Some Imaginary Torontos
Two Saturdays ago I sat down on the bare floor of my friend's apartment next to her, and we talk about Toronto restaurants for three hours. She's lived here all her life and has nine hundred pins for food places on Google Maps. Two hundred make their way to my own map (she's a much more adventurous and voracious eater than I).
My own intel on the food scene downtown is sparse and a decade out of date - Isshin was the best ramen spot, ten years ago, but every decade here the food gets a little more sophisticated, a little more complex, and it's not really in the game anymore. Patois is also still around + superceded, Bahn Mi Boys has held up surprisingly well. I bookmark good sandwich spots and brunch patios and cocktail bars.
She tells me about the Chinese restaurants she won't set foot in, including a fairly well regarded eatery that's owned by a jewish couple who's never set foot in China.1 She tells me about the newest restaurants opening up, by kids our age who grew up on the east end like we did — who grew up eating Chinese food at home and samosas and Jamaican patties at school parties. Now they're making their own impression on the culinary world here. Her storytelling makes me feel like I'm part of something bigger, like I'm part of the narrative of our generation, like I'm being welcomed home.
On Tuesday I go to an event about Toronto hosted by a new acquaintance. What do you think of when you think of Toronto?, she asks. What makes us truly unique? Surely it can't be the diversity, or the food, or the cute neighbourhoods - every big city has their own version of that. Forget comparing ourselves to the Bay or New York or L.A.; why do we have less of a coherent identity than even smaller cities like Miami, or Chicago, or Detroit? We read an essay about Toronto's self-loathing tendencies. Margaret Atwood says we want to be New York without the garbage and the muggings, other quoted authors ask why so few books are set in Toronto, when a surprising number of writers are from here.
The thesis of the event is that we don't have a mythos; there's not a lot of groundedness to Toronto, no sense of what we're about. I don't quite relate and I feel queerly about it: I feel like saying that out loud would simultaneously out me as a newcomer and make others feel bad for not getting it.
The day before this event it was an unusually warm day. My friend and I got dinner at a poutine shack she wanted to try; she got the butter chicken and I got the cajun spice. We wandered through cute stores in the Distillery district and I thought of M from high school, who used to work in the chocolatier. She notes one unique thing about Toronto: even in the tourist hotspots, all the food is decent.
Then we stroll down the esplanade, lined with co-op buildings and kids on tricycles and games of pickup basketball. We end up at the waterfront, the part of it that Sidewalk Labs was promised a decade ago. I tell my friend that I've met the guy who was the lead of it at a few conferences. (He writes a pretty good urbanism newsletter these days.) That's funny, my friend says. One of my old co-workers was a serious contender for that job, when he was still working at Google. Oh, by the way, do you remember J, from high school? She lives around these parts, with her husband and kid.
We sit on some Adirondack chairs lining the boardwalk and we look out into the lake, the silhouette of the islands.
I love that island, have loved it since I had that summer job in high school working at the amusement park there. The commute was ninety minutes each way from Scarborough; twenty of that on a ferry. It's insane that I just have beach access now, I say to my friend. I can just decide that I want to read on a beach and I can get on a six dollar ferry and make that happen whenever I want.
Yesterday I attended a rationalist meetup. I talked to many fascinating people, some with one foot out the door, and some who are here to stay. I scheme with both kinds about what kinds of events I want to run here after I'm settled. Afterwards, the stragglers go for dinner. J rattles off two places nearby that won't make any best-of lists, but are tasty and always capable of handling large crowds on short notice, despite being right at the core of the city.2 I talk about my recent forays with the CBC and he tells me that their bafflingly clunky headlines are a running joke in one of his group chats.
For one work term I was an RA for my favourite professor. For his own PhD, he studied the work culture of tech firms in San Francisco. I was helping him develop and do research for a follow-up study on how the work culture in Waterloo's tech scene differed. What we found was that the tech workers here enjoyed a more relaxed pace of life. They could do good work, but also walk their kids to school and amble through the farmer's markets and mess around with woodworking or their 3D printer setup. They moved here, or decided to stay, because they valued having that kind of life. The ones who wanted more from their work, who had higher ambitions — those people moved to the Bay.