping excursions take me regularly to St. Lawrence and Kensington Markets, Whole Foods and Pusateri’s, as well as a variety of farmer’s markets, shops in ethnic neighbourhoods and small health food stores, in addition to frequenting the stores listed below.

In my travels for this article, I looked for specific items such as milk and soy milk, eggs, produce and prepared foods.

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Chefs Are the New Rock Stars

Imagine for a moment that you’re walking down the street and you pass a punk-looking kid wearing a black t-shirt with Anthony Bourdain’s face on the front. Or you’re in the mall and the gaggle of girls outside of Old Navy are all wearing sparkly pink shirts emblazoned with the Rachael Ray logo. Or maybe you’re watching the news to see thousands of women mobbing the airport when Jamie Oliver deplanes and races to a limo to be whisked away before someone gets injured.

To people in the industry, the concept of chefs as celebrities seems vaguely uncomfortable. The people who cook the food for restaurants, events, and hotels are meant to be behind the scenes. They’re part of the great machine that makes a dinner or an event happen seamlessly and beautifully; the kitchen is called “back of house” for a reason. Most dedicated cooks don’t want the attention – they want to do their jobs and do it well, and don’t much care for the cameras and interviews and face time.

But most is not all, and as more and more of the celebrity chefs we watch on TV sign endorsement deals or create product lines of their own, the desire – we’ll even call it a “need” to be seen, to be out there promoting the gadgets, the cookbook, the product lines and oh, yeah, the restaurant – becomes overwhelming.

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Getting Taken For a Ride with Canada’s Food Guide

Yes, it’s the day that Canadians have been waiting for with bated breath – the release of Canada’s first new food guide in fifteen years. The media can’t stop singing the praises of the thing, but much of the media write their articles based on press releases. The truth is, the new Food Guide is not especially useful to anyone.

The guide has been redesigned to allow more personalization of choices; there are more ethnic foods to accommodate the cultural changes within our population, and it allows individuals to make specific choices with regards to which foods they will eat from each section.

But while the new Guide does offer serving sizes, it doesn’t differentiate it terms of calories or fat content. In the milk and milk “alternatives” section (to which I must emit a giant “HA!” – the only non-dairy “alternative” offered is soy milk), skim milk, 1% and 2% milk are all considered equal. And in the alternatives section, you can have pudding instead of a glass of milk. Not that milk should even be there to begin with (it’s really not necessary to good health and nutrition), but the Food Guide really wasn’t created with the health of Canadians as its primary focus anyway, and marketing boards have a much bigger say in the final draft than the real and genuine health concerns brought up by doctors.

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Mitzi’s Cafe and Gallery

Mitzi’s Café & Gallery
100 Sorauren Avenue (at Pearson)
416-588-1234
lunch for two with coffee, tax and tip; $35, cash only

Think for a moment about your perfect neighbourhood café. It would be small and cozy, hidden from the beaten path, but still busy enough to flourish. There would be funky mismatched furniture, artwork on the brightly-coloured walls, and an open kitchen where the staff regularly broke into song (in a good way). There would be a cute patio and maybe a big picnic table out front under an old apple tree, where locals gathered each sunny day, kids and dogs in tow, to sip coffee, share gossip, watch the birds flutter by and enjoy their breakfast.

Oh yeah, and the food would kick some serious ass.

Don’t have one of those in your ‘hood? I feel bad for ya, dude, because here in Parkdale, we’ve got Mitzi’s, and we love it.

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The Cost of Service

The Toronto Star is reporting that Joe Badali’s restaurant has backed down from a proposed $2 levy against their servers to cover the costs of cleaning aprons.

A popular Toronto restaurant has backed down after trying to claw back most of the extra 20 cents an hour it has to pay its minimum-wage waiters.

Joe Badali’s, on Front St. at University Ave., told servers it would start charging them $2 a shift to cover the costs of washing their aprons and providing notepads and cash envelopes.

This charge would essentially strip the staff of any increase they might expect to reap in yesterday’s rise in minimum wage.

While Joe Badali’s now says they will leave the charge at the current 50 cents per server per shift to cover cleaning costs, even that seems a little miserly to me. Laundry bills are part of the cost of running a restaurant, and servers or staff shouldn’t have to pay for the cleaning costs of items necessary to the job like aprons or chef’s whites. Having worked at establishments where there was an enforced uniform that had to be purchased from head office (a tacky little vest while working as a barista at a local coffee chain), I’d even go so far to say that uniforms that cannot be readily supplied by the servers themselves (ie. white shirt, black pants) should be offered to staff free of charge.

What’s next – is Joe Badali’s going to start charging the dishwashers for soap, or the bartenders for ice?