Toronto Public Health's Antoine Nikolopoulos has gotten back to us; he's the Entertainment District's Environmental Health Officer, and yesterday he inspected Second Cup's 307 Queen Street West location after Kate Bowen spotted a mouse inside the store on Sunday morning and sent photos along to us. First and foremost, Nikolopoulos concluded that the store has "adequate pest control." (And Second Cup told us that they were immediately taking additional steps at that particular location to......

Photo by portfolium. Samosas—those centuries-old puffy tetrahedrons continue to sweep up Toronto in their potatoey wave of popularity. Though available pretty much anywhere you look—"Memories of Punjab," anyone?—we decided to stretch out our search, from the Junction, to Little India, and a couple of places in between. So find yourself a comfy pillow, throw some Anoushka Shankar on your gramophone, and read on as we find out just who will come out as Toronto's......

Photo by DimsumDarren from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. Famished one bright, sunny, morning, Torontoist was in no mood for the greasy spoon fare most oft served for weekend breakfast. We felt the need for something with a little heart, and so turned our gourmand gaze towards Spadina and Dundas, and the delightful dim sum options on offer in that colourful and cacophonous square block radius. One of the more adventurous ways to fill your......

Photo by milowinningham. Mmm, soy. From tofu, to sauce, to the good old bean form we will explore here, soy just tickles Torontoist something fierce. Full of healthy-slash-trendy properties, frozen soy beans are now widely available for home consumption. Though tempted to stick with edamame, or "twig-beans", we wanted to—no pun intended—branch out to new territory. The results were varied—tasty, green, and sometimes, a little frightening. As the old, marginally related, Japanese proverb says,......

Journalists are no strangers to being sent odd things in the mail to get them excited about new products. For the most part, writers are paid such a pitifully small amount that we’ll take whatever freebies come our way. Free CD? Awesome! Free food? Hells yeah, we’ll go to your restaurant. But Sun Media's technology writer Steve Tilley was less than impressed to receive a pie from Rogers this week to announce the arrival of......

...unless you're a vegetarian. Ziggys Fantastic Foods was a chain of gourmet deli/specialty food shops around the GTA, located in stand-alone locations and within Loblaws stores as part of the grocer's revitalization attempt in the mid-1970s. Their prices were considered high—when complaints of price jumps of up to 89% after the conversion of Loblaws' Yonge and Yorkville store to Ziggys made the front page of The Toronto Star in November 1975, Loblaws president William......

Snappy Answers runs every Saturday afternoon. Send your questions, be they tough or trivial, to snappyanswers@torontoist.com. Do donairs exist in Toronto? Coming from Nova Scotia, I miss my donairs, and more importantly: donair sauce! I have yet been able to convince a Torontonian that donair sauce is delicious! I haven't seen any around the local supermarkets. Am I doomed to wait until my glorious return to NS to pick up some donair sauce? —Emma......

Drivers idle their cars at the drive-thru picking up grub, at curbsides waiting to pick someone up, and on their driveways warming up their cars. (Contrary to popular belief, it's better to warm up a car by driving it slowly rather than letting it sit idle.) While idle, a car releases twice as much exhaust compared to when it is moving and wastes gas, since just ten seconds of idling uses more fuel than......

Ask a group of people who their favourite cook is, and many will choose their grandmother. Eschewing contemporary trends like pre-packaged mixes and powdered stock, many a Nonna, Bubbe, or Oma still warms the tummies of their families with a taste of the old country, which no restaurant can duplicate as accurately. Enter Swiss culture thinker Laurent Haug with one of those "why didn't I think of that" ideas—book a restaurant, invite somone's Nana into......

What's better than sex? Maybe writing about sex. Sex and Our City is a special week-long series that looks for questions and answers about love and sex in our city. Photo by PPDigital. Ah, the second date: dinner and a movie. (First date involves, of course, a course of non-alcoholic beverages.) Choosing the right restaurant is a chance to demonstrate compatibility ("You love sushi? No way! I love sushi!") and the right flick can demonstrate......

Photo courtesy of Grace Restaurant. Forget Hollywood. Lesle Gibson says she wants to attract “the neighbourhood.” “I just want people who like our food,” the restauranteur says with a smile, as she takes a quick break before the dinner crowd arrives. The Torontonian, who has worked in L.A. for the past three years, and has entertained an impressive array of Hollywood A-Listers, has just opened Grace Restaurant on College Street. It takes the place......

Photo by n0wak from the Torontoist Flickr Pool. Stadium food, generally, sucks. Not only is it uninspired—nachos, cheese, and society-sanctioned violence, together at last—but it's so bloody expensive that we wouldn't be surprised if they started taking internal organs as payment. What a welcome development, then, when BMO Field and Toronto FC decided to mix it up and commit to bringing a variety of stadium edibles that "incorporate food from countries where soccer is......

For those who crave local food, the long winter of parsnip and rutabaga soup is coming to an end. The surest sign of spring is the sight of farmers pitching their market tents for the year ahead. You know what that means: you'll be able to add fresh local asparagus and radishes to that soup any day now. Toronto supports a handful of year-round markets including the old reliable St. Lawrence and a relative......

Yesterday was a tough day for fans of free ice cream. You see, April 29th was Ben and Jerry's Free Cone Day, at participating store locations worldwide. Los Angeles residents, like much of the rest of the world, easily (and, we assume, happily) got theirs. The Ben and Jerry's at 238 Queen Street West, however—Toronto's only downtown store—was closed, with a sign in the window that declared it was "Closed for the season! See you......

Photo by mag3737. Brimming with ice, syrup and syntho-flavours, the right slushy can truly hit the proverbial spot on a hot day. Refreshment possibilities aside, our research has indicated, as per undoubtedly reliable sources, that these concoctions are also capable of giving you the power of not only song, but dance—Broadway style! With that in mind, jazz hands a-ready, and our insulin levels relatively in check, we went slushy hunting.......

Start with the caviar and hazelnut foam. Next, try the bacon-stuffed tangerine segment appetizer, and follow with a palate-cleansing sorbet of kiwi and heirloom tomato purée. You'd be a fool to miss the rock lobster meatloaf, which is served atop an oasis of fig and cucumber gelée. Finish with a candied beet root custard and a tassé of chipotle-scented espresso. Bon Appétit! Haute cuisine fans will descend on Isabel Bader Theatre (93 Charles Street......

Two ads for local bakeries lay side-by-side in an evening newspaper. One will become an international food empire (albeit one in the midst of boardroom turmoil), the other will find that a walking loaf of bread does not ensure longevity. George Weston (1865–1924) entered the bread business at the age of 12, learning the craft at several local bakeries. At 17 he purchased two bread routes that mark the beginning of the company that......

Have you asked yourself recently "Hey, what happened to the "s" in my local Loblaw's sign?" If so, you probably live in Toronto or Collingwood and are curiously attentive to detail. The missing "s" comes as Loblaw Corporation, parent company of Loblaw's grocery chain, tries out a rebrand at three of their stores. Two of the locations are in Toronto, one on Burnamthorpe, and the other at Yonge Street and Yonge Boulevard (between Lawrence......

A very well-dressed and perplexed-looking man stands in front of the egg display in a local supermarket, warily eyeing the dizzying array of medium, large, extra-large, white, brown, free-run, cage-free, organic, omega-3, enhanced, hard-boiled, pickled, and even yolkless eggs. He takes a step back, calls a trusted confidant on his cell phone, and asks: Man: Hi. How exactly does one go about selecting eggs? Ah, the paradox of choice strikes again.......

Sometimes what passed for clever advertising in the past leaves us speechless. Note that today's ad appeared seven years before Advertising Standards Canada came into being. The free guide offered in this ad was first published in 1944 and offered the following words of wisdom: Soup has long played a stellar part on the Canadian menu—but never has it filled so many interesting and appetizing roles as it does today! Formerly served as a......

Snappy Answers runs every Saturday afternoon. Send your questions, be they tough or trivial, to snappyanswers@torontoist.com. Snappy Answers, as you may have noticed, is a couple days late this time around. Sorry. That's what happens when you outsource to China. We'll be back to the regular schedule next week. Where in Toronto, preferably near University of Toronto, can I get my hands on large quantities of tasty, tasty naan bread? Going to Jodhpore Club's lunch......

Photo by blmurch from Flickr. Flour? Check. Yeast? Check? Three pounds of butter? Mais, bien sûr! While we realize that we have been a bit starch heavy as of late here on Torontoist, we just can't help but love these sorts of snacks, and what could possibly surpass any of our previous contestants, in terms of pure indulgence, than the ultimate bakery offspring, the croissant. With a self-made commitment to run at least 10......

Someone at Maxwell House's marketing department must be catching on to some of the hints we've been dropping lately, because on the morning of Wednesday, March 26th, they'll be giving out free coffee to TTC riders at Eglinton Station. Get this—they're also giving free subway rides to the first 10,000 subway riders. It's a pretty awesome random act of kindness. And for good PR measure, Maxwell House is donating $100,000 to Habitat for Humanity.......

Photo by roboppy from Flickr. Don't be fooled by the beanage—red bean paste, eaten most often in Japan, Korea, and China, is sweet and not overly legumey on the palate. Boiled down and mashed to a paste of varying levels of smoothness, red beans are not only tasty, but also super healthy—high in iron, thiamin, protein, fiber, and low in fat. Sure, you could pull out your bean-eating spoon and straight-up consume a can......

Sarah Lazarovic—curator of the garage-based Montrose Portrait Gallery of Canada—is painting a portrait of a Torontonian every day. Each Monday, we'll feature one of those portraits here. Clark took over his father's Roncesvalles produce shop three years ago. While his dad's approach was buy cheap, sell cheap, Clark is all about the organic. He says you get what you pay for. If you're spending a princely sum on an avocado, how do you make sure......

Photo of Christian Landers by Jessica Landers. If you're a white person and you haven't heard of Stuff White People Like, you've probably been too busy watching entire seasons of The Wire on your IKEA couch with your Asian grad-school girlfriend, sharing iPod earbuds and a vegan stirfry, and having irony-fortified arguments about Wes Anderson movies, Barack Obama, and whose turn it is to take out the recycling. Congratulations, whitey: you've finally got a......

Every weekday morning, bright and early, we feature a photo (or two) from a photographer in the Torontoist Flickr Pool. It's our way of giving the many excellent photographers in our pool the attention that they deserve. Mr. Cool BY TAYLOR ZHOU......

Sarah Lazarovic—curator of the garage-based Montrose Portrait Gallery of Canada—is painting a portrait of a Torontonian every day. Each Monday, we'll feature one of those portraits here. Leonard Cohen thinks Mike's serves up the best hot dogs in town (we thought he'd be all about Buddha Dog!). He's known to take friends and fans down to the John Street doggery for a bite. On a recent snack-finding mission, Mike's friendly man at the grill was......

This fjord is my fjord, this fjord is your fjord, From the valley Thörsmork to the geyser Strokkur, From Lake Lögurinn to Björk's house in Reykjaviík. Iceland was made for you and me. Our favourite Nordic country just got a little closer: Icelandair will launch direct flights between Toronto and Reykjaviík on May 2. To celebrate, Iceland Naturally is hosting a week-long Taste of Iceland festival from March 10–16 to promote modern Viking culture......

Photo by Chenette from Flickr. Generally eaten in its native Trinidad and Tobago as a breakfast food, the loveliness that are doubles reminds Torontoist, yet again, why it's frustrating that the powers that be won't let us expand our street-vendor scope past encased meats. Luckily, there are a slew of places that serve up doubles from "proper" store fronts, and while we have a feeling they taste way better off the back of a......