Two years in Toronto

Let’s take a trip across Toronto through six flat whites! Of all the coffee places we’ve explored so far, these six seem to epitomise Canadian coffee culture, illustrating the variety in price, style and taste. 1. Second Cup Coffee Co. – $3.65 I’d be lying if I said I always managed to hunt down an independent coffeehouse for my daily caffeine fix, so f or a true survey of Canadian coffee culture, we have to begin with chain coffee stores.  In Toronto Tim Horton’s and Starbucks compete for most popular, but my favourite of the chains is Second Cup. Established in 1975, they offer a flat white with a mellow espresso and tonnes of creamy milk. This is my go-to comforting afternoon pick-me-up that can be found on almost every corner of downtown Toronto, for a moderate $3.65. And if it’s been a really long day I love to pair my creamy coffee with a traditional Canadian delight – maybe a butter tart or a Nanaimo bar. Whatever gets you through the long winter, ey?! 2. S...

Another birthday and another week of fine dining: Canadian on Monday, Spanish on Wednesday, Mexican on Friday, and Italian on Saturday. The diet starts next week! Highlights included Barcelona-inspired cocktails, fresh guacamole (smashed right in front of our eyes with an Aztec pestle and mortar) and caramel-covered churros. Plus, my colleagues treated me to a delicious chocolate cake. Clearly it didn’t take them long to discover the way to my heart! For our cultural feast, we headed to The Nightingale and Other Short Fables with the Canadian Opera Company. What an experience! The brainchild of Quebecois director Robert Lepage, it blends an array of song cycles and instrumental works by the twentieth-century Russian composer Igor Stravinsky. The orchestra sit on stage, their pit now a pool of water. First, mesmerising shadow hand puppets depict folktales and nonsense songs: kittens catching mice, peasants gathering riches, a dove in flight. Then, acrobats and their silhouette...

With the skyscrapers, crowds and government-mandated ignorance of red lights, Toronto can be exhausting. The city’s boundaries are non-existent – it doesn’t seem to stop before it merges into other towns to the north, east and west – so unless we have a cottage far north of the city (more on that another time), escaping for the weekend isn’t really an option. But there are several small islands of calm – hidden beauty spots dotted around the city where we can flee the busyness of urban life and rediscover a sense of perspective! Perhaps the most famous of these tranquil retreats is the Toronto Islands (formerly the Island of Hiawatha), a short ferry ride from the waterfront downtown. A five-mile sandbar that stretches from Woodbine Beach in the east to Billy Bishop Airport in the west, it’s home to just over 600 hardy residents and provides a natural shelter for Toronto Harbour from Lake Ontario. In the depths of winter the ice can be too thick for ferries to cross, but on Eas...

The mother-in-law has arrived, bringing with her sufficient quantities of tea and crumpets to start a small business – not to mention the Malteasers and extremely chocolatey Marks & Spencer biscuits that we had begun to crave after over two months here. She’s joined us in particular for Harriet’s birthday, which we celebrated on (Good) Friday with a trip to Vegetarian Haven on Baldwin Street. From an all-vegan menu of delicious Asian cuisine, we sampled crunchy garden rolls, spicy eggplant, purple rice and even tofu ice-cream, topped with chocolate sauce and a birthday candle. The whole Easter weekend has a strong family ethos in Canada, with many of our colleagues hosting or visiting relatives. We were invited to a delicious brunch on Easter Day by the mother-in-law of Harriet’s second cousin once removed (or something like that), who by chance lives only a few streets away. Plates overflowing with salmon, ham – my colleagues tell me that turkey and ham are the meats of c...