Is Toronto finally getting the culinary recognition it deserves?

Written By

Michael Sommers

over 1 year ago

A few months ago, my editor asked me if I’d be interested in writing a feature with the working title: “Is Toronto finally getting the culinary recognition it deserves?”

At the time, all of Toronto – or rather all of Toronto’s media – was in a star-fueled frenzy over the announcement that the city had been recognized as worthy of Canada’s very first Michelin guide.

Hyped global chains – Miznon, Prince Street Pizza, Benkei Hime – were opening, or announcing plans to open, locations in TO.

Meanwhile, American media and high-profile American media figures – from Dave Portnoy and CNN’s Carlton McCoy to Eater, Conde Nast Traveler, Bon Appétit, The Financial Times and The New York Times – were (re)discovering Toronto as a foodie destination. The hyperbolic if generic accolades – “world-class culinary destination,” “a food lover’s dream city,” “Canada’s most adventurous eating destination” and “North America’s most overlooked dining city” – was enough to make the most cynical Torontonian blush.

Undeniably, Toronto was getting a tsunami wave of recognition.

But “recognition” wasn’t the word that stood out to me.

The word that stood out was “deserves.”

Weirdly perhaps, when I first read my editor’s question, the voice I heard in my head wasn’t that of a polite, self-effacing, “Sorry”-saying Torontonian. It was that of Robert De Niro, the American actor (and co-owner of Nobu – incidentally soon to open a restaurant in Toronto). And not just any incarnation of De Niro (i.e. Meet the Fockers). No, it was De Niro in his Scorcese, Mean Streets-era prime, blusteringly, swaggeringly, aggressively demanding the fucking recognition he fucking deserved.

I liked the voice – and the idea of Toronto not so much getting recognition, but feeling that the recognition was deserved.

Toronto feeling entitled to praise seems so wildly unToronto – or at least the Toronto that used to be. Toronto the Good. Toronto the Bland. Toronto, the hopelessly provincial backwater of the British Empire that was scandalized back in 1966 when Yorkville’s bohemian Coffee Mill applied for a patio license to open the city’s first outdoor cafe (in the italicized words of Toronto Life, “What kind of self-respecting diner would eat outdoors?”)

Not to mention Toronto, the Recognition Slut, famished for compliments from south of the border while living in the long culinary shadow cast historically by much brasher, assured and vivacious metropolises: London, Montreal and – and perhaps most desperately – New York.

But before we get all De Niro and start talking about what Toronto deserves, we have to talk about all that recognition. When you break it down, “recognition” is a loaded term. In terms of Toronto’s food and drink culture, a lot depends upon what exactly is being recognized. How? Why? And by whom?

Recognizing how far we’ve come

When Lucy Waverman, cookbook writer, restaurant reviewer and food columnist for The Globe and Mail, migrated to Toronto in the 1960s from Glasgow, she recalls her family being shocked at the lack of good food (both her mother and Lucy attempted to rectify matters by opening their own cooking schools).

Back then, Toronto dining was so fabulously unadventurous that, in 1966, when the legendary Three Small Rooms launched a menu that dispensed with the city's twin culinary "must-haves" – prime ribs and shrimp cocktail – Toronto's dining masses "revolted."

Years passed and things began to loosen up. In 1977, Ontario's Prohibition-era liquor laws were relaxed enough to allow Torontonians to drink standing up. In the early 1990s, thanks to pioneering chefs such as Michael Stadtländer and Jamie Kennedy, Torontonians began to discover fresh, local, organic ingredients from their own southern Ontarian backyard (as opposed to mass-farmed imports). In 2000, Toronto's very first superstar chef, Susur Lee, opened his eponymous restaurant, Susur, whose daring dishes put Toronto on the global culinary map.

Yet even as Toronto's restaurant scene blossomed, it was always – notoriously – a trend chaser as opposed to a trend starter.

"At the beginning of this century, there was a lot of very fancy food," recalls Lucy Waverman. "There were a lot of big restaurants serving luxurious food, not necessarily fun food. And people really liked that. Those kinds of restaurants were beautifully designed. The food was good, but it wasn't in any way different from those kinds of restaurants in New York or other major cities."

Ivy Knight is a Toronto-based food writer and documentary filmmaker who spent years working in restaurants as a line cook. She recalls a restaurant ecosystem that was fragmented and almost feudal, with each establishment being a tiny culinary fiefdom – or as she puts it "dictatorship" – unto itself.

"When I worked in restaurants, the only way you knew anything that was going on in other restaurants was through media," says Knight.

Back then, Toronto still had a robust stable of food critics. "We read the restaurant reviews about what was going on in our city, but most of the real food coverage was coming out of the States and Europe."

Chefs didn't connect or share ideas. Competition and secrecy reigned. Knight recalls working at one restaurant where, after closing, the staff would head to a nearby bar also frequented by the staff from Susur's, next door. "They'd sit in one area and we'd sit in the other and we would never talk. If you talked, it would almost be a faux pas."

To break down such barriers, Knight created industry events where not just chefs but all restaurant workers could get together to eat, drink and hang out. At the time, this was a radical concept – as was Twitter, which had just made its debut. Knight feels that once chefs started communicating, Toronto's food scene really exploded. "It became a lot more creative with chefs becoming more willing to take risks. Anytime you open up and allow the outside world to come in, you're going to change for the better."

Recognizing our diversity

Growing up in Canada, it’s drummed into our toqued heads that – unlike America, the Melting Pot – we’re a Mosaic. In recent years, Canada’s diversity and Canadians’ sense of ourselves as open and inclusive has become a defining reality to be celebrated, not to mention a canny exercise in branding. Nowhere else is this more true than in Canada’s largest, and most diverse, city.

The easiest, and obviously most delicious, entry point into Toronto’s incredible cultural diversity is its food. Scarfing down dosas, momos, kitfo and silog is how many Torontonians experience multiculturalism.

As far back as 2016, in an article entitled “11 Reasons Foodies Should Be Flocking to Toronto”, American Vogue recognized “that the sheer diversity of Toronto’s food scene makes it somewhat daunting to navigate. Instead of boasting a unifying local style of cooking, the “local” cuisine is instead a compilation of borrowed garam masala, gochugaru, and jerk spice that have been made to coexist beside one another by the people living in the area, 47 per cent of whom speak a mother tongue other than the country’s native English or French.”

We Torontonians, of course, had been aware of such diversity for a while, even if we hadn’t necessarily availed ourselves of it.

“Toronto has a culinary diversity unrivalled in North America, if not the world,” declares food reporter Corey Mintz. “There’s so much happening in Toronto. But it’s really only started to be celebrated and mined in the last five years. We were touting that diversity for many years, but honestly 90 per cent of the food media attention was on downtown expensive restaurants that tend to focus on the traditional Eurocentric and Japanese cuisine, following the traditional, well-established trend of racial bias.”

[Aside: on September 13, when Michelin announced the names of the 13 restaurants that had won coveted stars, predictably, five were high-end Japanese eateries where the price of dinner begins at $200 per person, five were in Yorkville, and all but (a token?) one were located in the downtown core.]

Mintz credits several factors for Toronto’s recognition of its rich diversity but stresses the pioneering importance of Toronto-based food writer Suresh Doss. “If there’s any one person who deserves the lion’s share of credit for researching and fostering and celebrating and sharing the amazing things that are happening in Toronto it’s him.”

Suresh Doss (back left) poses amongst friends, colleagues and vendors of Toronto's inaugural Smorgasburg this past summer.

Born in Colombo, Suresh Doss grew up in Scarborough, the son of Sri Lankan immigrants. Although he had a background in IT, he had a passion for food. In 2003, he launched a blog, Spotlight Toronto. Taking to the suburban streets, he began documenting the kind of Mom & Pop, hole-in-the-wall places he’d grown up eating at with his friends. The kind of places where owners didn’t speak English or post on social media. The kind of places never mentioned in the mainstream press.

Over time, Doss contributed to every major newspaper and food-related publication in the city. In 2017, he landed a weekly gig on CBC Radio’s Metro Morning, where each episode was devoted to small restaurants, takeout counters and convenience stores serving up unsuspectingly fantastic food in the GTA, as well as the people behind them (this veritable encyclopedia was recently published online in digital map form). He also launched guided food tours through Mississauga, North York, Brampton and Scarborough. He did so conscious of the fact that many outsiders – Metro Torontonians and visitors alike – are uncomfortable about venturing into unfamiliar areas where the lingua franca might be Tamil, Arabic or Mandarin.

If there’s any one person who deserves the lion’s share of credit for researching and fostering and celebrating and sharing the amazing things that are happening in Toronto it’s [Suresh].

Recognizing our diversity’s distinctiveness

As Torontonians, we recognize that we're a diverse bunch. We don't have to read about it – we can walk down the street, hop on a subway, or check out all the different ways to picnic in our public parks. But what, if anything, makes our diversity unique and distinctly Torontonian, different from all the others?

"Most cities now are multicultural. I mean, that's just the nature of a city. But no city on Earth is as multicultural as Toronto. And I think we take it for granted a bit, living here," says Ivy Knight. "Every place on Earth is represented by a restaurant. And another reason it's so special is that it's a place where food from all over the world is not being made by white people. In some cases, it is. But you can also source food from anywhere in the world made by the people from that place. And not just that country, but from a tiny little district or village."

Daniel Bender is a Canada Research Chair in Food and Culture, director of the Culinaria Research Centre and teaches food studies at U of T Scarborough. He views Toronto, and its diverse food culture, as being markedly different from those of other global cities due to several factors. Among them is the distinctive nature of Canadian immigration, its many waves and laws that are more open than those of the U.S., for example, where cooks aren't considered skilled labour.

Many newcomers who arrive in Toronto open restaurants because it's often the easiest way to make a living, especially when you don't speak the language. Toronto is so diverse that, regardless of your origins, you're assured of having customers who are nostalgic for, understand and appreciate the food you prepare. You're literally feeding the community.

The cooking techniques of these 1st-generation entrepreneurs, not to mention their stash of (sometimes fiercely guarded) recipes, are often passed down through generations. The somewhat miraculous upshot is that in Toronto in 2022, you can eat dishes that, for myriad reasons – including upheavals wrought by war, climate change, immigration and technology – may no longer exist in their regions or countries of origin. It's as if we have access to a culinary time machine, albeit for a limited time only.

While some 2nd-generation kids are interested in their parents' cuisine, they don't necessarily want to take over their businesses. If they do, they want to revamp them in keeping with 21st-century tastes and trends, eschewing their parent's traditions and recipes. In an episode of the Racist Sandwich podcast, Suresh Doss expressed his concern that within a decade, as 1st-generation Canadians retire, many of these unique Toronto eateries will close or undergo drastic change, in doing so extinguishing the culinary conduit to particular places and moments in time that no longer exist.

Recognizing the next generation

In truth, however, Toronto has never been beholden to traditions. "Toronto is an old city that's a new city at the same time," observes Daniel Bender.

Bender compares Toronto to New York City and Chicago. Neither U.S. city has fundamentally changed in the last 100 years, enjoying the same prominence on many levels – economically, culturally and politically – as they always did. In comparison, over the last century, Toronto has dramatically morphed from a remote, primarily industrial outpost of dominion to a major global metropolis. Today's Toronto is nothing like its past self – and the same goes for its food.

Karon Liu, who covers all things food for The Toronto Star, sees Toronto's relative "newness" as a liberating force on many levels, including the fact that Torontonians are "not as caught up in the traditions of what a restaurant is supposed to be."

Liu was born to Chinese immigrant parents and grew up in Scarborough, where he lives to this day. He recognizes the unique richness of Toronto's diversity but is equally excited by a new generation of chefs, many of them children of 1st-generation immigrants who grew up in an extremely urban and globalized GTA where they devoured Jamaican patties and biryani, tacos and sushi, indiscriminately. That these foods become as ingrained in their culture as their parents' culinary traditions has resulted in a genre of third-culture cooking that Liu sees as quintessentially Torontonian.

Traditionally, many 2nd generation kids straddled these two cultures, often struggling with which they belonged to or identified with most. Today, however, Liu sees young Torontonians embracing their third-culture identities in a much bolder manner. "I think people have more confidence in their cultural heritage and their roots in that you don't have to be 'Canadian' or 'Chinese' – you can be a mixture of both." In terms of food, this translates into freedom: you don't have to worry about "whitewashing" or being accused of "inauthenticity."

Liu sees "authenticity" as a combined culinary and cultural trap that traditionally constrained chefs, particularly chefs of colour. "When it comes to the 'ethnic' cuisines, the words' authentic' and 'real' get thrown around a lot. As if there's only one way to prepare a dish."

The truth is countries are enormous and food is constantly changing as people change, ingredients change, cooking techniques change – even palates change. It used to be that attempts to modernize "ethnic" food would be categorized as "fusion" – or "fake" – by diners both within and outside the chef's home culture.

Liu believes that, thanks to the rise of third-culture cooking, Toronto is slowly moving away from the authenticity trap. "I think now authenticity means what does this dish mean to the person who made it? How does it relate to them? How did they come up with it?"

Liu stresses that the kind of culinary mash-ups you find in Toronto are distinctive from fusion, or at least fusion for the sake of fusion. "There is a sincerity in what these new chefs are doing; it's not novelty for the sake of novelty. Rather it's how their palates developed in a place like Toronto where you go to a plaza and there's a Greek place next to a Jamaican place next to a Mexican place. That's normal for us."

Such mash-ups have yielded some noteworthy culinary fruits. Butter chicken roti is supposedly a Toronto invention, as is sushi pizza. Liu recalls a recent visit to an Egyptian vegan place in Kensington Market where the owner copped to adding a shot of maple syrup to her tahini. "I'm Canadian," she explained. "So I added it to my grandma's recipe."

"I think there's a bigger confidence, especially if you're a person of colour. Maybe 10 years ago, you'd be a little more hesitant to put kimchi or fermented bean curd on a menu because you'd think, 'Oh my God, what would the audience think?' And the audience would default to a Western audience that might not be accustomed to such things."

However, Toronto's ongoing diversification combined with social media has increasingly swept away such reticence. Social media, in particular, allows everyone to see what other chefs, including chefs that look like you or share your background and language, are doing. Says Liu, "And you're like, 'Okay, if they're doing it, and they seem to be still in business, maybe I can do it too."

Recognizing our weaknesses

When asked to describe Toronto’s food and culinary culture, Daniel Bender doesn’t mince words: “Glorious, exciting, potentially truly great, and relatively inaccessible.” As an addendum, he adds, “by and large, I don’t think that people’s tastes have broadened at the same speed as that of the food opportunities.”

Bender believes that what makes Toronto’s food scene great is its diversity. However, he identifies several obstacles that prevent Toronto from reaching its full potential as a more equitable and engaged city where everyone has access to, can produce, and enjoy such diversity.

One of the biggest hurdles is Toronto’s geographic sprawl coupled with what many view as a woefully inadequate public transport system. “We have a very disconnected transport system, one of the worst,” says Suresh Doss. “It’s really hard to get from one end of the city to the other. And we’re a city of neighbourhoods. We have wonderful neighbourhoods with diverse pockets based on 60 years of immigration, but they are all disconnected from each other.”

As a result of these mobility issues, even with a vehicle at one’s disposal, there are only two ways to eat out in Toronto: embark on a major outing or have a profoundly local experience in your respective hood. Bender challenges hungry Torontonians to calculate how much time they’re willing to spend in transit – to and from – a given restaurant. If your one-way threshold is 30 minutes, pull out a map of the city and calculate how far you’ll actually get...

Another Bender challenge: recycling that same map, plot all the places you’ve eaten at over the last week, or month, and see how diverse they are. “Do you eat Toronto’s culinary diversity? Is it part of your self-image – ‘I live in a diverse city and that makes me happy’? – or do you actually eat in a diverse city and that makes you happy? My guess is that most people are the former.”

Even if we don’t eat as diversely as we’d like to think we do, we can take comfort from the fact that, in Toronto, the odds are stacked against dining homogeneity. As Karon Liu argues, “If you live on a block where for the last 10 years there’s a burger place, and then one day, a shawarma shop opens up, you’re going to go to the shawarma shop.” Faced with encroaching diversification, Liu believes that Toronto diners as a whole can’t help but become more open to different cuisines.

Bender, however, identifies other reasons Torontonians might fail to take full advantage of the city’s food diversity. Lack of culinary education plays a role, particularly in schools (to wit, Canada is the only G7 nation that doesn’t have a school lunch policy). There’s also the fact that the city government that touts Toronto’s culinary diversity often segregates it, not only relegating it to the hard-to-access margins of the city, but also by prohibiting it from literally spilling into the streets.

“When is the last time you smelled something good on Toronto’s streets,” Bender asks, comparing Toronto to New York City, where laws allowing food carts selling everything from knishes to burritos mean that you can not only see food on the street, but taste and smell it as well. The fact that only hot dog carts are ubiquitous in downtown Toronto hints at some degree of latent culinary nativism; there’s an implication that street food that isn’t as instantly recognizable as a wiener on a bun could be unsafe to public health.

The quiet racism of pricing is another persistent issue that revolves around the insidiously ingrained misconception that food from some countries constitutes “a cuisine” while food from others is (merely) “exotic .”The classic example would be that an Italian restaurant in downtown Toronto can easily (and is expected to) charge $25 or $30 for a plate of risotto. Meanwhile, an Indian restaurant in downtown Toronto can, with difficulty, charge $15 for a plate of biryani. This discrepancy becomes more glaring when one considers that the time, effort, and costs involved in preparing the biryani could very easily exceed those involved in producing the risotto.

Bender points out that unless they’re investing in a particularly high-end concept, “ethnic” restaurants that want to draw a broad dining crowd (beyond their respective communities) in Toronto’s expensive downtown core have to factor implicit consumer racism into their business model. “While this is hardly unique to Toronto, it contradicts our conception of ourselves as a culinary diverse city in which culinary diversity reflects an implicit egalitarianism.”