Just got back from the annual International Trademark Association (INTA) spring conference, which this year was in Toronto. Apart from official stuff, I was able to sneak in two very good meals with my Connecticut buddy Frank Duffin. We walked a good 45 minutes from the Convention Center at lunch time to a section of Toronto called "Portugal Village." Not knowing anything about where the good restaurants were, we stopped into a small Portuguese shop, and asked the woman proprietress, who obviously was from Portugal, where we could get good Portuguese food. She directed us to a place called "First Choice Restaurant," located at 1102 Dundas St. W, (416-588-3851), where I had a bowl of "caldo verde" -- potato and kale soup -- and we split a huge order of Pork Alentejana -- pork and clams. Sounds weird, but it was really good. We were the only non-Portuguese speaking customers in the place.
For dinner, we had our traditional Tuesday night steakhouse trek. Each year, Frank and I "stake" out, as best we can determine, the best steakhouse in whatever city the INTA conference is in, and this year our research led us to Barberian's Steak House, 7 Elm Street, (416) 597-0335. While wicked expensive, the steaks were excellent. The wine list had pages upon pages of great wines from everywhere, but the prices were outrageous -- which I think has to do with the Ontario government-run distribution system. It was hard to find anything first rate that was under $100. Although these were Canadian dollars, the poor exchange rate meant that we were only getting $1.05 Canadian dollars for each U.S. dollar.
Anyway, we settled on the 2000 Dessilani Fara "Lochera," a full-bodied Nebbiolo-based wine from the Novara region west of Milan (the most famous wine from this region is Gattinara; Fara is less well-known but can be just as good, in my view). This wine was deep in color, very fragrant of cherry liqueur, leather, and earth, with lots of body and concentration. It had some tannin, but they were ripe and smooth. This wine will improve over the next five years. For dessert, we tried two glasses of 2004 Henry of Pelham Winery Ontario Peninsula Riesling Icewine. My expectations were not that high -- Canadian Riesling Icewine??? -- but this wine was amazing. Intense, rich, honeyed peachy nose, with bracing acidity to balance the intense richness. Absolutely classic Icewine, which I would happily compare to the Germans'. It was so good I made sure to find a state wine shop (the "LLBO") before I left so I could buy a half bottle ($54!) to bring back. State-run wine distribution, with its attendant high wine prices, have got to be the single biggest negative about living in Toronto, which really otherwise impressed me as a sophisticated, diverse, HUGE, and very interesting city.
1 comment:
On the one hand, the provincially run liquor stores (LLBO) are much better than private operations at keeping alcohol out of the hands of underage drinkers. On the other hand, they have a limited range of wines so that even nearby Niagara region wines can't make it into the stores unless they can move a certain (high) number of cases. Our CBC radio wine critic constantly rails against this. On the other hand, when I lived in Alberta and they let their stores go private, the result was a huge number of very, very bad stores as well as a fair number of very big and successful ones. I don't really think that the selection is better now in the big Alberta stores than in the big Toronto provincial operations.
How smart of you to find your way to those two restaurants! Your steakhouse experience was probably the best to be had in Toronto, although you could have done fairly well at less than half the price in a few other places. You didn't mention their odd take on vegetables!!
Ron
Buenos Aires
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