There are two t’s in Toronto and if you pronounce the second one, you’re visiting. This isn’t the city’s only outsider-tell, nor is Toronto its only name. It was the city’s very own Drake – who appeared on the cover of his 2016 multi-platinum album, Views, sitting on the edge of the iconic CN Tower – who melodically dubbed the city The Six. The moniker stuck. Now the reference is as Toronto as “We the North” chants at Raptors basketball games.
Most people are unaware that the rap god chose the numeric nomenclature as a salute to two things: the city’s original area code (416) and the 1998 amalgamation of six municipalities (Toronto, East York, North York, Scarborough, Etobicoke and York) to form the megacity of Toronto. That a land-zoning decision could influence a rap song is a testament to how seriously Torontonians take their neighbourhoods.
It’s the kind of pride that bubbles along city blocks, gets passed down through generations and winds up on T-shirts. Toronto is a city of immigrants who laid claim to the enclaves where they landed, set down roots, had kids and made them swear to remain neighbourhood-faithful forever. It’s just one of the things that makes visiting the city so incredible: residents haven’t given up the nuances of who they are here. So if you’re open to it, each visit offers an opportunity to discover something new.
I was born in Toronto – Little Jamaica, to be precise – and even though I moved to the suburbs in grade school, most of my formative memories are rooted in the city. I browsed albums at Play De Record on Yonge Street. Wore out the treads on brand-new white Keds jumping in the streets during Caribana – the city’s annual Caribbean carnival. I partied at clubs that no longer exist, slept on the subway during rush hour, and trailed my parents through Kensington Market butcher shops while they searched for the freshest fish and oxtail. Ask me to name some of the neighbourhoods that make up Toronto and I can easily recite dozens. But ask me when last I visited one of them and, until recently, you’d have been met with a sheepish shrug.
In an effort to raise global citizens, my husband and I swapped family trips to Toronto for holidays farther away. My sons have slurped spaghetti in Rome and ridden camels in Egypt, but have never known the juicy joy of a pan-chicken dinner on Eglinton Avenue West. Adulthood turned a trip to the city into a commute and my youthful excitement into parking-search fatigue. Toronto became a place I drove through.
To be fair, Toronto changed too. The neon signs and mom-and-pop shops on Yonge Street have morphed into hipster-friendly barbershops and cafés. The city’s iconic towers have become enmeshed by construction cranes and the glass-and-steel condos those cranes raise. And just the thought of navigating gridlock is an ever-present deterrent to driving in. The city has simply grown up – like all cities do. But when you knew the original, the next chapter can feel like a door shut in your face.
Recently, as the lights of Toronto met me on a return flight home, I was hit with pangs of homesickness for the city of my youth. Not only was I losing touch with Toronto, but my kids, by proxy, were being shut out too. By the time my plane touched down, I’d made the decision: I was going to stick my foot into that closing door. And if I wanted to introduce my family to the city, I’d need to reintroduce myself. I’d need to connect with people who live and love the city in its present form.
It doesn’t take much research to find Aashim Aggarwal. During Toronto’s pandemic lockdown, he and his girlfriend, Amaara Dhanji, challenged themselves to eat a meal from every country. They called their effort the Toronto Global Eats Challenge and began posting all of the dishes they ordered from small purveyors across the city on social media. After the lockdown rules were relaxed, Aggarwal launched Seed. Eat. Repeat, a customised food tour series that combines his passions for the city’s ethnic enclaves and varied dishes with his desire to connect locals like me with the Toronto they’ve been missing. It’s Aggarwal who helps me understand that taking on all of Toronto is too big a challenge. If I want to rediscover the city, I’ll need to make it bite-sized.
“People don’t say they’re from Toronto. They say they’re from Scarborough or Rexdale or Parkdale,” Aggarwal observes. This hyperlocality is at the heart of his hosted culinary adventures: they’re deep dives into communities, not introductions to big-name chefs and concept kitchens. We share a ride into Scarborough, the northeast Toronto neighbourhood touted as the world’s most multicultural. The suburb I grew up in is just beyond its northern border but when I step out of the car, nothing looks familiar.
More than 40 Middle Eastern-focused businesses line both sides of Lawrence Avenue East between Victoria Park and Warden Avenue. Aggarwal points out spots like ARZ Fine Foods, which stocks Middle Eastern groceries; Karahi Boys restaurant, with its Pakistani-inflected menu; and the halal butcher shop Alzahraa. Then, he ushers me into Kunafa’s, a small café in a strip mall next to a Tim Horton’s. Co-owner Shadi Issa, a man with warm eyes and a measured cadence, holds out a hand to greet me. “Welcome to Scarborough,” he says. “It’s not too far for you but it’s a different world.”
The café’s concept is simple: desserts from the Levant. Two women stand behind a glass case that showcases pastries ranging from the crunchy, traditional kunafa popular in Palestine to a softer version common in Lebanon and Turkey. Baklava and chocolate treats are sold as well, but it’s the kunafa, served with a drizzle of simple syrup, that draws the crowds. The delicacy is made on site, but the owners had to travel to the Middle East to learn the process and arrange for the export of the special equipment they’d need, and to Quebec to connect with a specific cheese factory. After my first taste of nabulsi, the briny, semisoft Palestinian cheese at the heart of the pastry, I cry out in delight.
Issa isn’t surprised when I confess the neighbourhood is new to me. For many years his shop served the Middle Eastern community almost exclusively. “When I was growing up, this was the only location where you could come and get ethnic ingredients for your kitchen, so every family had to come to Lawrence,” Issa tells me. Over the past 15 years, shifting immigrant populations in the city, second-generation Canadians and interracial marriages have altered who comes through the area.
At Aggarwal’s suggestion, I wander into Shereen’s Guyanese Bakery and Roti Shop in a mall in East Scarborough. The nation’s staples, like mauby (a bitter tree-bark-based drink) and imported curry powder, line the shelves, a hot counter serves vegan and halal dishes, and baked goods fill glass cases. The shop is popular with Guyanese Canadians seeking a taste of home but word-of-mouth recommendations have expanded the clientele to include people of all ethnicities from across the city. “This place is a pain to get to. It’s not something that people stumble upon,” Aggarwal says. “It’s a decision. I want to try Guyanese food today. ”
It’s easy to see why people return. Within moments of wandering in, I’m chatting with straight-talking owner Shereen Simic’s dad, who’s baking up salara – a sort of Caribbean Yule log that can be sweet or savoury. Then her Serbian husband, Uroš, shows me the best way to puff up roti shells. (Shake them in a pitcher after frying.)
There’s a similar familial atmosphere at Maha’s Egyptian Brunch in Leslieville, a gentrified neighbourhood in Toronto East. Monika Wahba, a former contestant on TV show Top Chef Canada, launched the colourful eatery at Greenwood Avenue and Sandford Avenue in 2014, alongside her parents and younger brother. When she arrived from Egypt in 2000 as a kid, she recalls being smitten with the city’s multitude of ethnic districts, including two that are now close to home – Little India and Greektown. Wahba still enjoys showing people around her neighbourhood. When not in the shop, you’ll find her sipping tea with neighbours or eating at nearby spots, like the Michelin-rated Wynona (where fellow Top Chef Canada contestant Joachim Hayward is the head chef) or Que Ling, a family-run Vietnamese restaurant.
Jennifer Reynolds, a horticulturist, former editor-in-chief of lifestyle magazine Harrowsmith and a fifth-generation Torontonian, is as smitten with her Riverdale neighbourhood – a few blocks north of Leslieville – as Wahba is with hers. “You can see a frog in the middle of downtown,” she tells me before sharing her neighbourhood’s nightly ritual. Each evening people filter toward Riverdale Park East – just shy of 18 hectares of green space with walking trails and benches built for two – to watch the sunset over the distant Toronto skyline. The ritual started during the pandemic and caught on. Now in the glow of orange and pink, it’s hard to know who lives in the neighbourhood and who is just passing through.
People gather at parks on the city’s west end too. Married actors and comedians Kris Siddiqi and Aurora Browne often wonder if they’re on a movie set when they visit the sprawling Trinity Bellwoods Park. “Sometimes the park looks like somebody has cast it. Because it’s just so full of people doing these beautiful recreational things,” says Browne, best known for her work on the award-winning Baroness Von Sketch Show. “There could be, like, two, maybe three bands scattered throughout. Somebody’s slacklining, somebody else is doing a drum circle. There are people playing pickleball and there’s a baseball game.”
The couple live in nearby Little Portugal. “I’m really good at spotting people who are down for the day to visit our hip neighbourhood,” Siddiqi says. “There’s always four of them walking together and looking up at the buildings while I’m carrying my cat litter and toilet paper home.”
They’ve watched the area transform from a mishmash of rundown spots to the kind that gets talked about by celebrities like Johnny Depp and Jason Momoa. “I’ve been living here for more than half my life and I’m still not over how much I’m in love with it,” says Browne, “particularly in the spring and the summer when all the gardens just explode with greenery and people. I don’t like even thinking about moving somewhere else.” In this neighbourhood, they bump into people from across the city and abroad over pho at Vietnamese restaurant Golden Turtle or comfort food at the iconic Lakeview, open since 1932 on Dundas Street West.
One day I spring an idea on my 18-year-old son, Cameron: to explore together a bit of the city I once knew well. He’s game so I pick him up from his summer job downtown. We exit the tall black glass towers of the Financial District. The tourists we pass all seem to be heading in the same direction: south. It’s where most concierges will point them – the route to the waterfront features the most popular tourist attractions, including the CN Tower. But my conversations leave me wishing more people would consider the gems that await when you turn your back to the water and explore the sprawling metropolis to the north.
As we walk the stretch of Yonge Street between King Street East and Dundas Street East in the city’s downtown core, I point out places that filled me with wonder as a kid. We wander in and out of the shops that have replaced the ones I knew, sit for a minute in Dundas Square (the city’s equivalent to Times Square) and get lost in the labyrinthine Eaton Centre. My heart aches a bit as I realise how much Toronto has changed.
When Cameron catches me looking wistful, I explain how much the city has meant to me and how much I want to continue exploring it. I want this place to feel as much his as I used to feel it was mine. He says he wants that too, so we’ll keep the project going, revisiting new-to-us neighbourhoods for as long as we can, relying on locals to point us in the right direction. I mean, I can’t have him rapping about The Six without really understanding what a magical place it is. And clearly, I need reminding too.
Where to stay
Four Seasons Hotel Toronto
Toronto is Four Seasons’ hometown, so stakes were high when it opened a new flagship in the city’s Yorkville neighbourhood in 2012. But with 259 soothing white-and-beige or jewel-toned rooms and suites, perfectly executed Lyonnaise dishes at Café Boulud, and the brand’s biggest urban spa, the hotel nailed discreet luxury from the get-go and it still does today. From $590; fourseasons.com
1 Hotel Toronto
Befitting the hospitality group’s brand of eco-opulence, there are lots of sustainability touches – reclaimed wood in the 112 guest rooms, plants everywhere, on-site composting – but also a chic rooftop pool and a high-end Mexican-meets-Mediterranean restaurant. Bonus: you can walk to Lake Ontario’s waterfront trails and parks. From $350; 1hotels.com
Ace Hotel Toronto
Set at the intersection of the city’s buzzy King West and Queen West neighbourhoods, this outpost, like other Aces worldwide, attracts a cool crowd. The rooms have the expected turntables and a vaguely industrial vibe, but there are also nods to the Great White North, including locally sourced Douglas-fir cabinetry and flooring, custom deadstock-fabric quilts designed by Canadian artist Kyle Parent, and minibar tipples like Ontario-made Beattie’s vodka. From $350; acehotel.com
The Drake Hotel
Open since 2004, this intimate 51-room property in the heart of Queen West was ahead of the “hotel as hood” trend with an art programme that features homegrown and international talent, a live-music venue spotlighting local bands and DJs, and a lobby bar that’s always packed with Torontonians. From $433; thedrake.ca
Park Hyatt Toronto
Located on one of the city’s smartest streets, this Yorkville hotel is about as glitzy as Toronto gets. A recent four-year renovation upped its game with rooms that go heavy on the dark wood panelling and velvet furniture. The 17th-floor bar, the Writer’s Room, is one of the prettiest spots to take in the city views. From $580; hyatt.com