Navneet Alang

What is the state of Toronto’s food scene? The question itself makes assumptions: that there is a scene; that it is unitary or coherent enough to be referred to in the singular; that it matters at all.

But if one were to try and answer the question, where would one even begin?

BlogTO would be the obvious first stop because it is so very obvious. As a content mill, blogTO is an ongoing source of news about openings and closures, in addition to helpful overviews that are indistinguishable from marketing. I read the site daily.

When it comes to evaluation, discussion, or contemplation, though, your options are more limited. This is strange. Say what you will about discussing places where dinner and wine run a few hundred dollars for two, but food and dining out are normal parts of life for most people. News organizations should talk about them.

Perhaps what that requires isn’t just a source of information, but a critic. Alas, the Globe and Mail, the country’s only real national newspaper, has given up on Toronto. There was a short run by Jason Chow to replace Chris Nuttall-Smith as dining critic. But since that ended for whatever reason — one assumes there just wasn’t the appetite for it, either at the paper or among readers — there has been precious little discussion of dining out in the country’s largest city in the country’s largest paper (here is a recent exception).

A more traditional sense of critique is very occasionally found in Toronto Life. But while its food coverage is vastly more informed and interesting than BlogTO, reviews have essentially disappeared. They’ve been replaced by news about openings and best-of lists which, despite being beautifully produced and enjoyable to read, are not quite the same as criticism.

So, we search on. Despite the disaster that is the opinion page, the National Post has solid food coverage, often due to the excellent work of Laura Brehaut. But almost none of it is Toronto-specific or about dining out, and that is my concern.

The Toronto Star no longer has a restaurant reviewer after it discovered hardly anybody read reviews and it let long-standing critic Amy Pataki go in 2019. The Star remains a bright spot in terms of coverage, however, primarily in the work of Karon Liu (I have an obvious institutional bias here). Liu is, if you’ll forgive me for using the phrase, actually doing the thing. Rather than the relentless focus on downtown (a phenomenon lamented by people like me and also propagated by people like me) Liu writes frequently about places in the suburbs; doesn’t merely latch on to the buzzy joints everyone else is talking about; and is disdainful of the need for outsider approval such as Michelin stars. He also has an encyclopedic knowledge of the range of cuisines you find here, and a knack for finding hidden gems. For this, we are lucky, and it’s clear that the Star’s food coverage has gotten much better in the past few years.

In a related vein, it is impossible to talk about food in Toronto without mentioning Suresh Doss, whose work appears on CBC and in the Star, too. Doss, recently profiled in the New York Times, has become the standard-bearer for covering the broad swath of the Toronto culinary scene. In particular, his commitment to focusing on food made by immigrants in the suburbs means his (and Liu’s) version of Toronto is arguably closest to the way things actually are. It is hard to imagine that, say, Toronto Life’s recent shift to cast its gaze outside the core wasn’t in part a product of the work done by Doss.

Coverage and criticism aren’t quite the same however. When criticism is doing what it should, the critic plays a role, if perhaps a small one, in encouraging the creator to change, improve, grow. Without an active sense of criticism, the sense of evaluation as something more than consumer advice but instead, as a consideration of food as part of culture, diminishes.

Of course, it’s worth asking if a critic in the vein of Joanna Kates, Chris Nuttall-Smith, or Amy Pataki may be an anachronism now — not only because of a change in what constitutes a restaurant review (thanks, Yelp), but because the authority the older form relied upon may simply be gone (thanks, Yelp).

What’s more, the example of Amy Pataki and the Star makes it clear that economic case for restaurant critics has not just changed, but has mostly evaporated. Only rare exceptions like The New York Times or the Los Angeles Times can support critics, and it’s not just because of the the size of those cities and their readerships. It’s because what happens in New York or L.A. is seen as significant or influential beyond those places.

You cannot make the same case about Toronto. There is no national conversation about the restaurant scene here, and even less a sense of what matters in Canadian food. The three major cities in the country all feel as if they exist in their own distinct universes, and despite there being genuinely interesting things happening all over, food media is plagued by the same problem as all media here: Canadians appear more eager to read about what is happening in Manhattan than Toronto.

Still. Perhaps the very fact that there is no critic in Toronto may be as much cause as effect when it comes to this lack of a discursive context. Food writers are constantly saying “there’s always a food angle” in reaction to contemporary news because what they are trying to foreground is that the culinary is a central part of cultural and material life.

What I am thus wondering is whether a city’s culinary scene can develop as well as it might in the absence of a critic. I mean this not despite the shift to social and digital but because of it. Yes authority can be a scourge, even oppressive, but discourse as a network often operates in relation to particular, key nodes. It is why, for example, the New York Times is so central to how America’s chattering classes think: in light of so much noise, the stature or ubiquity of a singular thing at least gives one some common ground from which to start.

Without that anchor, discourse is more diffuse. This isn’t inherently bad. It is how we get something more heterogenous, less stratified. But without that anchor, it feels worth asking if there is something lost when someone isn’t doing more than just saying “here’s a new place” or “the chaat here is great,” but instead asserting why and how culinary trends are reflective of what is happening more broadly in the city’s culture.

My answer: maybe. I don’t know how one might address the change in cultural context and business reality that has all but killed restaurant reviewers. I don’t know if a sustainable model exists outside traditional media, especially after Chris Nuttall-Smith struck out on his own and failed. It seems likely that a return to the age of the restaurant reviewer is impossible - and perhaps that is the way it should be.

Still. There are excellent entertainment reporters and there are excellent cultural critics, and both are necessary. The former digs into what is happening; the latter can help us make sense of why it matters. And perhaps someone whose job is to talk about food and cooking as cultural artefacts and why they matter is an idea worth exploring.

All I suppose I am doing here is asking a pretty straightforward question. What if a culinary critic is important not because they might make pronouncements from up on high, but instead, that in the cacophony of the contemporary moment, you don’t need someone with all the answers, but instead, someone who knows to ask the right questions?

I am lukewarm on martinis. Before you object: I know exactly the sort of “butbutbut!” response it would elicit if something similar were said to me about wine or Punjabi food or Station Eleven. And yet, I’m still not sure about the classic cocktail.

I have both made and had martinis made for me. They are always with gin, most often with a twist rather than olives. Yet, despite being someone who happily and regularly drinks whisky neat, I often find martinis too harsh, obstreperous even. They seem good for getting sloshed and (cos)playing out Mad Men fantasies, but I have the same odd question for the martini that I do for a lot of prestige TV: ok, what is it actually trying to do?

Somehow, though, I am completely enamoured with writing about martinis. I began experimenting with them after reading the famous Roger Angell piece about the drink from 2002. It’s a glorious bit of writing, full of momentum and verve. Whether or not you’ve ever had a martini is entirely besides the point:

Dryness was all, dryness was the main debate, and through the peacetime nineteen-forties and fifties we new suburbanites tilted the Noilly Prat bottle with increasing parsimony, as the Martini recipe went up from three parts gin and one part dry vermouth to four and five to one, halted briefly at six to one, and rose again from there.

It also contains a “recipe,” though arriving as it does at the end of the piece, it seems somehow more than that:

But if there’s a friend tonight with the old predilection, I’ll mix up a Martini for the two of us, in the way we like it, filling a small glass pitcher with ice cubes that I’ve cracked into quarters with my little pincers. Don’t smash or shatter the ice: it’ll become watery in a moment. Put three or four more cracked cubes into our glasses, to begin the chill. Put the gin or the vodka into the pitcher, then wet the neck of the vermouth bottle with a quickly amputated trickle. Stir the Martini vigorously but without sloshing. When the side of the pitcher is misted like a January windowpane pour the drink into the glasses. Don’t allow any of the ice in the pitcher to join the awaiting, unmelted ice in the glass… Now stir the drink inside the iced glass, just once around. Squeeze the lemon peel across the surface—you’ve already pared it, from a fat, bright new lemon—and then run the peel, skin-side down, around the rim of the glass before you drop it in. Serve. Smile.

It all sounds brilliant – until you remember that what you end up with is essentially straight gin, very cold. No thank you! And I like gin.

The ever-excellent Alicia Kennedy likes them made 50/50, half gin, half dry vermouth, with an olive, which is much more appealing to me. As to why the martini inspires writing and thought in a way that a mere Manhattan could not, she has said it much better than I could:

Now that martinis have gotten cool—or so they say—I haven’t noticed any changes in how bars or bartenders approach them. They’re still a way of measuring, a way of understanding a bar and how you’re perceived within it. Martinis can go in and out of fashion, but for those of us who’ve chosen it as our drink, it’s because of how it allows us to read and be read. It’s a cocktail not of judgment, but of analysis and perception. This is why the martini is eternally chic.

Fine, I guess I’ll give it another go.

“A lot of the tragedy in the consumer preference algorithms deployed by Amazon and Netflix is in seeing the limits of your own taste: in recognizing how many things you will definitively not enjoy, and wondering by what aesthetic contortion you could find something new.” www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015…

In 2015, John Herrman wrote about celebrities doing an end-run around media, talking directly to the public using platforms like Instagram. Of those apps, Herrman wrote: “they, not the publications that post to them, are the primary filters through which people on the Internet find and consume news and entertainment."

It was the kind of thing that stuck with me because it seemed so true. What was the point of, say, releasing photos or news to media when you had a channel of your own to connect with the public? Something about the world was fundamentally changed.

There’s an obvious economic side to this (sorry) disintermediation. There are also social consequences. Antivaxers and other conspiracy types, not to mention racists and bigots, have all built their own audiences. When anyone can reach the world it turns out that anyone can reach the world.

It’s interesting, though, to watch this phenomenon spread into far more than just the usual back and forth between the famous and media.

Video game show E3 is now going to be missing Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo - which leaves one asking “well, what’s the point?” It of course makes sense. In the attention economy, brands need to draw focus to themselves; those companies can each have their own shows on their own days, which means they’ll get their own news cycle, too.

Similarly, auto show seems to be quickly going the way of the dinosaur, with major manufacturers just skipping them rather than using them to announce their latest models. Instead, we get cringe-inducing one-off events from companies like Volvo who debut their $100k electric SUV as if it were world-changing and not a 4 ton machine equally useful for both carrying and killing people.

Media has always been a vector, a metonym. Think of a protest: the point is that a 100 people gather outside an embassy but that, in the image and video of that action being broadcast to far more people, the message of the protestors spreads. Media has always been the thing that acts as a loudspeaker or magnifying glass, capturing the small or the singular and then sending it out to many.

Entities that are big enough to have their own audiences — everyone from massive companies to world-famous celebrities to popular TikTok influencers to white supremacists — no longer need that metonymic relationship of media to public. They form their own publics. And in that is all the promise and threat of the transition from the broadcast era to the networked one.

I had been trying my best to avoid the World Cup, but ended up watching the final and being as enthralled as everyone else. I felt weird about it.

This piece in Defector captured something important imo –>

The thing about a big, emotional ending is it can paper over a lot of what it took to get to that moment, the ugly parts getting washed away in a rush of adrenaline and sea of tears. That’s what I kept coming back to as I watched the storybook ending to Messi’s storybook international career. It was such a beautiful moment that you could forget everything else: The endemic FIFA corruption. The hostility toward showing support on the field for LGBTQ people. The fact that Qatar’s women’s team hasn’t played a game in eight years. The countless deaths of workers who built the stadiums where these golden moments took place.

Maybe the thing about “taking a principled” stance isn’t just about denial - refusing the thing that’s enjoyable for the sake of making a stand - but acknowledging the role of pleasure in the “immoral”: that you must avoid a thing not because of implicit or material support of your participation, but because once you “give in”, the simple fact of pleasure leads to the ordinary justification that we all do re the myriad of ethically dubious or harmful things that fill our lives.

You cannot talk about VR and AR these days without someone talking about immersion, or presence. The point of it is to “feel like you are there.”

This has been a recurring theme in the intersection of aesthetics and tech. Gaming is constantly striving for realism. 3D television, 4k and 8k, HDR — all of it is meant to make the digital both more lifelike, but also more like life.

Fine. But “immersion” — or at least something like it — has also become a dominant strain of auteur film as well. Think of every small, mumblecore indie movie you’ve seen: has the conceit not been that they are painfully, almost excruciatingly realistic? The cringe, the squalor, the immediacy, even the nudity — it is all meant to shed artifice in a kind of auto-erasure of the camera.

I am not suggesting that, even when it is the explicit purpose, art “recreates reality.” That is not exactly how mimesis functions. Rather, realism is an aesthetic mode with a particular sort of desired affective outcome: you weren’t meant to really feel like you were there, but it was meant to be realistic enough that you could fool yourself into believing you could be, and that those characters continued to exist after the credits ran.

So the question: as technology becomes more and more immersive, when does art circle back around to some sort of deliberate artifice? I suppose I mean less a Brechtian mirror than a move away from realism — not in the sense of Marvel movies' very obvious and still realist fantasizing, but instead art that refuses realism as its primary assumption. When does VR and AR prompt a desire for film that is decidedly “not believable”?

Something the kerfuffle on Twitter has made clear recently is that certain sites, locations, communities, though small, can also be connected as a vector to the larger world. This piece from the New Left Review thinks about how avant-garde art reacts to the fact that mass media will always inject/co-opt/transfer certain expressions into both the actual “mainstream” but also its logics, its economics etc.

newleftreview.org/issues/ii…