The best schnitzel in Toronto has made a long voyage here, from the tables of middle Europe to a city where paprika was an exotic spice and Wiener Schnitzel was like Pad Thai in a town that closed up tight on Sundays. A couple of the restaurants on this list actually date from this era before tapas and cheap sushi, and have survived mostly because there are probably few things as filling as a big slab of breaded and deep fried meat on a plate of potatoes and slaw.

The best wine bars in Toronto will sell you wine by the glass, but that's about all they have in common. From deluxe spaces for banker and high-end eateries to little storefronts with wine lists you could fit on the back of an envelope, the range and style of the wine bar has certainly evolved from the fern bar of the '80s. Right now it seems like Italian food is the dominant wine bar nosh, but that's as momentary as the decor, as the wine bar has become a great place for a decent chef to try something new under the cover of a thicket of merlot.

Here are the best wine bars in Toronto.

The best seafood restaurants in Toronto are selling a luxury product, one whose relative scarcity can be explained just by answering one simple question: When's the last time you ate anything caught in Lake Ontario?

There's not a lot of food that invites carnivore guilt quite as readily as seafood - just try googling "Chilean sea bass," or "Atlantic cod fisheries." While there was a day when lobster was food for the poor and oysters were cheap bar snacks whose shells made for landfill that changed shorelines, that day seems over now, and good seafood comes at a premium, especially if you're living inland, on a body of water whose purity has been in doubt for generations.

Christopher Heard remembers the day when he sat in the lobby of the Royal York hotel with his father, waiting for a train to Montreal departing from Union Station, across Front Street. "I told him, 'I'd like to live in this place. I'd like to come here one day and just not leave.'"

The best barber shops in Toronto are proof that sometimes - just sometimes - things can work out for the best. A decade ago, it was worth worrying that old-style barbering was a trade that would soon disappear from our streets, as a generation of barbers retired and barber shops went the way of shoemakers and TV repairmen. The odd high end barbering boutique in a hotel or upscale department store might have remained, but the two-to-four chair shop, with its stack of dog-eared magazines, TVs tuned to sports and tall jars of Barbicide would have been replaced by hair salons staffed with stylists. For some of us, it was a future not worth living.

Farewell tours have become something of a running joke, mostly thanks to bands like The Who that seemed to spend their last long decade leaving and coming back at regular intervals. When Glen Campbell arrived at the CNE Bandshell Wednesday night for a stop on his own farewell tour, it didn't sound like a joke, as the million-selling crossover country star had announced this summer that he had Alzheimer's, and that this tour, and the album it was meant to promote, would be his farewell to the music industry he'd been part of since the late '50s.