Entries from Torontoist tagged with 'restaurants'
April 14, 2008
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......
Continue Reading "Snappy Answers: Cause You Gotta Eat"January 10, 2008
Winterlicious is back with 130 restaurants participating. For $15 or $20 for lunch and $25 or $35 for dinner, foodies get a three-course meal including appetizer, main, and dessert. Too bad most restaurants play it safe by offering the standard soup or salad, chicken or beef, and cake or ice cream. Although the food is rarely bad, boring food at nearly $50 a head (after taxes and gratuity) is pretty hard to swallow. Luckily,......
Continue Reading "Winter-lickin' Good"January 4, 2008
Eat Me is a regular feature about the nooks and crannies of Toronto's restaurant scene, about the amazing restaurants that are––for some reason––criminally underpatronized. There are few non-vegetarian pleasures in this life finer than a really good steak. The problem is that a really good steak tends to be really pricey. So if I said, "Hey, I know a place where you can get a really good steak––and I mean a really good steak––for less......
Continue Reading "Eat Me: D-Ganz"January 1, 2008
Torontoist is ending the year by naming our Heroes and Villains of 2007––the people, places, and things that we've either fallen head over heels in love with or developed uncontrollable rage towards over the past twelve months. Get your dose, starting Boxing Day and running into the new year, three times a day––sunrise, noon, and sunset. Now in its fourth season, Food Network Canada's Restaurant Makeover—wherein both established and struggling restaurants are overhauled with a......
Continue Reading "Villain: Restaurant Makeover"December 24, 2007
What to do if you are alone tomorrow, either because you don't celebrate Christmas, or because there's no one around to celebrate with: Spend your day curled up with the almost-human warmth of your laptop, watching the WPIX Yule Log and listening to "Blue Christmas" (the Bright Eyes version), both on endless loops that resemble depression spirals more and more with each whiskey-and-tears cocktail that passes down your throat, which, come to think of......
Continue Reading "Christmas Day(ist)"December 10, 2007
After refusing to allow environmentalists into the official Canadian delegation at the Bali Climate Change Conference, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has raised some hackles by bringing businesspeople, including oil company executives, into the group. Wow, he's not even pretending to care anymore. In other Bali news, a proposal to eliminate tariffs on "green" technologies was shot down at the conference on the weekend, the victim of bickering between developed and developing nations. The human......
Continue Reading "Business As Usual In Bali, Pickton Convicted, Canadians Feeling Oppressed"December 5, 2007
Are you getting geared up for the season finale of The Hills on Monday? If so, continue reading. If not, we don't need another lecture about how the show is quasi-scripted—tell it to your boring friends. The last few weeks have surprised loyal viewers with some major plot twists: Audrina finally dumped Justin Bobby, Lauren wants to make a boyfriend out of notorious man-whore Brody Jenner, Spencer's sister has turned cat-fighting into the official......
Continue Reading "The Hills Are Alive In Toronto"December 1, 2007
Regardless of how you choose to celebrate (or not) the upcoming holiday season, it’s hard not to embrace a spirit of generosity that seems unique to this time of year. Students from the Ontario College of Art & Design’s Think Tank program are hoping that giving mood will be alive and well among restaurant patrons on Thursday, December 6, as they unveil the inaugural Bread Project. A joint project between OCAD’s Think Tank and......
Continue Reading "Bread Project Rises from OCAD Oven"November 4, 2007
Eat Me is a regular feature about the nooks and crannies of Toronto's restaurant scene, about the amazing restaurants that are––for some reason––criminally underpatronized. It's pretty easy to find sushi places in this city. From the Bloor Street strip to North York, sushi places range from suspiciously cheap to ridiculously expensive, from having incredibly creative culinary creations to the same old rolls. Quietly tucked on the east edge of Little Italy is Jun Jun Sushi......
Continue Reading "Eat Me: A Sushi Above"September 21, 2007
The idea of another Toronto restaurant guide may not seem original, but Urbanspoon, a newly launched website, sets itself apart by combining the best elements of other guides with some ideas of its own. And it presents them all in a clean and user-friendly design. Like many guides, it lets you browse by type of cuisine or by neighbourhood (including the suburbs), with the results listed alphabetically or ranked according to ratings. What distinguishes......
Continue Reading "Urbanspoon Ends With A Full Stomach"September 19, 2007
Toronto has been called a city of neighbourhoods: The Beach, Yorkville, Chinatown, Little Italy, Greektown, The Annex; all have their defining characteristics that make them appealing to locals as well as visitors. And when it comes down to it, most of these areas are well-defined by the intersection of two major streets. Photo by funkaoshi from Flickr. On the southwest edge of Trinity-Bellwoods Park lies the quiet intersection of Queen St. West & Crawford St.......
Continue Reading "A City Intersected: Queen Street West & Crawford Street"September 13, 2007
The price of oil scaled new heights yesterday, climbing up over $80 US for the first time ever. That's good news if you're an oil company, but bad news if you're a regular folk who likes to go places, or do things, or eat stuff. McDonald's Canada is going upscale. Influenced by popular chains such as Starbucks, the fast-food giant will renovate its restaurants to make them more "comfortable," creating cosiness with leather chairs,......
Continue Reading "Today: Oil Prices, Farrell Niceness, Doctor Crisis"September 4, 2007
Beginning this Thursday, the fifteenth annual Junction Arts Festival will be swarming the streets with an entourage of innovative musicians, performers, and visual artists hailing from Canada, Denmark, Brussels, and the United States. Taking place on the one kilometre stretch between Quebec Avenue and Keele Street on Dundas Street West, the festival will present the works of over fifty visual artists as selected by the 2007 Juried Art Exhibition—and for the first time, will......
Continue Reading "Junction Arts Take The Streets"August 16, 2007
Maybe all these cultural festivals in Toronto aren't your cup of tea, but with the summer season nearing a close the best may very well have been saved for last. The Festival of South Asia held on Gerrard Street East (between Greenwood and Coxwell Avenue) starts this Saturday at 2 p.m. and continues through to Sunday. With a short list of sponsors and a couple of them companies that actually sell Indian products, this......
Continue Reading "The S Festival: Saris, Samosas, and South Asia"August 10, 2007
With over one million attendees in previous years, there was no chance that Torontoist would have forgotten about Taste of the Danforth. One of the most popular cultural events in Toronto begins tonight at 6 p.m. on Danforth Avenue between Chester and Jones Avenue and continues throughout the weekend to make sure you get your fill of souvlaki. To help you plan out your trip, Taste of the Danforth has put together a handy......
Continue Reading "Taste of the Danforth"July 25, 2007
Gilligan Island's Ginger was a movie star—a beautiful starlet with a husky voice, expensive tastes, and, allegedly, a thing for the professor. Toronto's Ginger is a Vietnamese restaurant with outrageously cheap great food, with several locations around the city. And, uh, aside from being proper nouns, now they actually have something in common. The system for ordering at Ginger, the restaurant, normally works like this: when you place an order, you're also assigned a......
Continue Reading "Not A Single Luxury"July 21, 2007
Photo of delighted fans by Carrie Musgrave. It's a curious bit of magic that can connect eighties synth-pop, Bob Marley, and bouncing castles with a seventeen-year-old boy wizard. It's even more curious to see how far that wizard and his multi-billionaire creator have come in just a few short years. Last night, magic and wonder invaded the typically staunch and business-like intersection of Bay and Bloor. To celebrate the release of Harry Potter and......
Continue Reading "A Potter for the Masses"July 13, 2007
Those Pedestrian Sundays folk are back this weekend (July 15), and this time they're taking over Baldwin Village. Nestled on the edge of Chinatown, the area was once the home of Jewish immigrants, American draft dodgers and a myriad of other international settlers to Toronto. It is now well known for its diverse restaurants—especially to the U of T students who live in inexpensive apartments nearby. Baldwin Street will be shut down from Henry......
Continue Reading "Inaugural P.S. Baldwin"July 11, 2007
Toronto legend Edwin "Honest Ed" Mirvish has died. He was 92. The philanthropic businessman was a crucial part of Toronto's reputation as a world-renowned theatre centre, and had been mostly out of the public eye after contracting a severe case of pneumonia in 2003 and experiencing deteriorating health ever since. Mirvish died at St. Michael's Hospital at 1:30 a.m. Mirvish was born in Virginia on July 25, 1914 to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants. His introduction to......
Continue Reading ""Honest Ed" Mirvish, 1914-2007"July 6, 2007
This Sunday, July 8 from 12 to 9 p.m., Mirvish Village will host the first Pedestrian Sunday outside of Kensington Market. The neighbourhood is home to the landmark discount store Honest Ed’s and is a collection of boutiques, studios and restaurants, founded and named for the Mirvish family in recognition of Toronto’s retail show biz entrepreneur Ed Mirvish. Inspired by the success of P.S. Kensington, the project is being taken on by the local Business......
Continue Reading "Pedestrian Sundays Spreads Its Wings"June 26, 2007
Downtown Toronto experienced a hotel boom during the first half of the 1970s as modern skyscrapers and buildings like the new City Hall changed the face of the core. Among those that made their debut: the Sheraton Centre (1972), the Holiday Inn on Chestnut (1972), the Chelsea (1975), the Harbour Castle (1975) and, opening its doors 32-years ago this week, the Hotel Toronto. Western International Hotels traced its roots to the early 1930s, when......
Continue Reading "Vintage Toronto Ad: Welcome to the Hotel Toronto"June 19, 2007
Even though the city has voiced disappointment and considered allowing chain restaurants onto the list, Summerlicious has arrived with all its previous perks and kinks. Starting today and over tomorrow, restaurants participating in Summerlicious will begin taking reservations from Amex holders for the prix fixe menu event held July 6 to 22. Those who are sans Amex will have to wait until June 21 to start calling some of the highly demanded dining destinations.......
Continue Reading "Prix Fixe Your Summer"June 18, 2007
Toronto vegetarians are mourning the closure of East-end veggie haunt Narula's Chaat, Dosa & Thali House. Recently, the windows were papered up and the exterior now displays a large "for lease or rent" sign. The owners decided it was time to retire. We'll miss the all-vegetarian fare, the sunny patio, and Tuesdays, when everything on the menu was $2.25. (Seriously: Your entire meal was $2.25!) So, where to go now? It appears that veggie options......
Continue Reading "Narula's Closed, and Other Options Less Veggie"June 13, 2007
God bless our sister site LAist for discovering The Canadian Cafe (no, there's no acute accent), a small restaurant 4,000 kilometres away, in Montrovia, L.A., where (their website claims beside a clip art picture of a moose dressed as a mountie) "You'll Find Family Dining With A Taste Of The North." What, exactly, is Canadian cuisine, beyond poutine and Canadian bacon? Well, they have a "selection of Maple Syrup products" (!!!!), a "British Columbia Burger"......
Continue Reading "Donkey Riding, Donkey Riding"June 12, 2007
Photo by neuroticjose from Flickr. Toronto has been called a city of neighbourhoods: The Beach, Yorkville, Chinatown, Little Italy, Greektown, The Annex; all have their defining characteristics that make them appealing to locals as well as visitors. And when it comes down to it, most of these areas are well-defined by the intersection of two major streets. Every summer, a 2.5 kilometre stretch of Danforth Avenue is packed with people for Krinos’ annual Taste......
Continue Reading "A City Intersected: Chester Avenue & Danforth Avenue"June 7, 2007
Who says there's no such thing as a free lunch? This weekend, Torontoist got sent the above poster. While we can't reveal much beyond what the poster does, we can tell you that 418 Spadina is Lucky Dragon Restaurant, which has over three hundred items on its menu. We have been assured by the person or people involved in facilitating the lunch (see? we really can't say anything) that the free food line is......
Continue Reading "A Very Lucky Dragon, Indeed"May 29, 2007
Photo by Hamish Grant. Customer loyalty is a hard thing for a company to get, but once they've got it, it takes a hell of a lot of bad work to lose. With Amato Pizza, I was one of the people who happily ate from the pizza place in spite of the protests against it in 2005, when employees organized outside the St. Clair West location in mid-winter to protest $82,000 in alleged overtime......
Continue Reading "Domo Arigato, Peace Out Amato"May 29, 2007
This summer, Toronto will attempt "to probe the causes of panhandling and seek solutions" after business owners launched a complaint at City Hall yesterday. A Tim Hortons owner alleges that one beggar slapped her hard enough to draw blood after she asked him to leave her store. Restaurant owners complain that the homeless steal money and food off of patios and harass the patrons. Is it time Toronto did something about the panhandlers that......
Continue Reading "Handling The Pan, RCMP Scandal, Daycare Inquiry"May 26, 2007
In a promotion ingeniously titled...uh..."Harvey's Hamburger Day," head into your local Harvey's on Sunday between 10:30 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. for a free Original Hamburger. Or, if you're really eager, you can confirm your attendance on Facebook. There are, it appears, no vegetarian or vegan alternatives, but odds are that if you're a vegetarian you were probably never really that big on Harvey's in the first place. Photo by Crime Photography. Thanks to blogUT......
Continue Reading "Hey, It's Better Than McDonald's"May 11, 2007
There’s nothing quite like leisurely strolling on a warm, sunny Saturday, exploring shops, nibbling some treats, and sipping some wine. Can this enticing combination be had in Toronto? Yes—tomorrow is the last day of Santé, the 9th annual Bloor-Yorkville wine festival, with several events left to round out your activities this Mother’s Day weekend. First stop for you and Mum—Village of Yorkville Park on Cumberland between Avenue Road and Bellair Street, where you will find......
Continue Reading "Wine Her And Dine Her"