Category : News

Should I get the urge to splurge on the finest Basmati rice in the city round 4 am, I have only to hop and skip a couple of blocks to King Palace on Church and Park. King Palace is a 24-hour Pakistani diner on a car wash lot which backs onto the Toronto Metro Library.It carries an impeccable credential -  Cabbie Approved. In fact, it’s often tough to find a table round midday when the Cabbies take over the place, packing away the puffiest Naans, and ordering from the long steam table, curries of every heat and hue.  The curries and Naan however are not a match for the RICE! The most delicate pedigreed grains  which look like baby birds’ feathers tipped in orange and yellow.  One forkful of this ambrosia, after I’d taken the precaution of removing the rice  from its polystyrene container, thus eliminating the danger of radical toxic oil spores personally attacking my liver,  I cried hooray. Now I need never again struggle to cook Basmati rice at home because I know I will never be able to achieve the King Palace standard.

Then a fellow ricehead said, “Oh but the rice at Lahore Tikka House is just as good if not better.” So I take off on the magic carpet, TTC to you, for Little South Asia at farflung Gerrard and Greenwood. On this cloudy day, subcontinental bling shines out like the proverbial good deed in a naughty world.  Pinkish gold  jewelry so intricate it can only have been made by the tiny fingers of skilled elves, diaphanous saris in colours never found in box of Crayolas. On her visit to India, the legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland cried out  “Pink is the navy blue of India.” But my favourite colour is that intense blue-green, so subtle, not quite sea green, not quite turquoise, a colour good enough to eat.

Talking about eating, now I’ve reached Lahore Tikka House or I should say the new LTH because finally after years of promises, promises of a dining room – there is one!  Other restaurants eat your heart out. LTH has such a loyal fan base that for yonks, customers have lined up to eat in trailers parked alongside the  always-about-to-renovated house   – and loved it! Now the large rust-coloured house has a dining room on its first floor. My first thought is I hope they haven’t over-gentrified. I liked the informal picnic atmosphere of the trailers. Panic off. The dining room is vast and looks like a commissary with joyfully garish  artefacts, the lobby has woven silver seats. We choose a place at one of the long communal tables and make our picks from a flimsy flyer. Then we take it to the counter  and pick up a number on a stand so a server can identify us easily. I note a fellow diner is using silverware. He must have sneaked it in because we get regulation plastic cutlery and the same old paper plates.

The menu is eclectic, but don’t expect to see any pork dishes or beer in this Muslim restaurant.  We ponder chicken.  No to  Chicken Tikka Masala.  We haven’t come to Pakistan to eat Britain’s national dish, invented in Birmingham! Now Afghani Chicken Tikka (8 bits and pieces) $8.99 is more like it. The Northwestern Frontiersmen  prefer mildly spiced food and the chicken is gently spiced with lemon, black pepper, yogurt and garlic, then grilled. Lala’s Machlie Red Snapper $15.99 is amiably rather than aggressively flavoured with the customary combo of spices fried to perfection and delivered whole with roasted potatoes, chunks of tomato and peppers. The Naan $1,25 arrives hot from the Tandoor (Pakistan invention), kissing cousin of the wood-fired oven and capable of producing the same superlative and crusty bread. Now we encounter two puzzles.  We and LTH part company on the preparation of two favourites.  Tarka Dal $7.50 is a bowl of yellow lentils cooked with seasoned butter. We’d expected the more familiar soupy Dal and are disappointed. Another perennial fave is Muttar Paneer, $7.50, little cubes of fried curd cheese and peas which have always – atleast in my experience – come in a tomatoey sauce. Here the dish is on the dry side.

Spirits drooping a little, we turn to the rice $3.50. Nudging perfection, tipped with presumably turmeric and/or chili.  To end, we try a Kulfi, frozen custard on a stick. Flavour of boiled milk.  An acquired taste.

Lahore Tikka House, 1365 Gerrard St.E. 416-406-1668 Lunch for two $45 .
*** and1/2 Rice **Yums For Bucks, service. * ambience

1-4 stars awarded for food, service, ambience.

….Joanne Kates! After Anthony Bourdain named Richman, the GQ food columnist,  douchebag of the Year, Richman revenged himself by trashing  Les Halles, the bistro with which Bourdain was associated. I never called Joanne a douchebag. Don’t know her, never met her,never written about her,  only know that her day job  is running a kids camp on the tundra . But boy is she ever ticked off at me. After I … Continue reading.. →

Who’s spiking Richard Ouzounian’s coffee? I laughed aloud when I read in the Toronto Star his unctuous, self-serving paeon of praise for Garth Drabinsky -even as the Livent founder’s conviction for cooking the books is under appeal. “What I would like to do is to remind us of all that Garth Drabinsky has done — and continues to do — for the city of Toronto” intones Richard,  the chameleon of … Continue reading.. →

  I mourn the loss of Toufik Sarwa’s Cinq O1 at College and Palmerston. Ok it was a resto lounge, aka a noise machine, but it was an imaginative one with larky graphics and a wooden horse in the middle of the dining room. Perhaps it was too frivolous and Yorkville (where Sarwa’s Amber still pulls ‘em in) for earthy College. Since Cinq O1’s demise, its food has been dissed … Continue reading.. →

  I start out to eat at Ortolan, a tiny new place at Lansdowne and Bloor, just one more example of how gourmandise is going viral in the neighborhoods.  I’d like to dwell on that phenom but once again the growing problem of noise has intruded my thoughts. Every time the subject of noise gets an airing the press, as it has recently,  I get mail from people who are … Continue reading.. →

  The newest link in Cosimo Mammoliti’s burgeoning chain of restaurants is Bar Centrale di Terroni , Price and Yonge, which anchors the Rosedale strip known for its fine and expensive food shops aka the Five Thieves. OK, Mammoliti, drop the humble mask, you’re dealing with the rich terroni (peasants) now. In 1992, Mammoliti sneaked onto the scene with Terroni on Queen St. W and it was an immediate hit … Continue reading.. →

Friends went twice to Le Rossignol, the jolly French bistro in Riverside and ate well. The third time, they didn’t. They asked staff what was going on and were told that the chef Jeremie Sequinot had the night off. Question: why doesn’t he have a competent kitchen?

The Economist gets yuck of the week award for its report that oyster mushrooms are being fertilized by human urine in an experiment. But why not. Night soil, the euphemism for human feces, is still used in many parts of the world and with great success.  Moreover, as scientists point out, the oyster mushroom is a great mycoremediator! What a mouthful! oyster mushrooms are used to clean up successfully agricultural … Continue reading.. →

multicultural spelling confusion. I mentioned Marseilles in my review of Lafayette (april 23) and reader Tony Hiron  corrected me. Only one s in Marseille. For the French, that is.   But I used the English spelling and as I pointed out, this is English week. Right, replied Tony and the royal wedding is taking place in Londres as the French continue to say. But we all spell  Chateau D’If, the … Continue reading.. →

A tranche of sea bass swims in a sea of anis broth – yellow, creamy, fish stock and  anise star – and the flavour is blowing me away. The soup tastes bewitchingly of rich rot, aniseed/ liquorice, sweet,smelly, a twinge of bitterness, not entirely unlike the spores of wild fungi, a taste that comes right out of the earth uncontaminated by any human intervention. Why we might be sitting in … Continue reading.. →