To get the best from Toronto's
kitchens, head for any one of the
city's ethnic neighbourhoods,
where there's an abundance of good
restaurants , or go to one
of the many downtown
cafés,
café-bars or
restaurants
that have carefully nurtured a
good reputation. Some of the best
of the city's restaurants
emphasize their use of Canadian
ingredients - fish and wild-animal
meat especially - but there's no
real distinctive local cuisine: if
there is a Toronto dish, it's
hamburger, fries and salad.
Prices
range from the deluxe, where a
meal will set you back upwards of
$60, to the cheap fast-food
chains, where a decent-sized snack
or sandwich works out at about $9.
The majority of Toronto's
restaurants fall somewhere in
between - a $25 bill per person
for a two-course meal, excluding
drinks, is a reasonable average.
Most of the city's popular
restaurants feature bargain daily
specials from about $8 upwards and
serve food till about 10pm, drinks
till 1am.
For drinking , many of
Toronto's neighbourhood bars
are rough-and-ready places that
look and feel like beer halls.
Until fairly recently, it was
common for them to have one
entrance for men accompanied by
women, the other for men only, but
although these traditional bars
remain popular with many of the
city's blue-collar workers, they
have largely been supplanted by
the café-bar. The development of
the latter has made the
traditional distinction between
eating and drinking places
obsolete.
Cafes and
cafe-bars
Café Bernate , 1024 Queen St W (tel
416/535-2835). The steam machine
is in full swing at this
neighbourhood spot, and the sunny
yellow walls are hung with local
artists' work. The menu offers 29
plump sandwiches for all tastes,
and those drinking...
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Restaurants
With its large immigrant
population, Toronto prides itself
on the diversity of its cuisine.
The city has more than four
thousand
restaurants
offering a spectacular range of
foods from all over the world and
this is one of Canada's few cities
where you can eat high-quality
food of almost any ethnic origin.
One cautionary note is that many
restaurants are closed on Sundays
and sometimes Mondays too -
telephone ahead before you start a
major excursion.
