Eat, Drink and Be Worldly at Summerlicious
Calling all Torontonians and visitors alike! One of two main culinary events in the city, Summerlicious is back beginning tomorrow!
Sister festival to Winterlicious, this program offers amazing three-course prix-fixe menus at three different price points that spare your budget while letting you expand your culinary horizons!
Now in its eighth year, the City’s ‘licious,’ programs continue to be hugely successful year after year. Why? Because Toronto is a culinary capital! One of the most multicultural cities on earth, Toronto embraces its love of community, culture and art through food.
The program’s popularity means that many restaurants sell out quickly. My advice? Book as early as possible to avoid disappointment. And if you don’t get a table at the resto you covet the most, keep calling to see if there’s been a cancellation. If you can’t get in for dinner, book a lunch. Friday and Saturday nights always fill up first so why not treat yourself to a Tuesday night out? You deserve it!
Summerlicious offers something for everyone. Yes, you can experience fine dining and haute cuisine, but there’s also a wide range of local and ethnic cuisines to sample across a spectrum of neighbourhoods, not just downtown. Whether you pick a restaurant in Queen West, Yorkville, Parkdale, Little India or Chinatown, you’ll find art, shopping and vibrant street culture to go with your meal.
Summerlicious is a perfect way to beat the heat, have a foodie adventure and experience the growing culinary empire that exists in our city!
WHERE/WHEN: Summerlicious hits 150 restaurants across the city July 9 – 25.
Umbereen Inayet is a programmer with the City of Toronto’s Special Events team; she recently started her own food blog, Umbereen’s Palate.
Photo by Umbereen Inayet
Sholem Krishtalka Reclaims “Gay”
Pride may be over for another year but the Gladstone Hotel retains its focus on queer art through July 18 with That’s So Gay, a group show curated by Sholem Krishtalka, left. The curator hosts a panel talk tomorrow night (July 8, 7 pm) at the Gladdy with Philip Monk (director of the AGYU), Syrus Marcus Ware (AGO), and critic and curator, Gabrielle Moser.
“I’m a scarred veteran of panel talks where people drone on and on and on,” says Krishtalka, “so I want it to be fun and gossipy and anecdotal, with lots of images. With this show I was hell bent on making a queer art show that I would love and so I’ve been hell bent on creating a panel that I would love to attend and have fun at.”
Krishtalka was “very deliberate” in pulling the show together: “I didn’t want a cast of the usual suspects,” he stresses, although many of the artists are familiar, people like Stephen Andrews, Ed Pien, Sharon Switzer and Will Munro. “I needed to include those established mid-career artists but I also wanted a range of people who either haven’t shown a lot or are new to the city and are expanding and contributing to the queer art scene in Toronto.”
Shriners Parade Causes Traffic Chaos
My ears are still ringing from the horn blasts of this Shriners car making its happy way up Bay Street this afternoon following the Shriner’s Imperial Day parade on University Avenue. Downtown traffic was paralyzed by grid-lock as east/west routes in the city core were diverted onto adjacent streets. The Shriners appeared to be having a ball unlike the commuters forced to share the roads with these wacky do-gooders (Shriners work tirelessly raising money for children’s hospitals). With streetcars reduced to a crawl, walking became the better way, heat wave or not.
Toronto Film Festivals New Online Home
The Toronto Film and Television Office has launched a valuable online tool for the city’s film community called simply Toronto Film Festivals. The new site features links and profiles to most of the city’s large and small festivals — more than 70 and counting — ranging from big daddy TIFF to newcomer the Queer West Film Fest.
The Film Office partnered with George Brown College, which unleashed the challenge of creating the site on its New Media Design students; the result is a clean, user-friendly site that presents the depth and breadth of Toronto’s film festival smorgasbord. My favorite feature is the calendar that lets users keep track of what’s coming up in the weeks and months ahead.
Film Commissioner Peter Finestone notes that not all festival pages include full profiles and he encourages those with incomplete entries to contact him with copy and logo files.
Al Gilbert’s Life Behind the Lens
Al Gilbert probably won’t think much of my point-and-shoot portrait of him and his lovely wife Gail, who joined us for our interview Tuesday at the Market Gallery. Gilbert, 88, walked me through the show, a survey of images from his lifetime as one of Toronto’s most prominent portrait photographers.
After talking for more than an hour it was clear that Gilbert believes a portraitist’s skill lies in how he or she composes and lights a shot: “Photojournalism isn’t photography,” he says, a little dismissively, “you’re not setting up the shot, you’re just recording what you see.”
He might sound like a curmudgeon but Gilbert is anything but; he was gracious and funny as he walked me down memory lane, reliving the shoots that resulted in these images of Frank Sinatra, Golda Meir, Ed Mirvish, Oscar Peterson, John Deifenbaker, Robertson Davies, even world famous Canadian portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh.
“Was it intimidating shooting Karsh?” I ask.
“Not a bit,” says Gilbert. “When you’ve shot everybody from the Pope on down, what’s another photographer?”
“Al could teach Karsh about light,” says Gail proudly.
