Seasonal craft beer moves through a fairly rigid cycle. Winter beers tend to have Christmasy spices; recipes for spring use maple syrup and the field is packed with pumpkin for fall. But in summer we get a refreshing dose of variety. Yes, there’s lots of orange beer, but there’s also apricot, blueberry, lemon and now, with the latest release from Kensington Brewing Company, watermelon.
After moving to Toronto from his native Delhi, Sumit Kohli noted Hogtown’s dearth of Indian street food options. “Toronto has so many sit-down Indian restaurants,” he says, “but it’s missing some of the staple foods that people eat daily back in India.”
The Fountain, nestled along the Dundas West bar strip, is both watering hole and art gallery. Currently, trippy pieces from local artist Tomas Del Balso dot the walls, illustrating his take on dream imagery in fantastical detail. Behind the bar, tatted up co-owner Sarah Delany pours drinks for art-loving barflies while The Growlers play overhead.
Toronto’s street meat is getting some competition with the arrival of Craft Dogs, an upcoming gourmet hot dog shop near the St. Lawrence Market. Located at 95 King St. E., Craft Dogs is the brainchild of Brian Morin and Kathleen McGinn, formerly co-owners of the nearby Beerbistro, along with a third partner, Craig Smith.
Located amid Little India’s swarm of sari shops, Bombay Chowpatty is one part video-rental shop, one part eatery. Named after Mumbai’s most beloved beach, the restaurant dishes out street-style eats from India’s cultural capital. Bollywood flicks play in the background as patrons tuck into favourites like chana bhatura, bhel puri and paneer kathi rolls.
Weekly Restaurant Recap rounds up the week’s Toronto restaurant news. In this edition: a new seafood restaurant on Queen West, Peruvian cuisine at Yonge and Lawrence, a new spot for barbecue in the Annex and more.
In compiling her annual top 100 Toronto restaurants list, veteran food critic Joanne Kates ate out — a lot. Below, we’ve put together her favourite foodie finds, from the city’s best pizza to its top wait staff.
A New Zealand Sauvignon at its most stripped down and tangy. Pale straw in colour, it has a bouquet of green fig and elderberry. The wine is medium-bodied, crisply dry, elegant with tart flavours of gooseberry and elderberry. Long finish.
After less than two years, east-end gastropub Le Canard Mort has closed. Its final day of service was April 27. The restaurant was known for its elevated pub fare, which included a popular Yorkshire pudding. According to owner Richard Henry, the reason for the close was simply that the restaurant had run its course.
It’s a truism that salty snacks encourage beer drinking, but what if there were a way to put the salt right in the beer? Turns out that the German brewers of Goslar, near Leipzig, figured this out hundreds of years ago. The Gose river that runs through the town has enough dissolved mineral salts to give a distinctive salty flavour to the wheat ale from that region, which is known, appropriately, as Gose.
