Best of Toronto
The Best Fruit & Vegetable Stores in Toronto
The guy who compares apples to oranges is missing the point, but he's less doomed than the guy who tries to price compare oranges to themselves. Down that path lies madness. Oxford has 10 oranges for $4.99, College Fruit Market has 12 for the same. Mona sells them 2 for $1. You can get 4 yellow peppers for $2 at Valley Farm, or 3 for $2 at Maple.But if you nickel and dime over fruit you'll never enjoy it, and it's one of the city's great accessible pleasures. By drawing passers-by in to have a closer look at the cherries, corn, or mangosteens, fruit and veg markets create the tasty streetlife we dream about in our off-grey offices. Look for the shady awnings and stacks of fresh peaches, and bite into some colour on your way home.
Best of Toronto
The Best Card, Paper and Stationery Shops in Toronto
Except for a brief blip around the holidays, most mail is a grating medley of flyers, junkmail and bills. But mixed in with my recycling-to-be the other day was a thank you card from my friend's little girl (Hi Bridget!). Getting unexpected, genuine post in the mail is like finding a $20 in your shorts' pocket when you bring your summer wardrobe back out. There's the heart-fluttering "what's this?" moment, as it puts lustre on an ordinary day.
Plus the underrated fun of actual card shopping. Where you can build a narrative around what the proprietor seems to think you'll be doing while you write your note. Maybe writing letters awakens your inner need to own soaps shaped like ducks. Develop a hankering for decorative ceramic tiles? Roger's Chocolates? Inspirational fridge magnets about changing the world? An apron that says "Will Cook for Sex"?
I might open a store that sells greeting cards, pulled pork, and cat toys. I genuinely think I could get away with it.
Best of Toronto
The Best Cheese Shops in Toronto
When you ask a cheese lover what it is they like about it, often the response is not so much words as it is a low gurgle of pleasure at the back of the throat. But you can't force cheese love. You shouldn't startle a strictly cheddar eater with a Stilton or Roquefort. Though you might introduce them to a Cambazola or Saint Agur. To people just building their cheese palate, it can seem like an exercise in pain -- how much stink can you stand.
Until your senses are stretched in ways that make previously unpalatable scents and textures intoxicating. Similes become more flowery and favourable, replacing "smells like gym socks dipped in camel intestines" with "smells like seduction and a warm evening on the Champs-Élysées".
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Atelier Thuet's Brunch Smackdown
To brunch, to brunch, to eat a fat pig (thickly sliced). And also some pastries, and red wine poached eggs and the mother of all french toasts.I mean, just the description was like a double-dog dare. It wasn't french toast, it was a french toast sandwich: "French toast sandwich with seared smoked pork loin, Paul Sherk's maple syrup" ($18).
Who can plate french toast in a way that makes you say "yep, that's $18 worth of french toast"? Thuet can. At their newest digs in Liberty Village.
Butter up that bacon boy, we're going brunchin'.
Check out all the heart pounding, artery clogging goodness in my review of Atelier Thuet in the restaurants section.
Best of Toronto
The Best Places to Find Stuff Made by Local Designers
So we're eating local, and it's delicious. But food is only one of many things that can be homegrown. Art, artifacts, clothes, notepaper, posters, ceramics. If it can be knit, spun, inked, daubed, reconstructed, deconstructed, fused or 'smithed, there's a local designer producing it. The last few years have seen a clutch of designer collectives open in Toronto. As Shopgirls Gallery Boutique puts it, the local talent was evident, the opportunities were not. So, in true Canadian spirit, Toronto artists created their own opportunities, opening their own stores and galleries.
Come check out what the colonies can do.
Best of Toronto
The Best Florists in Toronto
The best florists in Toronto can be found across the city, at different price points, and for different needs. You've got your wedding florists, your chichi florists (Fiori), your hemp wearing florists (Eco Flora), and your cheap and cheerfuls (Kay and Young's).The flowers found at Toronto florists weren't always the mild-mannered simile for beauty they are today. Take dahlias: harmless filler flower now, formerly the Aztec flower of war, the bloom of choice to accompany human sacrifices to the Serpent Woman.
(I feel like I just broke some unspoken rule about keeping the phrase "human sacrifices" out of feel-good flower posts. Oh well.)
Then there's tulips. Today they crowd the entrance to every convenience store, yet during Holland's Tulpenwoede ("tulip fury") a single bulb was once sold in exchange for several loads of wheat, oxen, a mess of pigs, a dozen sheep, booze, butter, 1000 lbs of cheese, a bed, a suit of clothes and a silver beaker (see Torontonian Andrew Smith's excellent "Strangers in the Garden".)
Proust said he only had to think of lilacs to smell their scent. For those of us with less vivid sense memory, here is a short list of some of Toronto's best florists (which almost never trade in oxen).
