PaiGu

Guu Izakaya opened its doors in Toronto on December 18, 2009. Since then, Ryerson campus dwellers, the work crowd, Toronto foodies, and Vancouver expats have been pouring through its doors non-stop. From the exterior (and from the usual hour-long line-up outside its doors), the restaurant looks more like an exclusive club than a Japanese “pub”. Izakayas in Japan are affordable watering holes that also serve food for salarymen to hit up before going home. However, when I dragged my own crowd of two Vancouver and one Ottawa expats to Guu on a Saturday night¹, we were mostly interested in the food.

As soon as I pulled open the massive wooden door to its entrance, I was greeted with a loud and energetic chorus of irashaimase! from all over the restaurant. I was temporarily shell-shocked and froze in the entrance way, literally too dazed to take another step. Was this a restaurant? Was I still in Toronto? The warm, lively, chaotic scene before me seemed a world away from the wet, cold, windy, and empty street I had just left. I spotted my friends at the bar and quickly joined them.

The restaurant was not very large, but they seemed to have somehow fit a hundred people inside. The commotion of the Japanese chefs behind the bar, along with everyone else in the place, made it so loud I found it difficult to hear myself speak. Every few seconds, the entire staff would shout a chorus of Japanese together, and I would again be shocked into a daze. It took us a long time to order as the shouting made it hard to focus on the menus in front of us. Time here also seemed to go at a faster pace than the outside world. Our server came by four times before we were ready to order – it seemed like we were taking a long time when in reality, we took no more than twenty minutes. When we finished our meal (in a rather timely fashion I would say), we realized we had maxed out our two-hour time limit, but it felt like no time at all. » Read the rest of this entry «

1. It seems that weekends are not as busy as weekdays. Guu is open daily from 5 pm to midnight; if you go before 6pm, there usually isn’t a line-up. After 6 pm, on a weekday, the wait can be up to two hours. [↩]

When I was going through my brunch phase, The Drake Hotel was recommended to me on more than one occasion. However, it’s location in West Queen West made it a little inconvenient by subway, so I never made it there. This Sunday, when my friends asked me to meet them for brunch at a place of my choosing, The Drake Hotel immediately came to mind.

Low-back pale-green couches line the edge of the window, wrapping around on either side like fallopian tubes. A large painting of jungle animals hang on one wall. The rest of the space is dominated by a bar, high tables and chairs, and distractingly large post-modern chandeliers. The place is as hip as its West Queen West locale, although the clientele varies from tourists to Queen West hipsters to senior couples. » Read the rest of this entry «

Golden Court Abalone is a Cantonese restaurant in a plaza of like-minded restaurants in Richmond Hill. I ventured in one day for Cantonese-style dim sum, seeing that it was packed with Cantonese people – they know their food best after all. It’s a large banquet hall, and you order off a menu, very similar to its neighbour, Ambassador Chinese Cuisine, but with a smaller, and as it turned out cheaper, menu. Nonetheless, many items on the menu were ones I’d never seen before, like spicy duck tongue or steamed tofu wrap with pork, mushroom, taro, and duck web. I admit I ordered rather randomly when it came to items I didn’t recognize, but with dim sum, a little adventure never hurt anyone, right?¹

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1. Ok, very debatable, but humour me. [↩]