The Tale of a Vacation, in Six Meals

I swear I'm not turning this into a food blog, but I just can't help myself. I've tried to think of a pithy way to tell you about my recent road trip out to Toronto and back without organizing my post around the meals I ate along the way, and I've concluded that it's simply impossible. If it's any consolation, in what follows I don't mention french toast once. I was on vacation, after all, so I was determined to leave my work at the office, as it were.

(Photos of the excursion are here.)

1) Day One - The Moosewood Restaurant, Ithaca, NY.



Have you ever heard of the Moosewood? If you're a vegetarian, or if you've ever spent much time browsing the cookbook aisle at Borders, you probably have. The Moosewood Cookbook is to vegetarian cooking what What to Expect When You're Expecting is to childbirth - a sort of holy text that simultaneously informs and soothes. "It's not so bad," it says, "Here's how we're gonna get through this." Well, it turns out the Moosewood Restaurant is in Ithaca, which is kind of on the way to Toronto. And Kate, my road-trip companion (the Neal Cassady to my Jack Kerouac, if you will), is a vegetarian. And Camille, one of my former fellow Fellows from Philly (a former Philly Fellow, a Philly former fellow Fellow) lives in Ithaca. So... we went there! And we ate vegetarian food! And it was great, if a bit like eating something someone had prepared for you from The Moosewood Cookbook. And then Camille took us around Ithaca to see the gorges, which get quite dark at night, so I'm pretty sure we saw gorges, but I can't be positive.

2) Day Two - Niagara Falls Snack Bar. Buffalo, NY, has given the world one great culinary item and kept another one for itself. To the world it has given the Buffalo Wing, and we all know what the world has done with that. For itself it has kept a sandwich called the beef on weck, a roast beef sandwich that is dipped - bun and all - into a thin, salty juice that turns it into one of the tastiest and grossest sandwiches in the history of sandwiches. I had one a few months ago and it changed my life (while also nearly ending it), but I figured on this trip I would defer to the vegetarian sensibilities of my companion and try to find somewhere in Buffalo that might serve a vegetable or two. It was a fool's errand. After touring some of the most profound urban blight I've ever seen, trembling in horror before the Buffalo City Hall, getting lost on something called the Skyway, and spotting an okay-looking Brewpub just as we drove onto an interstate ramp that took us flying past it, we decided to pass on Buffalo and head up to Niagara Falls instead, where we were bound to find a quick sandwich or something. We did not. Turns out April is still the off-season at Niagara Falls. And by off-season I mean the spray from the falls is still frozen on parts of the park, nobody is there but a handful of dazed-looking South Asians, and there are no - and I mean no - places outside the park to buy lunch apart from a shabby Punjabi restaurant advertising "The Best Indian Food in America." Enticing as that was, we decided to take our chances on the grounds of the park, and what we ended up with was a $6 PB&J sandwich and chips (for her) and a $7 shrinkwrapped ham-and-cheese sandwich (for him), which, when you add in a bottle of apple juice and tax, cost us something like $17. We ate them outside in the windy cold, and it was all Kate could do to keep me from hurling myself over the ledge and into the falls.

3) Day Two - Byzantium. Things got much better once we crossed into Canada. Toronto, you must know, is the "gayest city in Canada," as a free newspaper I picked up put it, and it has a wealth of gay bars, clubs, and cafes - so many, in fact, that "Queer as Folk" (which, I believe, is a television program about gay people) was actually filmed there, although it was supposedly set in Pittsburgh (which is not a very gay city at all). With our Valley-sharpened gaydars in prime working order, we zeroed in on the principal gay district without much trouble that evening and landed in a place called Byzantium. And that's where I had one of the best meals of my life. Kate, working from the assumption that ostriches are vegetables, ordered the ostrich steak (I'm being glib here - she's okay eating meat, so long as she knows where it came from, and so long as where it came from isn't a horrible factory farm) and I ordered the rabbit stew. Have you ever had rabbit? It's a cliche to say that it tastes like chicken, but cliches are cliches for a reason, and in this case that reason is this: rabbit tastes like chicken. But the sauce - oh, the sauce! And the vegetables - oh, the vegetables! And the ostrich - oh, the ostrich (I maybe helped Kate out a little)! They made me very, very glad that I hadn't hurled myself into Niagara Falls earlier in the day. Terribly, terribly glad.

4) Day Three - Fran's Diner.



Of course I couldn't resist going to at least one diner on this trip, and, in fact, I actually went to two diners, though they were the same diner. What I mean is this: Fran's, a Toronto institution whose original location is rumored to have never locked its doors since it opened in 1940, actually has a few locations around the city. After eating here on our first morning in town - a decent-but-not-fabulous meal of poached eggs and english muffins for me - we accidentally stumbled into another Fran's on our last day in town. That second meal was equally shrugworthy, but the setting was pleasant retro-dinery and the service was impeccable.

5) Day Three - Kensington Market.



Kensington Market isn't a market but a neighborhood (oh, excuse me, neighbourhood), and after our cute gay waiter at Byzantium recommended we check it out while we were in town, and after we realized that Good Friday is a public holiday in Canada, and after we further realized that this meant that all of the museums (musea?) we'd planned to visit that day were closed, we decided to spend most of the day exploring this area. If you've ever been to London, it's a bit like the Spitalfields/Brick Lane district on a Saturday. If you've ever been to Philadelphia, it's kinda like the Italian Market on a weekend. Lots of funky shops spilling out onto the streets, many lovely places to buy all sorts of food of varying qualities, lots of graffiti, and at least one bona-fide cannabis cafe. We bought some bread and cheese and apples (but no cannabis), stole two plastic knives from a coffee shop, and had a picnic in the park. Well, it was more of a sand pit with some dope dealers lounging on benches and sullen children playing on a swingset, but it looked like it may once have been a park. In any event, we then went to my new favorite place, a pie shop called Wanda's Pie in the Sky, which had just relocated to Kensington Market from Bloor Street, up near the university. I had sour cherry pie and Kate had ambrosia pie, and it was all I could do not to walk out of there with several more pies tucked under each arm, a few hot cross buns stuffed under my chin, and as many frosted cookies crammed into my mouth as I could manage without dislocating my jaw. Oh, Wanda's Pie in the Sky - if you were a woman instead of a shop I'd try really hard to get you to marry me.

6) Day Three - The Sultan's Tent. That evening it was down to the old part of town for some Moroccan food at the Sultan's Tent. The food was very good - I had sesame-crusted salmon - but the place was memorable principally for the bangles that all of the hostesses were wearing around their waists and the belly-dancing that was going on in the back dining room, which we were nevertheless unable to watch because we didn't want to pay for it. Oh, and then when we ordered some mint tea after dinner our waiter, who I'm pretty sure didn't like us, poured the tea out of a fancy Moroccan teapot by holding the tray of glasses waaaaay down low in one hand and raising the pouring teapot waaaaaay up over his head, so that by the end he looked like some sort of fancy tea-pouring fountain. It would have been better if he'd looked like he was enjoying himself, but he didn't.

7) And The Rest. Okay, this post is getting a little out of hand, and there are still several days to go. I think I'm going to wrap things up here, since the above meals really were the most interesting ones we had, and they give you a pretty good taste (ha!) of what we did during the trip. There were also donuts (Tim Horton's! Maple Cream!); Italian food in Chinatown (that's right); breakfast in a diner that looked like a doctor's office waiting room in Rochester, NY; delicious hot dogs (veggie and meatie) at a hot-dog place called Dogtown, also in Rochester, where all of the different varieties are named after dog breeds (I had the Bernese Mountain Dog - mushrooms and swiss); delicious sandwiches and a strawberry brownie in Albany; zucchini pancakes in a neighborhood of Toronto whose name I could never pronounce, but which starts with an R; a strange but tasty Ukrainian frozen treat on Bloor Street West; German easter chocolates; and lots and lots of grapes.

Now, sadly, vacation time is over, and it's back to the rat race, the nine-to-five, the daily grind - the search for the perfect french toast.