The year in Toronto-centric food and eating, 2011
Linton Murphy
We haven’t really had a full year yet. But we still have plenty of stuff we’re proud of. So, as we wind down for our brief holiday respite, we’re putting together some of our favourite stories from 2011, so we can all take a little walk down memory lane together. Oh, September. You were so innocent.
• We started our twice-monthly food column, Fooding, with a look back at some Canadian Thanksgiving traditions, and how they crystalized under the reign of Dief the Chief.
• We also kicked off our ill-conceived feature where we ate big, gastronomically ambitious, kind of gross food, chewing through Dangerous Dan’s $40 McEwan burger.
• Sausage Of The Month, our monthly sausage feature (get it?), set up a showdown between to porky pairings from Sausage Partners.
• Quest For Crapulence continued, moving further down Queen East to the Burger’s Priest, where we grappled with the Tower of Babel.
• In one of our most-read stories of the year, somehow, we put the screws to Tim Hortons for abandoning its roots in favour of fancy-pants lattes.
• Angered at Toronto’s narrow-minded obsession with brunch and brunching, we jumped out of line and trolled through the city’s best greasy spoon breakfast joints.
• Everyone went nuts when the new Loblaws at Maple Leaf Gardens opened. We sat on our enthusiasm for a bit, and then dispatched our hilarious interns Jake and Kayte to get lost there. We haven’t seen them since.
• And as the holidays rolled around, we went eggnog crazy. First was our experimental eggnog test kitchen (where we tried to make Chicken Noggets, only to find them disgusting). Next was our soul-crushing eggnog taste test, which we’d rather not even think about it.
