S. Worthen | Weblog

Location: 94 Ossington, north of Queen West. Toronto. Canada.

I don't usually give so much feedback on a meal while I'm eating it, but our waitress asked, and, more to the point, was patient, interested, and caring enough to listen. It's not that anything was wrong, so much as that they were clearly trying, and some things could be better: wine warm enough to taste, portions of dips proportionate to the things being dipped. We didn't have a chance to comment on being rushed out the door at the end, but that was a nearly-inevitable consequence of giving us time to digest before dessert, crossed with two strictly-regimented eating sessions.

But let me back up. The problems were - relatively speaking - so trivial that C. wondered if Paramour would become our new local if we moved back to that neighborhood, close to where we used to live in Toronto. It's part of the happening new stretch of restaurants on Ossington north of Queen West whose vitality - oddly - has been fed by a city-mandated freeze on the issuing of further licenses along here for a year. As a result, those which got their license in time have a little extra aura to them: the rare, the special, the open.

( Very clear menu design and other, edible things... )

Service was why we came to Paramour in the first place. Splendido, which used to be our favorite Toronto restaurant, was bought out last year and we wondered what had happen to their best, most astonishly intelligent and attentive waiter: he'd gone on to head up the staff at Paramour. Although he wasn't in the evening we were, the staff clearly had their hearts in the right places. After a day in the processed air of indoors Toronto in winter, I was thirsty. The staff kept my glass topped up all evening. Our waitress really was interested in passing on our feedback to the kitchen. The service really was good, if limited by the timing of seatings.

Food was competent and cozy, if undersauced and - for our stomachs - overportioned. Next time, I'd share a starter and a dessert rather than tackling more of the meal's structure on my own.

In between work and social visits, I've spent this trip revisiting favorite fooderies around the city.

Mitzi's (Sorauren & Queen): My favorite brunch in Toronto. Large, fresh, tasy glasses of juice and a lovely menu of six staples presented in news ways every week. My favorite is the oatmeal pancake, crisp on the outside and tender within, which last week was topped with cranberry-orange sauce, maple syrup, and whipped cream. My hosts from last week, J. and G., came along.

Phil's Barbecue (College & Ossington): Slow-roasted barbecue, meaty ribs, and tender pulled pork. I've never found the side dishes too exciting, although I like the baked beans. Really, it's just all about the meat. B.P. joined us there.

Simone Marie Belgian Chocolate (Bloor & Avenue, on Cumberland): The best all-around truffles from the Toronto chocolate tour chamaeleoncat and I self-organized the other year. I still hope to make it to J.S. Bonbons and/or Soma for the hot chocolate before I leave.

Insomnia (Bloor and Bathurst): Competent brunch, with quite nice potatoes. C.V. was impressed with their hollandaise sauce - she's had a run of mediocre ones around town lately. Plus, we somehow managed to spend five hours there, and they didn't mind at all. theengineer and C.V. came along; plus, we ran into acrabtree and L. there!

The New Yorker Deli (Bay and St. Charles): Tender, tasty cabbage borscht comfort food. We brought their soup to visit forthright and curtana for lunch.

Ginger (Bloor and Yonge): A full cooked meal, with drink and appetizer, for C$7.30 - their pork vermicelli comes with a deep-friend spring roll and a pleasant light vinegary sauce which contrasts with the pork's sweet caramelized crunch. I went with snowdrifted, but C. wanted to go too, so we went again after he arrived.

Splendido (Harbourd and Spadina): Comfortable, elegant, decadent, superb - this was the restaurant which first serious sparked my occasional international search for truly fabulous places to eat. The evening flew by in the company of double0hilly. ( Menu, with comments... )

Still to come: The Red Tea Box, Mildred Pierce (for brunch), Mt. Everest lunch buffet (with all-you-can-eat rice pudding)

If only there were more time: Gallery Grill (for brunch), croissantwiches at The Croissant Tree, samosas from The Butler's Pantry, fig croissants and sandwiches at Clafouti, burger at the Drake café.

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.

( A bit of background... )

Now I know why I should never accept a restaurant booking for so late in the evening, unless I'm either in Spain or planning on a light dinner. A good multi-course meal needs to be enjoyed slowly, over the course of hours and hours, with plenty of time to digest along the way. Even with the late start, the restaurant was happy for us to take breaks, but given how full our schedule had been in the preceeding weeks, we were fading fast with fatigue when midnight hit. Full stomachs warred with exhaustion, and exhaustion won. Additionally, despite trying hard to time my meals that day with a late dinner in mind, by the time 9 pm rolled around, I was no longer as hungry as I'd been an hour or two earlier, and thus, for the first time ever, didn't have the appetite to finish my last few dishes.

There was one further complication with this particular dinner: I was fighting off a cold and was mildly congested. I thought the congestion mild enough to be no impediment to enjoying complex foods, but I was mistaken. There were various registers of taste I lacked. Not only was I missing out on many of the flavor notes which C. could taste, the dessert and mignardises- confections of coffee and milk chocolate and hazelnut - was effectiveful tasteless to me. C. swooned over the sweets; they were tragically wasted on me.

Finally, this dinner was one more lesson in the important of taking copious notes on a meal as I eat it - or as soon afterwards as possible. However good, many of the details fade with alarming alacrity from my memory when I don't write them down.

Please note that none of these problems were in any way the restaurant's fault.

For your delectation, here's the tasting menu we (mostly) ate that night. As ever, Splendido was happy to replace C.'s fish and seafood dishes with substitutions, and substitute whites for reds for me. Wines are listed in parentheses.

( Splendido's December 2005 Tasting Menu... )

Some things I learned yesterday...

• Milk chocolate and chesnuts occupy the same register of taste.
  
• Even mild congestion substantially limits the perception subtle tastes.
  
• I should never accept a dinner reservation for 9 pm unless I'm in Spain or planning on a light dinner.
  
• Salmon pearls are very odd, burstable little bubbles of liquid salmonness.
  
• Persimmons have a lovely floral flavor.
  
• Lush has undermined the appetizingness of butter cream for me.
  
• It's hard to go wrong with squash.

Wagamama location: 10a Lexington St, London, W1F 0LD, UK, SE of Piccadilly Circus, and 49 other locations
Ichiban location: 50 Queen St., Glasgow, UK, and one other location
Izakaya location: 69 Front St. E., Toronto, Canada.

Since Wagamama opened its doors back in 1992, It's grown into a small empire of Japanese noodle restaurants whose aegis spans from Ireland to Auckland by way of Dubai. Long communal metallic tables stand in rows, built-in benches on either side. The staff use PDAs to put orders through to the kitchen, then scribble down the numbers corresponding to items ordered on each persons' paper placemats. Food is served whenever it's ready. The concept is efficient, but the practice is fairly pleasant, most of all because the food is good. C.'s apple-and-lime juice was fresh and tangy. My amai udon was nicely put together, the flavors blending into rich comfortingness. The white chocolate and ginger cheesecake had a flavorful spicy bite, with a dash of chilli mixed into the toffee, complementing the cheesecake.

( Ichiban and Izakaya... )

I don't know how closely these restaurants cleave to new wave Japanese noodle bars (can any of you tell me?), but I like the way the trend is spreading around the English-speaking world so far, with good food, efficient service, competitive prices. These won't be the last meals I eat at this new breed of sit-down fast food.

Location: 696 Queen West, between Niagara and Bathurst. Toronto. Note: Closed Tuesdays.

jennybeast requested good food during her whirlwind two-day visit, and so good food there was. We went to Arabesque and Clafouti and The Spice Trader, and we went to The Red Tea Box for afternoon tea, where I had previously had two of my best lunches ever in Toronto. The Oriental-influenced eclectically furnished air-conditioned space enveloped us in its relaxing atmosphere, complete with soothing wall paint and what I suspect was an air-cleaning device. As a light breeze toyed with bringing in the scent of greenery and blooms from the small courtyard which divides shopfront from eating area, we leaned back into plush chairs and off-beat elegance.

( Tea bento boxes! )

All of the other Toronto cream teas provided fairly literal variations on the theme's requirements: scones, jam, clotted cream, sandwiches, pastries, and tea. The Red Tea Box took the basics of the theme and transformed them into beautifully-spiced confections of beauty and deliciousness. It's not for everyone, but if you love interesting spicings, subtle and complex flavors, and innovative cooking, I highly recommend afternoon tea at The Red Tea Box.

Location: 2305 Queen East, near Glen Manor Rd. Toronto.

A modest exterior reveals a comforting interior, blue and white tableclothes, white and blue china, a small but well-equipped tea shop located just east of the heart of the Beaches. As its name implies, La Tea Da specializes in tea. The shop sells tea in bulk... but what it really specialized in is variations on cream teas. Their menu includes three major options: a "cream tea" (scone, toppings, tea); an "afternoon tea" (the same, plus finger sandwiches); and a "high tea" (all of the above, plus pastries). Note: the cream tea comes with two scones; the other combinations come with one each.

( More details... )

La Tea Da provides a good balance between quality and price. If you want full linens and silver serving ware, go to the city's top hotels and pay $5-10 more for the elegance and frills. If you want good food in pleasant and less formal circumstances, unrushed and nicely presented, La Tea Da would make an excellent choice.

I went to the Dufferin Grove Farmer's Market on Thursday. Freshly back from Chicago, the city named after wild leeks, how could I resist the wild leeks that the Forbes Wild Foods stand was selling? Inspired by this exploratory purchase, I also bought sunchokes, a vegetable previously unknown to me. ("Like a nutty potato", the vendor said. aka jerusalem artichokes.) Mixed greens and rhubarb completed my shopping - I was limited because whatever I acquired needed to survive an evening out at the pub.

With one thing and another, I didn't get around to cooking any of these treats until tonight. My lunch was large and late (dim sum!), so a wild leek and sunchoke soup was a pleasantly light and richly-flavored dinner. I used the Joy of Cooking leek and potato soup recipe, with a dash of cream. Either the sunchokes or the chicken stock unexpectedly turned the cream a distinctly yellow shade.

More exciting for me, however, is the prospect of rhubarb compote with sour cream for dessert. The rhubarb compote is cooling as I type. I love rhubarb dearly, but this is my first time cooking it myself. I've been sampling from the pot off and on for the past couple of hours.

In other food news, The Healthy Butcher, an all-organic butchery and high-end takeout joint, opened to a handful of enthusiastic reviews a few weeks ago. I haven't been yet, but I'm looking forward to checking it out in the near future.

For two nights running, dinner has involved interactive food preparation as part of the meal process. That's a very formal way to say that we made s'mores and grilled meat, only under more unusual circumtances than I usually do either.

Thanks to carmen_sandiego and snowdrifted, aerinah, J. and I had the fun of making mini-s'mores last night. Take a mini-marshmallow or two, and toast it over an individual tea light. When the marshmallow is bubbly, soft, and nicely toasted, take two Chex squares (or shreddies, as they're called here), place a chocolate chip or two on one of them, and sandwich the mini-marshmallows in the middle. They're cute, they're fun, and they taste wonderful.

We also made individual upside down pineapple cakes, partially recreating the fun of Girl Guides camp in the security of our hosts' kitchen, before retiring to a challenging game of Harry Potter trivia. (The Durseleys stayed in room 17 while fleeing the Hogwarts letters.)

Tonight, aerinah, B., and I checked out the Fondue and Grill place just south of Yonge and Bloor. I really love fondue, you see, and had been wanting to try this place for a while. Alas, there was no fondue to be found, but the grilling was fun, and we reconciled ourselves to all-you-can-eat meat, veg, and a variety of noodles, including vermicelli, pad thai, and spicy noodles. The meat was tremendously varied, each in its own bowl and tasty marinade: pork, lamb, chicken, squid, salmon, another fish, shrimp, mussels, ribs, beef, tongue, liver, and my favorite, betel-leaf wrapped beef. My banana smoothie was pleasant and intensively banana-y too. Up until they neglected to clear the meat after turning off our stove and failed to bring us the bill at the same time, service was good.