Explore Toronto: the surprising food, nature and art of Canada’s largest city
It lacks the obvious appeal of some other cities, but beneath the surface is a place that’s constantly being reshaped by immigration, with all the cultural and culinary riches that brings, and where nature is ever-present
Canada’s largest city is not an easy place to define. “Toronto does not make any sense,” says Rossana Tudo, an urban planning consultant who was born and raised in the city’s west end. Her husband, illustrator TJ Garcia, nods in agreement. “Toronto does not have a ‘thing,’” he says.
Other cities have an identity, a narrative, that was forged through a mix of civic consensus and outside observation. When someone visits New York, Tokyo, London or Paris, they know what they’re getting into. Toronto is more inscrutable. And that is what makes it worth exploring.
The city is packed with narrow brick houses, home to families of Portuguese, Polish, Chinese, Jamaican – and many other – origins. The main commercial strip along Bloor Street is a hodgepodge of Ethiopian restaurants, family-run grocery stores and stylish bars like Burdock, where customers sip barrel-aged sour beers on a patio lit by fairy lights.
“Toronto started off as a modest place,” says Tudo. “There was no ambition to create a great city. We became a metropolis by accident.”
I can see salmon jumping a 10-minute bike ride from my house
Founded in 1793 as York, the capital of the new British colony of Upper Canada, Toronto took on its current name in 1834 to distinguish itself from New York. It eventually became a hard-working industrial and commercial city that made good use of its location on Lake Ontario.
But even as it prospered, it was defined by a stuffy Protestant culture that contrasted with the more freewheeling, polyglot mix of Canada’s largest city at the time, Montreal.
