SpiceCityTo

Exploring strip malls and hole-in-the-wall restaurants in search of the city's best international food

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Spicy snacks from the beach in Bombay

While hundreds of Indian restaurants in Toronto serve up the standard butter-chicken-and-dahl buffet, one restaurant in Little India has a different take on food from the subcontinent. Bombay Chowpatty (1386 Gerrard Street East) serves up vegetarian street food from India. 



"Indian restaurants tend to have buffets, but I wanted to do something different," says co-owner Gurpreet Mann (below), who hails from the Punjab and opened up the restaurant two years ago. 

"In Bombay, and all over India, people make snacks and sell them on the road. We make these snacks and serve them fresh." 

The restaurant gets its name from Chowpatty (Chaupati) beach in Mumbai (formerly Bombay). The beach is famous for its food stalls. In addition to serving fast food treats, the restaurant doubles as a video store, selling the latest Bollywood DVDs. 


The ragda patties ($5.99) are pan fried potato patties swimming in a chick pea, onion and tomato sauce.  The masala fries (below; $3.99) are tasty dish of spicy french fries topped with yogurt, green chutney, tamarind chutney, and cilantro. Many of the other dishes on the menu combine similar elements to create punchy treats that pack sweet, salty and creamy flavours into each bite.


Pav bhaaji ($5.99) is a puree of mashed veggies sauteed with onion and garlic and topped with lime. The bhel puri (below, $4.99) is a dish of rice crisps with onion, potato, green mango, cilantro, tamarind and chutney. It tastes a bit like Sugar Crisp breakfast cereal and includes bits of sev, a type of cracker.

The menu also included paneer burgers and this lovely paneer kathi roll (below, $5.99), which must be an Eastern equivalent of the breakfast burrito. It was made of mashed paneer (unaged Indian cheese) and rolled into a flakey paratha bread.

I finished the meal with a surprisingly good rose lassi, a sweet, milky drink made with rosewater. It was truly a pleasure to discover so many new dishes and to sample a different side of the Indian food in the city.

Bombay Chowpatty is located at 1386 Gerrard Street East. Its hours are 1:30pm to 11pm on weekdays, 12 noon to 12 midnight on weekends. 

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Monday, September 19, 2011

Eat a duck fetus out of a shell in St. James Town

***UPDATE AS OF JULY 2013: Pilipinas Restaurant is closed but there is another Filipino restaurant at the same address called Mahal Kita. It has a good hot food counter and yes...balut!

Think you’re okay about your decision to eat meat? A visit to the Filipino section of Toronto’s St. James Town might give you doubts. Here you can try a Filipino delicacy that will make you question your food morality.
Balut is a duck egg that is sold by all over the Philippines and in other Southeast Asian countries. “People go around and sell them on the street,” says owner Marissa Garcia, who hails from Bataan, a province near Manila. It’s a boiled, fertilized duck egg—basically a duck fetus—that you eat right out of the shell.

I recently ate balut ($1.99) at Pilipinas Cusine, a new variety store/take-out restaurant at 29 Howard St., a street in St. James Town that is lined with shops serving the Filipino community.

Balut is just one of the many strange foods I first encountered on a trip to the Philippines a few years ago. I sampled a skewer with three one-day-old deep fried chicks (crunchy), I ate dog meat and dog soup (very tasty but made me uneasy) and tried pinikpikan, a delicacy which involves beating a chicken to death slowly with a stick to change the texture of the meat (not good for so many reasons).


In Pilipinas Cusine, I sat at a small table inside the shop to eat my balut. I cracked open the top of the shell and slurped out the broth-like liquid. After breaking into the shell, I sprinkled salt on the yellow yolk, which was akin to a regular hard boiled egg, and the meaty duck part. You could see duckling’s little organs and blood vessels. The whole thing tastes undeniably good—hey, what’s not to like about broth, hard boiled egg and duck meat? But somehow, thinking about the little unborn duckling made me feel queasy.
 
“It’s better to eat it without looking,”  advised Marissa. “It’s like a baby bird. It’s better not to see it, just to eat it.” Very wise words, indeed.



Pilipinas Cusine is located at 29 Howard St., Toronto. Hours: 9am to 11pm, 7 days a week.

***UPDATE AS OF JULY 2013: Pilipinas Restaurant is closed but there is another Filipino restaurant at the same address called Mahal Kita. It has a good hot food counter and yes...balut!

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Monday, September 12, 2011

New York Subway is back in business

Queen West residents rejoice! After being closed for seven months for renovations, the famed burrito join New York Subway at 520 Queen Street West is back in business. 

New York Subway before the renovations
New York Subway after the renovations
Many residents of the neighbourhood feared New York Subway would reopen as a slicked up version of itself, if it reopened at all. But fortunately, the renovations that were unveiled on Friday have proven to be fairly minimal.

"Not much has changed," shrugged Dino, the veteran burrito maker who is now back at his post after a stint working for sister restaurant Gandhi's Indian Cuisine. "It looks like something old. That's okay. If it's too fancy, it's no good for me."

The booths have been replaced with tables and office chairs, and there's a new floor and counter. The grungiest edges from the place are gone, but otherwise, it looks pretty much the same as before. The same touristy posters of the New York skyline are still on the walls.

Fortunately, the food also hasn't changed much. You can still get the same great veggie burritos as before, although some menu items are slightly more expensive: a small burrito is now $4.49, up from $3.95. It's still a super cheap and satisfying meal, so I'm certainly not complaining.



There are some new additions to the menu: breakfast items, such as omelettes and fried eggs, will be rolled out in the next month or so. 

New York Subway is located at 520 Queen Street West; hours are Monday to Friday, 11:30am until midnight; Saturday noon until 10pm; Sunday closed. Hours may be expanded once the breakfast items are added to the menu. 

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Tuesday, September 6, 2011

A pint and a good plate of curry

"It's all about curry, beer and music." That's how Vincent Pollard, the charming barman at Stella at 1261 Bloor West, describes his establishment. It's no surprise that he's from England, a country enamoured with all three. 

Pollard handles the music and beer, while back in the kitchen, his business partner, Bangladeshi immigrant Ronti Hosen, tends to the curry in the kitchen. 


Stella is a bar in the newly cool Bloordale area that attracts a reggae and indie music-loving set in their 20s and 30s.  Just a year ago, Stella was yet another divey sports bar attracting ne'er-do-wells on the sketchy Landsdowne strip. 

But Pollard, who was then just an occasional customer, was gradually enticed to run events at the bar in exchange for regular doses of Ronti's curry. Pollard liked the social atmosphere so much that he quit his job as a web designer a couple of months ago to run the bar with Ronti full time. 


And the curry? For $8 to $10, you can pick between beef, shrimp and okra, butter chicken or fish. All the choices are good and quite distinct, but the fish is the must-have dish here. 

As a Bangladeshi curry, it's less saucy than its Indian counterpart. The turbot is made with freshly crushed coriander and cooked with tamarind, ginger and garlic, tomato and onion. The result is a wonderfully smooth and tasty meal with much more flavour than a typical fish curry. (However, Spice City readers be warned, if you like it hot, you'll need 'superspice' your order by asking for a little more kick.) 

Before the transformation of Stella, Ronti (above) spent his days doing food prep for fancy restaurants like Scaramouche, while own bar served nothing but chicken wings. But after seeing Landsdowne begin to shed its sketchiness in the last year or two, he decided to bring his passion for cooking to his own establishment. He hopes one day to open a Bangladeshi restaurant, something that would be welcome in Toronto, as many Bangladeshis serve Indian food in their establishments rather than their own cuisine.


Ronti just returned from a four month stint in Bangladesh, where he gleaned culinary secrets from his kin. He had immigrated to Canada as a teenager, so he only started cooking after he came here. "When I was back in Bangladesh, I got recipes for curries and dahl from my mom, my grandma, my relatives, anyone in town who was a good cook," he says. Ronti even spent a couple of weeks there working helping make food for large 500-people events. "I wanted to know the real Bangladesh flavour." 

Stella is at 1261 Bloor Street West.; Tel: 416 655 7142. Open Tuesday and Wednesday 6pm til 1am; Thursday to Saturday 6pm til 2am; Sunday 6pm til midnight. 

  • Share your own thoughts on Stella in the comments field below.
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