Toronto Food

[owlfish]

Before my information becomes too outdated, here are the major ways I kept track of the Toronto food scene while living there.

• Toronto Life Eating and Drinking Guide. The best overall guide to Toronto's restaurants. Especially good for the higher end of the market. Comes out sometime in autumn.
  
• eGullet's Toronto, Ontario, and Central Canada discussion board. eGullet in general is a fabulous place to read up on and discuss food online. A fair sampling of the world's great chefs and food critics hang out there too. From locals to celebrities, the people there care about their food.
  
• Gremolata. Website updated weekly (and you can have the weekly headlines emailed to you). Good for a sampling of Toronto's overall food culture, from farmers' markets to special tasting meals to interviews with culinary instructors and chefs.
  
• Toronto Star's weekly restaurant review. One review a week from Canada's major Toronto-based newspaper. You can subscribe to the reviews via email for free. (This is how I follow them.)
  
• Toronto Life. The monthly high-end culture and gossip magazine offers good analyses of Toronto food trends, major restaurant openings and closings, and reviews. Especially good for the higher end of the market.
  
• Now. The free weekly magazine offers several reviews every week of the city's restaurants, cafés, coffee shops, and even street stands. Occasionally, there's an inset with news about other restaurant openings and closings and chefs moving venues. I didn't always agree with their reviews, but after a while, I had a good sense of where they were coming from, which meant their reviews were still useful to me. Especially good for the lower end of the market.
  
• toronto_eats isn't very active, but now and again there're some interesting posts to the group.
  
• I've also been following a few Toronto-based food blogs. Edible Tulip (edible_tulip) regularly contemplates parts of Toronto's food scene. A la cuisine (alacuisine) mentions Toronto things occasionally, but the blog is really more worth following for the spectacular cooking than the local references.

Chowhound also has a lively discussion board for Toronto, but I've never found Chowhound very easy to use.

Also, since I left, there's a new food magazine out: City Bites.

Comments

[greenelephant.livejournal.com]

*adds to memories*
Thanks for this - I'm new enough to the area to not know where to go in Toronto.

[owlfish]

I'm glad it's useful. I first began to realize how much I cared about food when I'd been living in Toronto for a year and had yet to eat a memorable meal. I knew there had to be good food out there somewhere.

[maevajecig.livejournal.com]

As much as I’m fond of all of Chinese food iterations (it’s strange how much loathing for Shanghainese cooking I’ve run across on the internet—no, I’m not calling anyone out) coconut milk, shrimp paste and fresh hot chiles suck me in like nothing else.

[racheloxuke.livejournal.com]

Gary King Says: January 18th, at pm How did you manage to add new labels to your map that do not exist in Google Maps.