Blogs

The Gladstone Hotel prides itself on notable achievements across a number of fronts. And we’re talking about some pretty cool stuff here, not just manufactured superlatives, like the restaurant professing to serve the “world’s best hog maw” or the pub with the “city’s comfiest bar stools.” 

Consider, for one, that the Gladstone’s Melody Bar was named among the top 10 bars in the world by the Condé Nast Traveler Readers’ Choice Awards. No small potatoes, that. 

Nor is the one about the Gladstone being the oldest continuously operating hotel in the city. That’s a pretty nifty claim to fame to bandy about with your buds. 

Or that it was one of the first 10 hotels in the province to be granted permission to allow its patrons to drink and play shuffleboard in a licensed alcoholic area, at one time even skirting the municipal imperative that all beverage rooms had to close between 6:30 p.m. and 8:00 p.m....more

Life just got easier for home stickers with a taste for restaurant food. 

Online food-ordering service Just-Eat Canada Inc. has gobbled up its fattest rival, GrubCanada. With this move, the Toronto-based Just-Eat—the Canadian arm of the London, England parent company—adds another 200 Ontario and BC eateries to the roster. All told, Just-Eat clients now have access to more than 1,000 participants across the country....more

Next weekend marks the occasion of the seventh annual Grand Cru Culinary Wine Festival in Toronto, a hoi-polloi biennial celebration of all things food and drink that brings together the worlds of wine, gourmet dining and medical research in a powerful combo. 

The exclusive dinners that are the hallmark of the event spill out across 27 of Toronto’s most splendid private homes, with each experience featuring fine food, fine wine, a treasure-laden silent auction and the attendance of a leading UHN scientist to pepper the conversation with erudite stuff. 

Among the participating wine estates this year, find such oenophilic powerhouses as Champagne Barons de Rothschild, Château Margaux and Hugel et Fils. The chefs, meanwhile...more

It’s been lodged in the back of your brain since Labour Day: the looming toilfest that is Thanksgiving. Take heed, gentle tryptophan fan—this annual indulgence doesn’t need to tax your tail feathers unduly. Here are some outside-the-coop options for getting your turkey on. 

360 The Restaurant, CN Tower

Feast your eyes along with your belly with a Thanksgiving eat-a-thon 1,151 feet up in Toronto’s oxygen. The prix-fixe Monday dinner (also offered on the Yank-friendly November 24) features such up-in-the-air exotica as roast pork stuffed with calvados prunes and roasted squash, and pumpkin seed fettuccini. Dinner’s $52 a head; the view, however, is free and for nothing. 

Casa Loma

Introduce an element of stateliness to your proceedings with a Thanksgiving meal at Toronto’s most regal of lodgings. Three Sunday brunch sittings are held in the august conservatory and library. Follow up the candied yams and maple-baked toupee ham with a toss-back of the complimentary pumpkin pie liqueur...more

25: The number of would-be chefs, home cooks, aspiring entrepreneurs and food purveyors who hawked their wares at the Toronto Underground Market on the evening of Saturday, September 24, the inaugural rollout of what promises to be a favourite for local foodies.

1,200: How many bellies rumbled inside the shadows of the Don Valley as a slew of food lovers hunkered down for the much-anticipated social food market at the Evergreen Brick Works. 

1: The number of weeks it took for the 1,200 tickets to sell out.

$2.99: How much it cost for one pulled-pork adobo slider, served with a mango and papaya slaw and deep-fried plantain chips, from the Bistro Filipino booth on Saturday night. 

20: The number of minutes one might have spent lining up for jerk chicken on a coco bun, lemon and lime rice, or cornbread grilled cheese under a blanket of sour cream and guac, some of the evening’s favourites....more

Along with chilly mornings and an expanded offering of faux-pumpkin-flavoured drinks, the onset of autumn delivers the promise of beautiful bathrooms. The annual Cintas Canada restroom contest, now in its second year, seeks to crown the country’s finest throne, as voted on by the very public that might rest its tender parts thereon.

The ultimate winner (vote at www.bestrestroom.com/canada) will be announced on October 24, but among the five best-bathroom finalists that came out last week, find two hopeful Toronto johns.

The bathroom at e11even is remarkable for a slew of reasons, not the least of which are the heated toilet seats. And the warmth continues at this spacious public restroom, with top-to-tail marble and some of those really funky sinks that make you call your girlfriend in for a look...more

Looking for Turkish nosh in Toronto? No problem. Got a hankering for Ethiopian? You bet. How about Ukrainian, Italian, Spanish, Thai or Greek? Just a matter of being pointed in the right direction. But options have historically been sorrily scant for locals looking for a taste of their own country’s most native fare. Until recently, thanks to the launch of two initiatives dedicated to the service of Aboriginal cuisine.

First, the Keriwa Café, which opened in Parkdale (1690 Queen St. W.) in mid August. Promising a menu of fresh and authentic ingredients, this restaurant is the breathless product of the efforts of owner and chef Aaron Joseph Bear Robe, a Blackfoot with the impressive pedigree that having worked at Splendido and Michael Städtlander’s Eigensinn Farm bestows on a guy....more

So you’ve eaten your weight in donut cheeseburgers (this year’s superstar artery clogger at the Ex) and stuck it to all the food-on-a-stick choices you could wrap your grip around (pausing, perhaps, to appreciate the miracle that is a deep-fried peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a stick), and now you’re wondering what other food-based trouble you can get up to at the CNE in the summer of 2011. 

Wonder no longer, inquisitive fair-goer. ...more

Would-be chefs, home food purveyors and open-minded foodies take note: a fresh opportunity to pursue gastronomical passions is about to unfold in the form of a renegade food fair, due to launch here in the early fall. The Toronto Underground Market proposes to be a kind of food experiment wherein sellers and buyers of tasty victuals will congregate in a communal space without the confining strictures of the typical commercial environment.

Neither a farmers’ market nor a restaurant, the TUM is a “social food market” that seeks to matchmake adventurous food lovers with folks who have unique foodstuffs to sell—but not the official means of doing so...more

There’s something fishy in the Toronto restaurant scene and it ain’t the shellfish boil at Big Daddy’s. After an exhaustive investigation that lasted a year longer than anticipated, the Canadian Revenue Agency has uncovered evidence of some big-ass tax evasion among a slew of area eateries.

Over three years, the CRA looked into the records of 424 Toronto establishments and discovered at least $141 million in so-called “phantom sales” that proprietors had attempted to erase from their systems. They’ve done this, says the agency, with the aid of high-level “phantomware” or stand-alone software “zappers” that wipes clean the memory of sales data in an instant. ...more