The stars were bright, Toronto
2 holidays for the price of 3 (part 2)
We were last in Toronto for the final leg of my birthday month in Canada 7 years ago. I recognise very little of the downtown area where we are staying, this time in a big suite near the top of Cambridge Suites Toronto.
Last time, we used Airbnb for the weeks spent in Montreal and Toronto and had the luxury of hotels for the shorter stints in Quebec City and Halifax. We stayed in a more residential part of Toronto, which is my preference, but there was a shortage of baths in Toronto hotels. I was not going to live on showers for eight days, so instead, we had downtown luxury complete with a separate bedroom, dressing room and kitchenette.
Having flown over after a stint in Reykavik, thanks to the stop-over deal from IcelandAir, the journey still felt as long as if we’d travelled from London. Arriving in the middle of dinner time, the first stop was for a bit of familiarity at Eatons Centre for the comfort of Indian food, much of which was placed in our handy fridge for lunch the next day. Not before I got the first of what is usually legendary French Vanillas from the uber-legendary Tim Hortons.
Not only did I not recognise much of Toronto, but I kept looking for things that weren’t here but in Vancouver. So that made me miss my favourite city, which we visited 16 months ago. Like many cities worldwide, Toronto is experiencing a building explosion, as tower after tower fills the skyline. Indeed, our hotel has applied for permission to be torn down for, no doubt, yet another taller one. It's already about 20 floors high.
On our first morning, after a quick (Tim) Horton’s breakfast, we walked all the way to my favourite neighbourhood, Yorkville. We would have stayed here had the original hotel we booked guaranteed us a bathtub.
After a long walk around the neighbourhood, we headed to the fantastic Pusateri's store to pick up some baked goods. Eventually, we headed to 5 Elements for coffee to round up my memories of this hood.
We were having such a lovely time that we bought some body/hand cream from Aesop, as the currency exchange rate was in our favour. I wanted something to remember the lovely day by.
Back downtown, we had another coffee at Dark Horse, one of many inside office block coffee locations here I was obsessed with the view of the Toronto Tower before going to the first of our booked dinners.
Somehow, even though Tim Hortons was on the next street, as it so often us, we only enjoyed a couple of our traditional night cap French Vanilla drinks. One evening, I had what is nowadays far too common a wave of holiday nausea, brought on by some travel anxiety or another (it’s not as easy to travel as it used to be in years gone by). Another time, the beloved wasn’t feeling the sweet, milky drink. Still, it brought comfort whenever we had it, including once with lunch after a particularly testing cold walk around the Niagra Falls area, which, as I expected, was full of chain restaurants and burgers. And Tim Hortons. The beloved surprised me with both doughnuts and French Vanilla with the brunch. An utter delight.
Anyhow, we have an unopened tub of powder at home that was bought from Vancouver 16 months ago. It is possibly unopened because we had a Hotel Chocolate advent calendar plus other luxurious hot chocolate throughout our winter.
We did even worse on the other Canadian institution, Second Cup. I did spot a fantastic old-school branch in the neighbourhood beyond Yorkville, The Annexe. Sadly, I had no room for the big, comforting drink that is London Fog. I’ve written about why this drink is close to my heart a few times. So we went to the wire on this one. On the last day, frankly, we didn’t have anything left to do, so we purposely went deep into an office complex food court, where the Second Cups seem to be located these days.
I had last been to Niagara Falls on a day trip from Toronto as part of my NY honeymoon 3 decades ago. Now, there are modern shops, cafes and facilities for tourists so apart from marvelling at one of the natural wonders of the world, we can shelter from the cold and buy some maple earrings and a non-matching birthstone maple necklace. But that’s just me. Unbelievably, we paid around a tenner on a slow train from Toronto so it was worth every penny. On the border of the US, Niagara Falls is worth visiting every 30 years - see you in 2054 where I expect to be in a flying car flying through the magnificent falls.
I know breakfasts will all be great in Canada, and one of the standouts is the Japanese Egg Club, where we happily stood up to have the egg sandwiches on our way to Little India. These look and taste better than they sound. We topped up this early breakfast with some cinnamon bun pancakes at the delightful Lazy Daisy’s Cafe, which I am very glad we shared but still struggled to finish. Towards the end of the trip, Landwer Cafe with its spectacularly comfortable booth served me the best Shakshuka I’ve ever tasted.
Diner breakfasts at OEB and Frans were great, too. The latter’s all-day breakfast came in handy on the Saturday morning I decided to walk into a local place to see if they could fit me in for an uber-expensive Thai massage to get the stiffness out of my neck. Previously, Thai massages have saved the day. This one was close to £80, and not only did the stiffness remain, but the next day, I had a full-on pulled muscle and a headache to match.
Having walked into Craft Beer Market thinking we’d get a table on an early Wednesday evening and being told there was a long wait, we went home, booked a later dinner at 8.15, freshened up, had some pre-dinner snacks and headed out. This set the habit for the rest of the week.
We went a bit more 4-star than we would ordinarily but I much preferred being able to book restaurants and walk along at the allotted time rather than wandering around looking for places that suited our palate. This used to be fun and one of the best things about travelling, and sometimes it still works that way. In downtown Toronto, where 100s of restaurants surround us, you soon realise they are mostly burger or pizza joints and I can only eat one of these per trip. OK maybe 2 burgers at opposite ends of a 12-day trip but that’s it.
We made the most of the complimentary bottle of red wine in our hotel room, which we would never pay the North American price for ordinarily. This comes courtesy of Hotels.com status, and this time, unlike the last couple of trips, I made sure we drank a little bit most nights and actually finished it.
The priciest dinners we booked were at Lena and Richmond Station, both on the hotel's recommended list and a few minutes walk away. The latter is fine dining, and we saved this for our last night. Both were busy and excellent.
We visited another familiar chain, Cactus Club, which was both surprisingly pricey (for a chain) and stunning, and it was matched by the service.
We balanced these with a salad from Freshi (on my feeling poorly evening) and popped to the Chef’s Kitchen food hall where I had a healthy stuffed pitta and I think the beloved had something Japanese.
We forgot about the PATH but remembered it on the rainy day. This is a series of undercover walkways that take us right to the hotel without going outside, which happened to get us straight to our hotel. That’s as long as we’re happy to dodge the suits underneath office blocks and shopping centres,
We returned to a few places we remembered form 2016.
We wandered through Kensington Market and visited the Distillery area for lunch and window shopping. I remember seeing The Ordinary shop last time when it had just opened, and this time, it beckoned us in, as did the handmade chocolate shop. Towards the end, when we’d run out of things to do, so we took a train up to the Yorkdale shopping centre and finally had a Thai Express, another Canadian standard (although less so since they opened one 10-minute walk from home) and St. Lawrence market. We bought even more locally-made chocolate.
Other coffee consumed at Third Wave Coffee, Public School Coffee and Shy Coffee,
As with last time, the highlights were a visit to The Beach, where we saw countless squirrels and enjoyed coffee at Remarkable Bean. It was in this neighbourhood that I saw many homes display a lit-up heart in their windows, and I never found out why. Post-Valentines, to keep a light on during the dark winter or something else?
My memory of Toronto is of the architecture. Despite there being far too many excessively tall glass towers, there is a glorious mix of old and new. Once away from downtown, this is much more prevalent, although I fear Yorkville residents have a battle on their hands with already a series of towers appearing. Sadly, we learnt that my city favourite Pusateri's will be closing its doors there. At least it has a new outpost inside another, the Hudson’s Bay.
March 2024
