The gourmand tour 1

So, yesterday I told you about the food tour that me and my friend were going to partake in. It started out early in the day–I met up with her at 9:30 a.m. or so. We decided to get an early start because we were determined to get as much content in as possible. In the end, we covered a lot of ground, ate a lot of food, and even participated in a pillow fight. I’ll talk about the pillow fight in another entry because this one is going to be a long one as it is.

Read more of the food tour, and check out the photos after the jump.

We started out with a small pit stop at Honest Ed’s. The place is a Toronto institution, and somehow I knew that my friend would understand why the place is just plain cool. Maybe the magic of the place that seemed to permeate throughout has kind of died down now that I’m older, but it’s still quite a good place to get lost if you’re in the right company. Last time I was there the people I was kind of found the whole visit to the store pointless, which kind of made me sad. Jesus, where else can you get a bottle of Jones Soda that has a pic of Ed Mirvish on it?

When we left, we started heading south on Bathurst and passed by this place with balloons and a lot of deliveries coming in and out. We were curious so we ducked in. There was an organic/vegan fair of sorts going on. It was the Toronto Sprouts Spring Market. The greeter at the door was very courteous even though we were completely out of our element. We bought some tickets to a raffle (even though we had no intentions of staying) because they money was going to a cause: Juice for the Cure. We walked around and observed some really wholesome stuff. Since this was supposed to be our food adventure day, we went to the bar and got a tropical green smoothie. The drink had: bananas, kale, spinach, pineapple, and mango. Man, I think we were expecting a drink that was grassy or heavy on the veggie-feel, but it was quite nice. If anything, I think the banana was kind of dominant. The resulting texture was how I’d imagine blended banana to turn out. Maybe I’m pulling this idea out of thin air, but the (non-)word that comes to mind is: pectin-y. Hah. I joked about how the drink was giving me a good dose of iron due to the spinach. Popeye would drink this.

We left the place and headed off to a brunch place. When we got there though, there was a lineup going out the door. We observed the people eating there and determined it to be very hipster like. After a few minutes though I decided that we should bail. The line wasn’t really moving and I was getting hungry. It’s kind of a pity, but…how offbeat is brunch anyway?

So, we headed off to El Trompo in Kensington Market. The recommendation was to try out the corn truffle quesadilla. The Spanish name of the corn truffle is huitlacoche. That’s all well and good, but when I typed that into Wikipedia, I was redirected to a page called “corn smut.” Sounds pornographic. The whole day we were laughing and referring to it by one of two terms: the aforementioned “corn smut”, or black ovary fungus. Nice! Actually, now upon reading the Wiki further, it seems the Spanish name comes from “raven’s excrement.” Too bad–we could have added a third name to our list.

Anyway, we also ordered the huevos con chorizo. The table had two types of salsa. I can’t identify either, but I’ll guess the smoky red one was chipotle and the green one…I’ll just call that one salsa verde because I don’t know better. I ordered a cinnamon coffee, and she ordered a drink called a Jamaica. Well, when the quesadilla came the first thing we did was look inside. Wow, the look was…intriguing. When we tasted it though, it was very nice. To me the taste was kind of mild. Yes, there were earthy tones, but it was still good, and even kind of sweet. The eggs were all right, but to be honest the quesadilla was drawing all of my attention. When the waitress came to ask about it, we said we were enjoying it. She seemed kind of shocked. She told us that she herself wasn’t a fan of huitlacoche because it reminds her of wet soil. Hah! Ringing endorsement! We ensured her that we enjoyed it and that made her happy.

We left the place and headed for Cheese Magic–also in Kensington. I think we went in aiming to try something really odd and of the wall in terms of cheese. However, we had no idea what that entailed. In shop we got a recommendation and the cheese guy gave us a bit of applewood cheddar. That was quite awesome, but I think it was middle of the road in terms of unusual. We asked again and he gave us another white cheese which I’ve now forgotten. We asked or a different one, at which point he asked if we were looking for something stronger in taste or just unusual. That’s when we realized we had no clue. He gave us a sample of the Guinness cheese. Yes! No kidding. That was some good cheese too. He also gave us a sample of this really strong blue cheese. Holy crap, that was really strong, but good. It left my hand smelling of blue cheese. We were able to sample one more cheese that had ginger and some other fruit in it. It was mild and pleasant. In the end we walked out with 100 g each of the Guinness and apple wood cheeses. We were happy with that.

From there we hiked over to the AGO area and went into a crepe place. When we went in I immediately felt out of place. It seemed like the majority of people there were artistic hipster types. I dunno. We went up to the counter because there was a big board with menu items hanging above it. After a minute or two of gawking, a waitress informed us that we could sit at a table and use the menus there. Gee, thanks. To fulfil the spirit of the food adventure spirit, we ordered the so called crepe for adults. Apparently it had something like sensual figs and some sort of aphrodisiac herbs in it. I don’t know. The waitress regretted to inform us that they’d run out of the figs necessary to make that menu item. Wha? At 11 in the morning? Umm…OK…I suppose there are a lot of horny artsy people in the area, and it’s possible that they all want the horny-making crepe. I DON’T KNOW.

After a minute or two we decided to just get the grilled chicken and dark chocolate crepe. Honestly, what we got looked absolutely fantastic. What we ate on the other hand was kind of underwhelming. I feel bad saying that because it looked so good. Thing is, the chicken was dry and overcooked. We really had to use force to cut through it. The chocolate sauce didn’t seem to add anything to the dish. I’m not expecting it to be sweet, but I know what dark chocolate tastes like–it should be bitter and strong. You kind of expect it to have a lead role. In the end, the sauce just seemed like it was there. Kind of disappointing. I went up to the counter to pay for the $13 crepe (yeah, no kidding). As I was walking out, I saw the guy already cleaning our table. Sure. I continued walking and realized that, holy crap, I forgot to tip. I could have turned around, but…no. I just called out to my friend to hurry up and we rushed out of there. I ended up brooding for a little while after that, feeling crappy about not tipping, but man…that kind of sucked.

After that kind of disappointing experience, I wanted something I knew would be good. I suggested we head to Manpuku for some takoyaki. We ended up sitting at the counter where we had a good look at the takoyaki machine. The machine somehow rotated the balls as they cooked, so the result was something evenly done all around. It was interesting to watch it all roll around. The balls themselves? Good, as usual. Felt better to have a good food experience.

We left that place and started heading for our next destination. As we walked, we noticed that we were passing by the other crepe place located in front of 299 Queen West. My friend insisted we get a crepe there to erase the other crepe experience. I was hesitant, but we went in anyway in the spirit of adventure. I picked out the rum, coconut and banana crepe. It came out quickly and soon we were back on the street consuming the thing as we walked. The coconut and banana were quite pleasant. I was happy to have an OK crepe. However, all of a sudden my friend hit a patch of rum and coconut at the bottom. She freaked out. I took a bite and indeed it was rough going. The rum wasn’t burned off at all so that part was overbearing. Not good at all! We took a few more bites before dumping the remainder in a dumpster. Boo!

At that point we were feeling kind of stuffed, but we pressed onward. The Corned Beef House on Adelaide was our next stop. We were both on the verge of a food coma, so we decided to just split a sandwich. We bought a corned beef sandwich on light rye with mustard. Whoa. We knew it’d be a big sandwich, but we didn’t expect that much meat. Seriously. All in all, it was a really good sandwich. If we weren’t feeling so gross we’d probably enjoy it even more, but we were just happy to get through it.

So, after that stop we were due for a good long walk. We hoofed it to King and started heading east to the Distillery District. We made a pit stop at St. James Anglican to take a break and admire the inside of the church. Beautiful, beautiful. We made it to the Distillery District in good time. The chocolate shop there seemed nice and all, but it was quite crowded. Before we could get anything though we had to leave because we were aiming to make it to Yonge-Dundas Square for the big pillow fight. Yeah, no kidding. Like I mentioned, I’ll write about that fight another time because it turned out to be really interesting. I didn’t think I’d get involved, but strange things happen when you’re just handed a pillow.

So, back to the food thing. At the pillow fight we met up with a few friends of my friend. Second degree: nice! We all walked over to Cabbagetown (pillows in hand, feathers in hair) to eat at the Gourmet Burger Co. Our intention: eat the Aussie burger. So what’s the Aussie burger? Apparently it involves: a fried egg, some bacon, pineapple, beets and cheddar. As a free topping, we requested avocado. Why not? Well, this weird-ass combo sounds pretty gnarly, but as God as my witness, that was one damn good burger. The sweetness of the beets and pineapple were a fantastic contrast to the beef patty, bacon and egg. Lord, it’s a long way out to Cabbagetown, but I know I want to go back there again. Or at the very least I want to replicate the burger on my own.

As a final stop, we walked over (very slowly) to Yonge and headed just north of Wellesley to the Ethiopian House. We really weren’t sure what to order, so we just got a recommendation from the waitress. She ordered for us a veggie dish, a beef dish, and a chicken dish. She brought back this large platter with everything all beautifully laid out, with several rolls of injera bread to eat it all with. All of the food had an interesting amount of heat to it. It wasn’t spicy to the point where I knew it’d irritate me on the way down, but the heat was palpable. We had also ordered to have an Ethiopian Coffee Ceremony done for us. Apparently that takes 35-45 minutes to prepare so we ordered it early. After finishing off the tray she came in with an incense burner which smoked up the whole room with Ethiopian incense. She had a box laid out with the clay coffee pot and several small cups. She skillfully poured out coffee from this pot and served us one by one. That was nice. Interestingly she also brought in this basket of popcorn for us to snack on. That just drew questions from us. Popcorn seems kind of out of place, doesn’t it? After doing some cursory searches online though it seems expected. Who knew? Apparently it helped control the acidity of the strong coffee. Overall the restaurant was really cool. I think I’m going to do more exploring at some point to try out more east African cuisine. Seriously, who knew there’d be so many Ethiopian restaurants in the city? Seemed like every other street we walked down someone in our group would point out another east African place. Heh.

At that point we called it a day. Even though we didn’t eat large amounts of food at each place it was still a large amount of food as a whole. I figure that some of the calorie intake would be offset by all of the walking and the pillow fight, but probably not enough. I seriously want to do another one of these days again. I think we need to ease up on the locations though, and try to minimize the number of unexpected stops we make. For example, we weren’t expecting to do takoyaki and the second crepe. That’s all my fault, really, but still. Having to walk everywhere is a good idea for sure because it’s introduced me to new areas of the city that I haven’t walked through at all. I didn’t knew where this fabled Distillery District was all this time, and now it’s all become so very real. My love for this city grows.

Possibly related posts:

1. Tour follow up
2. Mystery tour
3. Meditations on the new office