Toronto: Thumbs Up or Down?

It's been years since we spent even a night in Toronto. Ben and I were here in 1982 on our way home from honeymooning in Quebec and Montreal. I'd been here in 1980. Wow, this place has changed a lot. It was a big city, now it's a huge city, going on for miles with high rises everywhere. At first we thought it had lost its charm.
The first place we went after checking in to the Toronto Townhouse BnB in Cabbagetown just east of downtown, (nice place, owner, Tan is a gem), was to get to Jet Phuell for Ben's coffee. A disaster ...the barista had attitude for days, gave himself a tip and made coffee that was adequate. No decaf. This was much different from early morning coffee at Mermaid Cafe in Tobermory,where the coffee was not perfection, but the owner went out of her way to try to do it right. Her machine was not working properly.

Anyway, that was compounded by a drunk boor in the bar, Zippers, we went to for an early evening beer. He was smashed and accused me of being unfriendly. Antagonistic with booze, he could only blither about meeting the Queen Mother and being an executive chef. These were not great intros to Canada's largest city and the first metropolis of size we'd visited since Chicago almost a month ago.

However, later that evening the tram driver (very cute, waved at us this afternoon when his tram passed us) went out of his way to help us with fares, and transfers as we went to Chinatown to relive dinner from 26 years ago. We had dined at the Pearl on Dundas Street, but alas it was no longer there. Instead we went to E-pan on Spadina, a smart place with plenty of Chinese eating there. We discussed dinner and ordered some pickled jellyfish to start, with chilis and a bit of sugar it was lovely. We matched it with a Jackson-Triggs Niagara sauvignon blanc, Our next courses were pork belly (a very mild, thinly sliced tripe) with bean sprouts and a lobster with scallions and dried mushrooms. Both were exquisite. We starched the dinner with Yangchow fried rice of shrimp and BBQ.

Our morning, of course, had been wonderful. We awoke to thunder and rain, but by 9:30 the weather had cleared and we took off on our Georgian Bay voyage to see wrecks and islands. The wrecks from the last century were just below the surface of a harbor, so you could see them from either the deck or the glass bottom view points. The islands are rocky and deserted. Only one has much in the way of national park people. Flowerpot island, named for its coastal rock formations.

Today we went off to the Royal Ontario Museum and caught the Darwin exhibit that had already been in NY. Wonderful. Very intellectual, but very good. And then a short multi-media show called Kaleidoscope on Shanghai. About trends in modern Shanghai. Some of the material was very cutting edge, particularly a mixed media with a woman on film puffing at a another film across the room, which reacted by receding into the screen.


The Royal Ontario Museum is partly in an old building, but it also has a huge new extension designed by Daniel Liebiskind,the architect who has designed the site plan for Ground Zero in NY. The juxtaposition of the old building with the new part, let alone with the adjoining buildings, the CN Tower and other skyscrapers is astounding.

Getting around Toronto, of course, is easy. It has a subway,whose Museum station is designed to complement the building above, and its tram system is extensive.

LCBO of Ontario did not have the First Nation wine from BC we wanted, but we did get a couple of meritage from Ontario and a very expensive meritage from BC. Should be good. Lunch at the Chew-Chew Diner down the street. Ben explores for coffee as I write.

Right now we give the city thumbs up.