I didn’t take a huge number of photos this leg but what there is, is here. Mostly food- and coffee-related as you can see.
The trip was almost completely good. The flight from Vancouver to Toronto (I had the option of flying PDX-YYC-YYZ which would have given me the bizarre option of transferring at my own airport, but YVR was cheaper and got me into Toronto earlier, though still at night) was a good hour less than I thought it would be, about 4 hours and 20 minutes gate to gate, and it was on a comfy but packed 767. The flight from Portland to Vancouver, I should note, was on a turbo (I hadn’t flown on one of those in, oh, two years), and both flights were smooth as silk and on time.
Anyway, I arrived in Toronto just as a weeks-long garbage strike was ending and so it was, as you can imagine, completely filthy and ugly. That said, my hotel (the Sutton Place on Bay) was very nice. The room was not huge but I had, to my surprise, a delightful private balcony at the rear (on the east side) of the building. Sutton doesn’t appear to have balconies based on looking at its west-facing facade on Bay Street so this was nice to have. AC worked brilliantly and at a perfect sleep-inducing white noise hum that let me sleep embarrassingly late almost every day I was there (six nights). Another neat thing was that one could pay for high-def movies on a a beautiful 42″ Philips plasma in-room; I took the option and watched Drag Me To Hell ($15.95 but we’re talking 1080p here) my last night. I got a superb deal here on, I think, travelocity, and I’d stay there again in a heartbeat.
Toronto is, to an extent, hurting. I have to laugh a bit at the frequent references in The Globe and Mail about how Calgary (and Alberta) are “hit hard by the recession,” because of that’s true, then Toronto is an apocalypse. Shuttered businesses are EVERYWHERE, more than I saw even when I first started visiting Toronto regularly when I first met Brian in 1995, worse than my vacation there in 1993. It is far, far worse than what we’ve seen here. But that said, there are too many new restaurants to comprehend. I’m not talking about high-end places (which may or may not be opening, I didn’t look for them), but rather a profusion that’s shocking, really shocking, in (1) cheap Korean and Chinese sushi places, (2) shawarma, and (3) viet-thai noodle places. Yes this sounds like Calgary, minus the “thai” aspect, but the scale is unbelievably greater. I should have done a photo thread of just new and new-to-me sushi places, because it’s mind-boggling. Now not all of my food experiences were good, in stark contrast to Portland where everything I had was at least “good” and at best spectacular. The low points happened with all of three of my last meals; Monday night was an I-deserved-that too-salty and generally unbalanced carnitas burrito (not one-tenth as good as what I had in Portland) at Canada’s first Chipotle at “Toronto Life Square” by Dundas Square, where I went to see the very fun horror flick Orphan; the next two were lunch on my last day at a terrible sushi place on College Street (I needed air conditioning and also thought sushi would be nice and light; the AC was fine but the sushi rice was horrible sticky stodge, the consistency of cold oatmeal), and the last was at a Trinidadian place near Yonge and Eglinton that had, my heart leapt, shark and bake on the menu, but it was terrible. Highlights? Well nothing beats a boneless chicken roti from Islands Foods, a chicken and eggplant sandwich from Mustachio at St Lawrence Market, or the sublime lemongrass chicken at Ginger (Yonge and Bloor location), or this new-to-me place’s AMAZING salad rolls; it’s called “Hue” and is also around that Asian fusion paradise near Yonge and Bloor. Great food and value that puts us to shame here in Calgary. While we’re now used here to paying $15.95 for Indian buffets, in Toronto you can still find all-you-can-eat similar for $8. This is part of why I love Toronto, but there are some bad choices to be made so one has to be careful sometimes.
The COFFEE scene in Toronto has improved markedly over the last couple of years and it was great to witness it up close. I had nice cappuccinos at Manic Coffee on College Street (east of Bathurst) and, to my happy surprise, at Bulldog which was for a long time the closest thing to a third-wave shop in Toronto, but my fave was Dark Horse Espresso Bar on Spadina, a new location for them (original is in Leslieville though I’ve not been there) that has all of the ingredients of a great cafe: excellent beans from 49th Parallel, a gorgeous machine setup with a La Marzocco FB-80, a Clover, press pots (no drip) and the same cool-as-hell siphon machines that I saw in action at Blue Bottle in SF last year, well-trained and friendly baristas, cool tunes, a lovely, open space, and a vibe that is just perfect. It’s so nice to see this in Toronto and I hope that this place sees more success.
NOW, I was going to write a treatise on Toronto and its place (whether it likes it or not) in Canada but I think most of that can wait. I have to just say that Toronto is a very inward-looking city and this focus can seem almost insulting to visitors from the rest of the country, because Toronto really is (unlike Calgary, REALLY unlike Calgary) pretty much indifferent to it. The thing is- it could be worse. Torontonians are not, like many Vancouverites, HOSTILE to the rest of the country. They don’t HATE the rest of Canada. They just have their own things to worry about. This gets lost in the stereotyping and it’s really, really easy to confuse this issue of concern with one’s own city and its unique (in Canada) problems and challenges to mean that the denizens of that city are actively abusive of the country outside them. I don’t think the latter is the case but it’s hard to remember this. I guess there’s a lesson for dealing with humans there, somewhere, too.
