culture
Vintage Toronto Ads: It Started With Noodles
As Joanne Kates winds down her run as Globe and Mail food critic, a look at her first review for the paper.
Source: Saturday Night, September 1977.
Whatever achievements the Saint restaurant on Ossington may earn, it will go down in history as the last spot Globe and Mail food critic Joanne Kates reviewed in her 38-year run with the paper. Like her or hate her, tracking her reviews over the years shows the changes in the Toronto dining scene since the mid-1970s.
Her first review for the paper, published on April 22, 1974, spotlighted Noodles, a Bloor Street Italian eatery from the people behind the restaurants at the Windsor Arms Hotel. Much time was spent custom-designing the décor, which included “Gigantic polished steel cylinders running the length of the ceiling [that] bounce back the gaseous glow from 350 feet of hot pink neon.” Kates asked neon sculptor Sam Markle about the excess of neon in Noodles, and he said “I love neon, but it’s not conducive to eating. It’s great in a discotheque where you want to turn people on, but the keynote is appropriateness. It’s not relaxing.” As for the red and pink colour scheme, Markle noted that they irritated the eyes, pointing out that theatres used red lighting to depict anger.
Kates wondered about the role of décor in general—while she thought it “should make you feel as cosy and relaxed as your favourite chair” (a quality the award-winning chairs at Noodles apparently lacked), she noticed that “young people apparently love this elegant hyper-stimulation.”
As for the food, Kates found the menu “palate-tingling,” with only a few misses. Especially praise-worthy was the pasta cooked in a $10,000 cauldron—“You won’t find a fresher noodle in Canada today. Or tomorrow, probably.” Summing Noodles up, she wrote “Flawed it may be, but credit Noodles for venturing tastefully where few dare to tread.”