Category: Toronto

More like this, please

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Uh, that was a ridiculously great long weekend.

Friday: we saw an amazing Japandroids concert (seriously, one of the best value-for-money shows I’ve ever seen) and had a late dinner at The Auld Spot.

Saturday: we drove to Beamsville in the beautiful sunny weather to sample wine and eat raclette at Hidden Bench, then do more tastings at Foreign Affair and Megalomaniac before heading home and getting fancy for dinner at The Chase. We had Perrier-Jouet Champagne and buratta, and scallops + pork belly with Chardonnay and Nebbiolo, and duck (me) and lobster cavatelli (Lindsay) with a fantastic bottle of Sangiovese. Dessert was a slightly disappointing (for me, anyway) honey pastry, but I came home and had some 1986 Don P.X. to make up for it.

Sunday: we were a little slow-moving, honestly, so not much happened until we had a halfway-decent-for-us lunch at b.good and a pint at Beerbistro before going home to watch Going Clear (imdb | rotten tomatoes). Unfortunately we ended the day with a somewhat gross AYCE sushi dinner that night at Fushimi.

Monday: we hung out in my (almost) new hood, hitting Boxcar Social for beers, L’il Baci for brunch (spicy pork balls, turducken balls, cocktails), Ed’s Real Scoop for ice cream, and Mercury for cortados. That night we made pasta we’d picked up at the market, and it was freaking delicious.

Whadda weekend.

 

 

On y va

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Two weeks ago I mentioned that I was staging this condo for sale.

It listed last Wednesday. There were 34 viewings by Sunday.

Monday there were half a dozen offers. Now someone else owns it. Or will, in a few months.

Most sane humans would sell first, then buy. Or buy first, then rent. I, naturally, chose to parallel-track these things, and bought a new place on Wednesday. So in April, I’ll live somewhere else for the first time in ten years.

So cold. So close.

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Despite badly outplaying Seattle (outshooting them 17-3) Toronto FC lost the MLS Cup final last night, falling in penalties on a freezing night at BMO Field. Toronto had a ton of great scoring chances; Seattle didn’t have a single shot on target through 120 minutes. But then it was penalties, and in penalties it comes down to luck. Shit way to lose the championship, in my opinion, but there you go.

I was still lucky enough to see it, with more than 35,000 on hand despite freezing temperatures. I survived the cold pretty well (except for my toes…didn’t plan that part properly) but then the walk home almost killed me. Streetcars weren’t running, the buses were overloaded, and every taxi was occupied. I finally got in one around Spadina and Richmond, and got home around midnight, after 4.5 hours outside. It took me an hour to warm up again.

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Next year, TFC. Qu’est-ce que vous chantez? Nous chantons les rouges allez.

Ero

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Jeez, what a week. I’m afraid to even come near my scale.

Tuesday was a drink & bite at Richmond Station and dinner at La Bettola.

Wednesday was stellar catering from Food Dudes at an event.

Thursday was my first visit to Buca Yorkville, and holy shit. I mean, holy shit. What a meal, easily one of the best I’ve eaten this year:

  • Starter: three smoked fish from Nova Scotia, including a scallop & lobster sausage (with a glass of Franciacorta)
  • Main: calamarata alla carbonara di mare (pasta with pecorino, cured hen’s egg yolk, white fish roe, and sea urchin bottarga); ravioli di zuzza (pasta stuffed with roasted delicata squash, smoked burrata fonduta, and white truffles); and polipo e vongole (braised octopus, BC clams, veal bone marrow, carvola nero, crisp artichoke, and fregola sarda); all paired with some wine from Mt. Etna that I can’t remember now
  • Dessert: lemon tart with gelato, paired with some kind of sweet wine which also escapes me

Friday was a long day at work, a quick stop for cheese and beer and wine at Boxcar Social, and then meeting some friends for drinks and delicious pork belly steam buns at Bar Hop.

Saturday was all over the place:

  • breakfast at XO Bisous
  • an unsuccessful first visit to Greater Good (it was closed)
  • a successful first visit to Blood Brothers
  • a hurried walk to, and pint at, The Three Speed
  • some purchases at Burdock‘s bottle shop (including their new collaboration with Pearl Morissette)
  • way too much lunch at Libretto
  • a few hours of work followed by espresso back at Boxcar
  • a drink at Weslodge
  • dodging costumed drunks on King Street
  • enough junk food to kill a teenager

Somebody get me a vegetable, post haste.

 

 

Cover photo by Chris Riebschlager, used under Creative Commons license

SweepingJay

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Last night I, and the rest of Toronto, watched the Jays beat the Texas Rangers in the bottom of the 10th inning, in just about the most dramatic and poetic way possible. That the winning run was scored on a throwing error by Rougned Odor, infamous for punching out Jose Bautista earlier this year (in retaliation for a hard slide into second, but really for the bat flip in last year’s playoffs), was just about the best possible way for the Jays to complete their first-ever series sweep.

Bring on Cleveland. Or Boston. Or whoever.

.:.

Cover photo by Chris Riebschlager, used under Creative Commons license

Session VII

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Our seventh Session craft beer fest went off yesterday, and once again our friends Adam & Alicia joined us. Actually, they came over first to enjoy the views, do a bit of snacking, and sample a few beers before we left: Refined Fool Pouch Envy Australian Pale Ale, Left Field Sunlight Park Saison, and a phenomenal one-off Saison/rosé collaboration between Burdock and Pearl-Morissette winery. That bottle went straight to the hall of fame.

Then, off we went to Yonge/Dundas Square for the event itself. Here’s what I tried, as best I can remember:

  • Sextant “Why So Sirius?” pale ale
  • Big Rig “Great White North” hoppy wheat (collaboration w/ Central City)
  • Oast House “Haarlem Globe Trotter” koyt beer (collaboration w/ Jopen)
  • Stack vanilla chai amber
  • New Ontario “Sap Sucker” maple brown (collaboration, but not really)
  • Redline “Cruise Control” mango + lime session IPA
  • Nickel Brook “Arkells Morning Brew” coffee brett pale (collaboration w/ Detour coffee)
  • Nickel Brook “Uncommon Element” brett pale ale
  • Sawdust City “1606” barrel-aged raspberry stout
  • Sawdust City “Bitter Beauty” double IPA (collaboration w/ Jason Collett)
  • Muskoka “Ruff Draught” tropical blonde (collaboration w/ Born Ruffians)
  • Sawdust City 1606 (again)
  • Amsterdam “Revelator” Bock (collaboration w/ Jordan St John)
  • Sawdust City “Blood of Cthulhu” imperial stout

Oddly enough the Oast House was probably my least favourite, which surprised me. The New Ontario and Stack were pleasant surprises, but the 1606 was friggin’ outstanding.

We returned to our place, stopping at Batch to pick up some wings, and knocked down a few more beers (Fat Tug IPA, Great Lakes Hanlan’s Point coconut coffee porter) before calling it a night.

Overall, pretty happy with this event again. Lots of great beers, not too crowded, and unlike Cask Days I actually got every single beer I asked for. Add good friends and gorgeous weather, and it was a pretty top-notch day.

Chimps Batch Jays Owen

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That was a busy-ass week. Fun too.

On Tuesday we grabbed some dinner at Wine Bar and then went to see a talk by one of Nellie’s heroes, Jane Goodall. Such an impressive human being, and her final story of the night (shown below) pretty much says it all.

On Wednesday we grabbed dinner at Batch with our buddy GB, visiting for the week.

On Thursday I met my buddy Joe at the new Bar Hop (my first visit, believe it or not) where I had an excellent Burdock session saison and then availed myself of one of his Jays tickets, with which we watched the Jays beat the Yankees. Labatt’s acquisition of Mill Street at least meant I could have a 100th Meridian to go with this view:

Last night we went over to our friends A+A’s place and had a seemingly Dan-tailored evening: grilled meat and charcuterie, stellar beer (including a Gueuze Tilquin they brought back from Brussels, bless their little hearts), cool music that made me want to start collecting LPs again, and a cat named Owen who blithely tolerated my attention. We turned into pumpkins on their couch. It was, after all, a busy-ass week.

Elemental

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I have an emotional hangover. I sportsed too hard last night.

Plenty of ink has already been spilled about the Blue Jays game 5 win over Texas to advance to the American League Championship series. (Cathal Kelly’s story in the Globe was the best, I thought.) All I can say is that it was definitely one of the highlights of my sports-fan life…to go from so low to so high, to sprout a profuse belief in the sporting gods, all in the space of a single epic inning of baseball, was mildly profound. I can’t imagine actually being at the Rogers Centre Skydome for the game, as some of my friends were.

We’d had tickets for the Toronto FC game last night, but given how long the Jays game ran over we really didn’t think we’d make it over to BMO Field. But after Jose’s bat flip we figured we’d make a break for it: we assumed the Jays would win, and if they relinquished the lead, I didn’t want to watch it. So in the middle of the 8th we jumped in a cab and beat it west before the mayhem began. As it turned out, the mayhem began at the corner of Queens Quay and Bathurst, when every car around us at the traffic light began honking wildly.

Despite it being freezing cold, we’re glad we made it to the TFC game. They clinched the first playoff berth in team history last night, on a highlight-reel goal from the incomparable Giovinco, who’d gotten off a plane from Italy just a few hours before. For at least this one night the sports gods were on Toronto’s side.

All in all, a pretty good evening. Oh, and as I type this, the Canadiens are about to win their fifth straight game to start the NHL season, the first (!) time in their storied history that’s happened.

Sports!

Cover photo from the TIFF site

#TIFF15: Films 1-4

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We’re seeing seven festival films this year, which makes it our most ambitious in several years. In 2008 (right after I finished the MBA) I did thirty films and Nellie did twenty. Since then we haven’t done more than five in a single year. This year we bought our customary 10-ticket package, plus single tickets for a screening later this week, and we’ve been invited to a Gala near the end of the festival.

We kicked things off in prototypical TIFF fashion: Michael Moore’s newest documentary Where To Invade Next (imdb | rotten tomatoes | tiff). We were the first audience to see it. No one even knew what it was about, and the teaser image they put in the programme book was deceiving. Rather than an anti-military polemic, this was a domestic-issues plea. Moore stuck around after the film (before the bidding war started) to answer questions, and talked about how the crew called this “Mike’s happy movie” since it presented near-Utopian solutions rather than just rail about problems. Maybe he’s softening in his old age, but he’s still awfully entertaining. 8/10

Our token Midnight Madness entry was a big miss. Baskin (imdb | rotten tomatoes | tiff) started off SO well…so creepy, so tense, so gripping…and then wasted it all on a ridiculous set piece in the final act. After the screening the director said he was heavily influenced by French new wave horror and old Italian horror cinema. This felt derivative of both. 4/10

With only a few hours’ sleep following our Midnight Madness miss, we got up Saturday morning to see Sicario (imdb | rotten tomatoes | tiff), Denis Villeneuve’s latest. This had the most star power of any film we’ll see this year, and is already scheduled for a broad release in a month or so. Still, it was worth it: this was a better version of a straight procedural (written by Taylor Sheridan, who I mostly remember from playing small parts on Sons Of Anarchy and Veronica Mars) and shot with such skill by Roger Deakins. It was engrossing from the very beginning — despite the man hacking up a lung one section over and the dude next to me whose phone kept flashing like an emergency beacon — and watching Benicio Del Toro evolve (devolve?) over the course of the film was masterful. 8/10

The Lobster (imdb | rotten tomatoes | tiff) was…weird. Basically, you start by accepting the premise that all single people must go to a hotel where you have 45 days to meet someone to pair off with, else you’re turned into an animal of your choice. Colin Farrell, playing a frumpy architect, chose the titular lobster. This is a darker, less symmetrical Wes Anderson film (the same dryness and absurd humour live here) which maybe went on a little too long. Part of the problem was that the movie stopped dead halfway through, and re-started 20 minutes prior to where it cut off, so we watched both the funniest part and the most awful part twice. Eventually they got it back on track, but I found it a little tough to put myself back in that world after the projector took me out of it. Oh, and the chick in front of us having a total fucking meltdown because, I don’t know, her friend was mean to her or she couldn’t find a parking spot or something. Still, Lobster: points for creativity. 7/10

.:.

Cover photo from the TIFF site

#moustachebeers

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You know what feels weird? Not working on a weekend.

Apart from my birthday weekend a few weeks ago, I’ve worked every weekend since…well, I can’t remember. If I’m in the city, I’m working.

Not this weekend though. This weekend I’m relaxing and enjoying the summer. We walked over to King West today to buy some stuff for Nellie’s upcoming camping trip, and tried out Mascot Brewery (verdict: cool rooftop, okay beer, absolutely horrid DJ) before retreating to Bar Hop for a better one. Now we’re just lazing about, playing games, listening to music, getting ready to make dinner. Maybe picking out a movie or two.

Relaxing, in other words. And it’s fucking awesome.