Despite the fact that the last show in Buddies in Bad Times Theatre’s 2012/2013 season is titled Of a Monstrous Child: A Gaga Musical, Lady Gaga herself takes a secondary role. There are no homages to raw-meat dresses and gold-plated wheelchairs here. Instead, writer and director Alistair Newton uses the House of Gaga as a pathway into the history of the notable performance-art stars that came before her in the pantheon of queer iconography, and how she is and isn’t a construct of all of them put together.

It’s entirely possible that an early work by the next Atom Egoyan or David Cronenberg will screen on Wednesday night at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. With the 2013 Student Film Showcase featuring the best from post-secondary schools around the country and the Jump Cuts Young Filmmakers Showcase kicking off the evening with Toronto-area high-school students’ films, the night will be a coming-out party for a new crop of talent. Judging by the polished creativity of some of the entries, it’s safe to say that young people are more prepared than ever to start telling stories on film from an early age.

The exterior of Danforth Dragon.

What do you get when you take a group of culinary-minded Chinese people to India, home of many of the world’s greatest spices, and have them adapt their cooking to local tastes for several generations? The answer is Indian-style Hakka Chinese food, such as the fare served at Danforth Dragon, at 861 Danforth Ave.

Danforth Dragon’s owner, Anthony Lin, is Hakka, meaning he speaks the Hakka dialect of Chinese. His Chinese grandfather took a two-month boat ride to India in order to avoid political instability and violence. Anthony was born and raised in Calcutta.

“Hakka people are like gypsies,” says Lin. “They travel everywhere.” As part of the third generation of his family to live in India, Anthony doesn’t know much about China, but he still speaks Hakka at home and cooks Hakka food. “Our food has an Indian twist,” he says. “It is Chinese food for Indian taste buds, so it’s spicier.”

The Danforth Dragon’s jeera beef dish ($9.50) is a good example of the hybrid technique. It’s marinated in a Chinese style, using soy and potato starch to make it tender. It’s also infused with a strong dose of cumin seed and garlic, giving it punchy flavour that resembles a Pakistani lamb skewer.

Hakka-style fried rice, chili paneer with Chinese greens, and jeera beef.

Chili paneer with Chinese greens ($8.99) is another great dish, featuring flavourful Indian cheese and Chinese cabbage stir-fried with onion and soy. Many of the dishes are peppered with bits of green chili, which pack a fiery punch. It’s also worth paying 99 cents for the hakka-style special hot sauce—a slightly sweet concoction made with chilis and garlic.

The spicy egg roll is better than expected, with minced pork, fresh green peas, and a bit of curry flavour. Hakka-style fried rice ($7.99) is a spicier version of the Chinese classic.

The evolution of Hakka food hasn’t stopped since its arrival in Canada: Lin also serves what he calls “North American Chinese” food such as chicken balls, chop suey, General Tso’s chicken and lemon chicken, to cater to his mostly Canadian-born clientele.

Danforth Dragon is one of the only Indian-style hakka places in Toronto proper, but Scarborough is chock full of Hakka places, some Indian-style and some with more traditional fare. There are also many Chinese-run Jamaican restaurants in Scarborough. Most of the Chinese population in Jamaica is of Hakka origin.

Danforth Dragon is located at 861 Danforth Avenue. Tel: 416-461-9238. Hours are 11:30 a.m.–10 p.m., Monday to Friday; 4 p.m.–10 p.m., Saturday; 4 p.m.–9 p.m., Sunday.

Spice City Toronto explores Toronto’s great hole-in-the-wall restaurants and strip-mall joints serving food from all corners of the world.

Photos by Sarah Efron.

The firfir special (bottom) and scrambled eggs (top) at Lalibela.

Unbeknownst to the hungover hipsters who line up at College Street diners for weekend brunch, one of the best breakfast joints in the city is an Ethiopian place on Bloor just east of Ossington. The popular dinner spot Lalibela also serves a killer breakfast—with coffee guaranteed to get you moving.

Breakfast service starts at 10 a.m., and most of the items are different than those served later in the day. One excellent dish is the firfir special ($8), which is made from injera (the spongy Ethiopean bread) cooked with butter, hot peppers, and yogurt. The dish gets its punch from berbere, a curry-like spice mixture.

The scrambled egg ($6) looks like any regular diner fare, but is made with lip-smacking spices and jalapeño. The kenche was another hit—it’s an airy cracked-wheat dish, similar to couscous, that’s flavoured with butter, ginger, coriander, and garlic.

A server at Lalibela performs the coffee ceremony.

Other breakfast dishes on the menu include foul, a mashed bean dish common across North Africa and the Middle East, and qunta firfir, a cube of dry meat that resembles jerky.

There are also some interesting drinks to sample. Our waitress, Rahel, chops up some fresh ginger for tea and serves it in a glass with a regular tea bag. After we finish our meal, it’s time for the Ethiopian coffee ceremony. Rahel brings out a large metal ladle, where she roasts fresh coffee beans (as seen above). The coffee is served in a clay pot and comes with smoking incense and an enormous basket of popcorn. Syrupy and potent, it’s a great jump-start for your day.

Lalibela is located at 869 Bloor Street West, with a second location at 1405 Danforth Avenue. Tel: 416-535-6615 (Bloor), 416-645-0486 (Danforth). Hours are 10 a.m. to 2 a.m., seven days a week.

Spice City Toronto explores Toronto’s great hole-in-the-wall restaurants and strip-mall joints serving food from all corners of the world.

Photos by Sarah Efron.

The bulgogi burger at Airima.

Toronto is filled with soulless, concrete buildings. Thankfully, some of them house hidden restaurants dishing up great ethnic food. One such gem is Airima’s Kitchen, which serves homemade Korean cuisine in the bowels of St. Clair subway station.

Airima’s opened about six months ago in a food court by the subway entrance and has quickly gained popularity with local office workers. Its owner is Joe Bang, a Toronto-born former extreme-sports promoter. His retired parents, an adorable couple who are originally from Seoul, helped their son launch the restaurant and have never left. “They’re retired and they’re having fun, so they stayed on,” says Joe. “It’s nice to have them around.”

Indeed, it was Joe’s mom (named Airima of course) who came up with the idea of selling a bulgogi burger (above), a fusion dish. It features traditional Korean sliced sirloin marinated in soy, garlic, brown sugar, and onion, served on an oversized hot dog bun. Overflowing with fried onions and crisp cucumbers, it’s topped with hot sauce and Airima’s homemade thousand island dressing.

The meat isn’t as high quality as the stuff you’ll find at some Korean places, but for just five bucks, it’s a satisfying enough treat, if somewhat messy. However, Joe himself prefers the traditional method of eating bulgogi on rice. “I think the bulgogi burger is weird,” he confesses. “I’ve never tried it.”

Joe Bang and his parents pose for a photo.

The restaurant recently added a $5 kimchee burger to the menu. It’s a chopped pork cutlet topped with kimchee, a pungent Asian cabbage pickled with salt, garlic, and spices. You can get a bargain-priced Korean pancake for $1.91. There’s also dok boki, a wonderfully alien-looking dish of spicy rice cake that is served on the streets of Seoul, for $6.99. The classic Korean rice dish, bibimbap, sells for $7.49.

One of the place’s nicer touches is the free boricha tea, a wonderfully rich caffeine-free drink made with roasted barley and corn kernels. That alone makes it worth a stop if it’s approaching lunchtime and you find yourself travelling along the Yonge-University line.

Airima is located at St. Clair subway station. Tel: 647-340-6262. Hours are 7:30 a.m. until 6 p.m., Monday to Friday. Closed Saturday and Sunday.

Spice City Toronto explores Toronto’s great hole-in-the-wall restaurants and strip-mall joints serving food from all corners of the world.

Photos by Sarah Efron.

I was surprised to receive an email from one of my Spice City tipsters about a grocery store in my old neighbourhood with a hot food buffet inside. I must have passed by the place, M&M Fruit & Grocery, a million times. It’s located at 1263 Dundas Street West, just across from the 7-11 at Dovercourt.

From outside, it looks just like your run-of-the-mill corner grocery, but inside, it’s a different story. The shop sells a good selection of Portuguese breads and cheeses, and there’s a full meat counter in the back. More unusual is the large hot food buffet right inside an aisle, packed with dozens of southern European specialties.

While Portuguese take-out barbecue joints aren’t hard to find in this part of town, M&M is unique, as you can serve yourself. Food is sold for $14.99 a kilo; fish is $21.99 a kilo.

“Customers can choose whatever they like,” says the owner, Joel Morais (shown below), a native of Portugal’s Azores islands. “I got the idea to do this when I was on a trip to Florida 18 years ago. In the plazas people buy everything by the pound and it’s amazing.”

Hot food has been served at this 34-year-old grocery for a long time, but Joel says his offerings have expanded considerably in the last couple of years. The food is grilled in the shop’s basement.

While the buffet is a hit with the Portuguese grandma crowd, it’s a great opportunity for non-Portuguese people to sample a wide range of the country’s dishes that go well beyond the standard barbecue chicken and potatoes. The dishes aren’t labelled, but if you ask what they are, you might be in for some surprises.

You can try alcatra, an Azores dish of beef marinated in wine and garlic. There is a wide variety of tasty fish: plump mackerel stuffed with cornbread, good quality tuna steaks in tomato sauce, grilled stickleback and sole filets. Moray eel, another Portuguese delicacy, is served up fried.

The chicarron (fried pork rinds) is a trashy treat, and the blood pudding and blood sausage are undeniably tasty. Another surprisingly pleasant dish are the cow’s feet, which are stewed with sausage and chick peas and served extremely tender.

However, you can never be sure of what you will find here. “The food here is always changing,” says Jorge, who works at the meat counter (shown below). “It’s never the same twice.”

And the final bill? On my first visit I piled in a piece of chicken, those lovely round Portuguese potatoes, and two long grilled fish and it came to $5.55. On a second visit, taking a solid chunk of tuna steak, a large mackerel and a sampling of half a dozen other dishes and it came to around $10. The meal was easily enough to feed two people.

M&M Fruit & Grocery is located at 1263 Dundas Street West, at Dovercourt. Tel: 416-533-9017. Hot food is served from 9:30 a.m. until 4 or 5 p.m.

Spice City Toronto explores Toronto’s great hole-in-the-wall restaurants and strip-mall joints serving food from all corners of the world.

Photos by Sarah Efron.

Chino Locos' fish burrito.

When Minh La goes on holidays in Mexico or Cuba, he is often greeted by locals shouting of “chino,” the Spanish word for Chinese. So when Minh opened up a burrito joint with another Chinese-Canadian, Victor Su, they decided to run with the theme, calling it Chino Locos, or “crazy Chinese.”

The restaurant is located in the east Toronto neighbourhood where Minh grew up, at Greenwood Avenue and Queen Street. There’s a second location on Church Street, a couple blocks south of Wellesley.

Victor and Minh have a love of Latin American culture, and they’ve decorated the tiny space with Mexican wrestling masks and sombreros, along with one of those ceramic good luck cat sculptures you always see in Asian restaurants.

Minh, a former chef at the fancy Asian restaurant Blowfish on King West, brings careful attention to each and every ingredient that goes into his burritos. The chicken is all-white breast meat. For the pork burrito, he slow roasts pork leg for four hours in an Asian-style marinade made of honey and soy. The hot sauce is also made from scratch.

In addition to their chicken, pork, steak, and bean burritos, Chino Locos also has specials like its Korean BBQ burrito, jerk chicken burrito, and General Tao chicken burrito. For vegetarians, there is a bean burrito as well as a vegan burrito with tofu, eggplant, and shitake mushrooms. For all the burritos, you can choose between rice or chow mein noodles.

The fish burrito (top photo) is made with sauteed basa, an Asian fish. Usually I don’t bother ordering fish burritos or tacos, because you can never taste the fish anyways, but here, the generous portions of marinated basa hold up well inside the burrito.

The Korean BBQ with chow mein burrito ($8.99) was an interesting novelty, but I preferred the more traditional pork burrito with rice. It was perfect in every way and was just $6.99. And while both the Church Street location and the Greenwood Avenue location have great food, Greenwood is definitely my favourite due to its charming ambiance.

Chino Locos: original location (4 Greenwood Avenue), 647-345-5626, open Monday to Friday 11 a.m.–9 p.m., Saturday 12 p.m.–9 p.m., and Sunday 12 p.m.–8 p.m.; second location (459 Church Street, 2nd floor), 416-551-7007, open Monday to Saturday 12 p.m.–9 p.m., closed Sunday.

Spice City Toronto explores Toronto’s great hole-in-the-wall restaurants and strip-mall joints serving food from all corners of the world. Find more photos and details about Chino Locos here.

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Chinese Halal's beans with garlic and bits of lamb. Wonderfully crisp.

Along the Markham/Scarborough boundary there are endless rows of modern strip malls filled with Chinese restaurants. Chinese Halal Restaurant, which serves the food of northwest China, is truly special.

Chinese Halal Restaurant, also known as the Chinese Beef and Lamb House, was founded by Chef Li, who ran several halal restaurants in northwest China. It says it’s the first halal restaurant for the Toronto Chinese community. There is also another location in North York, at 101 Ravel Road.

Reading through the extensive menu is an experience to itself. Where else can you get fried ox tongue, spicy jellyfish, and lily-fried celery?

I came here for the lamb, and I wasn’t disappointed. Every part of the animal is on the menu in endless combinations. You can get lamb organs soup, lamb dumplings, barbecued lamb, curry lamb, fried lamb tongue, fried lamb lungs, jellied lamb, and “special lamb bones,” just to name a few.

The bottom line: If you are a fan of lamb, you’ll love this place, particularly the skewers.

Chinese Halal Restaurant (668 Silver Star Boulevard), open seven days a week, 11:30 a.m. to midnight.

Spice City Toronto explores Toronto’s great hole-in-the-wall restaurants and strip-mall joints serving food from all corners of the world. Find more photos and details about Chinese Halal Restaurant here.

There’s been endless hand-wringing about Toronto’s lack of street food options, but if you know where to go, you’ll find some world-class street eats here. You’ve got to feel a blush of pride in our city when you watch jerk chicken being grilled over coal fires on the sidewalks of Eglinton West.

Three rival Jamaican restaurants, Spence’s Bakery, Rap’s, and Hot Pot Restaurant pull out oil drums that have been converted into barbecues nightly around 7 p.m. and start grilling jerk chicken. Spence’s started the tradition here in the 1990s, and the years of smoke have left the restaurant’s main awning completely charred. Rap’s has had the same man, Horace Francis, grilling its chicken for 20 years.

“When we first started doing this, I wasn’t sure if it would take off,” says Horace Rose, the owner of Rap’s. “For sure, I didn’t think it would work during the winter.”

Not only does the barbecuing take place year-round, it goes until 6 a.m. on the weekends and until 5 a.m. on other nights. “People go party at the clubs and everybody comes here to eat after,” says Roy, the jerk pork specialist at Hot Pot.

For all three restaurants, the chicken is marinated and partially cooked inside, then transported to the grill to be finished off. Grilling specialists douse the grill with water from plastic pop bottles. You purchase a $5, $7, or $10 container inside the restaurant and bring it out to be filled up at the grill.

The chicken has a delightfully smokey flavour. It’s a bit on the dry side, but this can be remedied by dousing the meat with the sweet, tangy hot sauce. Hot Pot’s jerk pork was even better: juicy and much spicier than the chicken.

For the Eglinton West’s sizable Jamaican community, the steel drums are the taste of home. “I started eating at drums back in the 1970s in Jamaica,” Horace Rose says. “In the evening, people put out drums on the street and you can go and buy a whole chicken. Ever since this time it’s been something special for me.”

Spice City Toronto explores Toronto’s great hole-in-the-wall restaurants and strip-mall joints serving food from all corners of the world. Find more photos and details about Spence’s (1530 Eglinton Avenue West), Rap’s (1541 Eglinton Avenue West), and Hot Pot (1545 Eglinton Avenue West) here. The restaurants start grilling most nights around 6:30 p.m. or 7 p.m. and go until 5 a.m. or 6 a.m.

A meal from Amma comes with a mutton roll, some buns stuffed with various curried meats, and vadai (chick pea fritters).

Tamil cuisine is some of the tastiest food in the world. Lucky for Toronto, we have a large Tamil population from Sri Lanka and South India, so this food is available if you know where to find it. Tamil food is notable for its high spice levels, and it has a different combination of flavours and spices than Indian food.

A shiny new strip mall—or rather, series of strip malls—in Markham is a great place to try authentic Tamil food. The Market East complex at the southeast corner of Steeles Avenue East and Markham Road, which opened up about two years ago, houses a grocery store, money transfer agency, dental office, jewellery shop, and a newspaper that cater to the nearby Tamil community.

There are two Sri Lankan takeout-only restaurants that offer a mind-blowing variety of food for super low prices. Amma Take Out & Catering is a busy place where customers line up to get their orders. And no wonder.

They serve kothu roti, a wonderful dish made of chopped up roti bread cooked with meat. Also on the menu is string hoppers, a rice noodle dish served with curry, and pittu (also known as puttu), a rolled cylinder of ground rice with coconut.

I’d recommend trying one of the rice and curry meals served on a banana leaf, which is the traditional way of eating Tamil food. The meat version is $7.50 while the vegetarian one is just $6.00 (on special for $5.00 on Fridays).

The vegetarian meal was made up of wonderful variety of tasty dishes: an okra and tomato stew, a spicy salad with tomatoes, a mixture of ground banana flowers, a curry made of long beans and potatoes, shredded beets, dahl, and a generous portion of rice. Plus, it came with pappadam, a cup of soup, and a dessert made of tapioca.

One banana leaf meal is easily enough food to share between two or even three people. The photo above is of the meal, along with a mutton roll, some buns stuffed with various curried meats, and vadai (chick pea fritters). Total bill: $12.

Similar fare is available at Poorani Vilaas take-out restaurant, in one of the other plazas in the complex.

The friendly owner, Saroginidevy Ratnavel, was keen to show off her tasty “short eats,” which are fried or baked street foods. Some are empanada-like pastries stuffed with tasty fish and potato curries, while others are timbitesque sweets you can enjoy after your meal—if you are not completely stuffed.

Thanks to Vicky Tam for the tip. Photo by Jennifer Hollett.

Amma Take Out & Catering (3351 Markham Road, Unit A126), 416-754-1211.

Poorani Vilaas (6055 Steeles Avenue East, Unit 104), 416-355-7775.

Spice City Toronto explores Toronto’s great hole-in-the-wall restaurants and strip-mall joints serving food from all corners of the world. Find more photos and details about Amma Take Out & Catering and Poorani Vilaas here.

Darband Restaurant's lamb kebab with saffron rice.

In a dingy strip mall in Don Mills, there’s an amazing restaurant that serves what just might be the best rice in Toronto. Darband Restaurant is a 24-hour bar and restaurant that serves Iranian food. In fact, the 10-year-old restaurant is often busiest at 4 a.m., as it serves as a gathering place after concerts and other events in the Persian community.

I used to work nearby, and I came in here often for lunch to get the delicious koobideh kebab ($8.99), skewered strips of seasoned ground beef. The portions were giant, so I would save half and eat it for lunch the next day. It was always served with a mysterious plate of raw onion and parsley. Turns out this is meant to aid digestion, the waitress told me. A jar of sumac, a red-powdered spice, is on the table to further help with digestion.

Also on the menu: fesenjan ($8.99), a fried-walnut pomegranate sauce mixed with chicken and rice, and ghormeh sabzi ($7.99), sauteed vegetables with veal cooked with dried lime. Vegetarians be warned: you won’t have much to eat here, save the fried eggplant appetizer.

I started out with the maust ‘khiar, a yogurt and chopped-cucumber spread with mint that was similar to tzatziki. Then I had the chenjeh kebab, made of marinated spring lamb tenderloin ($10.99). The lamb is succulent, tasty, and perfectly spiced. And the rice! It’s incredibly fluffy and buttery, with some of the long basmati grains tinted yellow from saffron.

This style of Persian rice is made by partially cooking it by boiling it, then the water is drained and it’s steamed to completion, resulting in a fluffy rice where each grain is separated. It’s cooked with some oil, salt, and saffron, which adds colour to the plate.

Darband Restaurant (879 York Mills Road), 416-445-1777, open 24 hours, 7 days a week.

Spice City Toronto explores Toronto’s great hole-in-the-wall restaurants and strip-mall joints serving food from all corners of the world. Find more photos and details about Darband Restaurant here.

Lahmacun, a thin crust topped with spiced ground beef, peppers, onions, tomatoes, and parsley.

A tip from a Spice City Toronto reader led me down to Pizza Pide, a Turkish joint located near Gerrard Square.

The place serves pizza, but 90 per cent of the customers come in for the pides. Pronounced “pee-day,” this is a sort of Turkish thin-crust pizza that comes in many variations.

Owner Mustafa Ozkan, who is from the Black Sea region of Turkey, opened up this restaurant in 2003. He says that originally 80 per cent of his customers were Turkish, but now it’s about 50 per cent because much of the Turkish community has moved outside of Toronto.

He explains that, unlike pizza, pide has no sauce. He walks us through the menu, telling us the regions of Turkey that each pide comes from. There are so many kinds of pide available here that it’s difficult to prepare them all, says Ozkan, who muses about giving up his restaurant and returning to his previous job as a dump truck driver.

Ozkan says that #1 on the menu, lahmacun, is popular throughout the Middle East and is also a hit with his customers. It’s a thin crust topped with spiced ground beef, peppers, onions, tomatoes, and parsley.

For first-time visitors, he recommends #18, karsik. It consists of slices of all his most popular pides.

The lahmacun is a tasty treat, like a thin-crust pizza but with spicy meat. The karsik is quite the adventure: one part has grilled chicken breast in a sea of mozzarella; another has roasted lamb and mozzarella; another has turkish (beef) sausage. My favourite was the spinach and feta, a sort of doughy spanakopita.

It’s certainly not a light meal—grease drips down your hands as you eat—but it’s tasty. Each pide costs $6.99 to $9.99 and is enough for a meal and possibly leftovers.

You can wash it down with aryan, yogurt drink, although I’d recommend a cherry juice if you’re not accustomed to salted yogurt.

Pizza Pide (949 Gerrard Street East, at Pape), 416 462 9666, open 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. Monday to Saturday; Sunday 11:30 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Spice City Toronto explores Toronto’s great hole-in-the-wall restaurants and strip-mall joints serving food from all corners of the world. Find more photos and details about Pizza Pide here.