JT and I spent a long weekend in Toronto, Ontario. Despite the fact that the weather was about as uncooperative as possible, we had a great time.
We went out on Saturday AM and arrived to a cold (hovering around freezing) and rainy day. We took the TTC (one bus and two trains) from the airport to our hotel; it was very easy, especially since our hotel was only two blocks from two different subway stops.
Our first two days in town were mostly alternating wandering around town (our preferred mode of tourism) with seeking warmth and dryness. Thankfully, Monday was sunny, and by midday (and after a fair bit of walking-around-exercise), it was decently warm as well.
On Saturday morning, we walked over to the St. Lawrence Market a wonderful old-school collection of butchers, bakers, cheese shops and the like. It’s huge, though: there are two buildings, one of which has two floors of shops. In the South Market Hall we wandered around ogling the many food booths, finally settling on the Carousel Bakery for a great sandwich for lunch. Regretfully, we didn’t have the capacity to try food from Sausage King or Churrasco of St. Lawrence (among others), but we did get a great Skor brownie from Eve’s Temptations. We didn’t even make it into the North building, which is mostly produce; we knew we wanted to pack a lot into our three days.
I’ll spare you the minute-by-minute rundown, but there were certainly some other food highlights worth mentioning. Our best restaurant meal was some very good Indian food at Dhaba, in the Theatre District. No doubt in part because the windowsill by our table featured two gushing reviews from Toronto’s Now magazine, we tried one of their favorite dishes, Aloo Kadchi Maar Ke. It was a unique dish of two potato cylinders stuffed with raisins, pecans and other stuff and served swimming in a dish of a delicious creamy tomatoish sauce. The sauce was reminiscent of that in which chicken tikka masala is served, but definitely had some more subtleties to its spicing. I wish we had ordered double the naan so we could have sopped up more of it. Part of me also wished that we had gone instead for the lunch buffet, considering how many menu items we didn’t get to try, but a few of the online reviews I’ve seen suggest that, like many fine Indian restaurants, the buffet doesn’t cover the whole menu.
Finally, on the food front, we spent our sunny Monday snacking around Kensington Market, which is not a market in the sense of St. Lawrence Market. Instead, it’s a few streets of densely packed retail, including a lot of produce and an all-eggs store, as well as quite a bit of clothing and such. We had a great cherry pinwheel (kind of like a turnover which wasn’t turned over on itself) at My Market Bakery on Baldwin, and we discovered the remarkable Trinidadian Double (kind of like a channa masala sandwich) at Patty King. To be honest, the beef patty at Patty King was not that impressive, but I suppose I’m spoiled living just a few blocks away from the Caribbean-American Bakery. PK’s patty had been sitting too long, despite the fact that we went by before 11 AM.
On Sunday, our refuges from the elements were two museums. We were massively impressed by the Art Gallery of Ontario , which is hosting a huge Christo/Jean-Claude exhibition. We also really loved an exhibition about the Group of Seven, who painted vibrant Canadian landscapes in the first half of the 20th century and established the possibility of a Canadian art movement. Great stuff!
Later on Sunday we went to the Bata Shoe Museum. Yes, it’s a whole museum about shoes, the history of shoes, and history through shoes. It was pretty interesting, but we were getting tired and our own shoes were totally waterlogged, so we probably didn’t appreciate it as much as we might have.
In short, we found Toronto to be a great place to visit. We loved how easy it was to walk everywhere. We loved the diverse culture and the many independent book and music shops (far more than Chicago, despite a somewhat smaller population. I’m sure we’ll be back before long…