Blackbird Bakery in Kensington Market
[This is a continuation of my Canada October 2025 posts]
It’s a cliché but I am going to say it anyway: food is very important to Chinese people. We don’t eat just to survive, although that would have been the primary reason in a rural, agricultural community. We eat because it gives us a reason to be together with other people. I could write a whole essay (others have) on the societal importance of communal eating, but I think you already know what I mean.
During our stay in Toronto we had many meals together with Toronto Uncle and my cousins. The gathering up of whoever is around to make up a table of diners is one aspect of family life I appreciate very much. We had many shared meals: dim sum breakfast, Middle Eastern brunch, home-cooked lobster dinner, turkey and all the trimmings for a Canadian Thanksgiving, congee lunch at a Chinese mom and pop diner and a home-style mid-Autumn festival dinner at the local Chinese.
Toronto Uncle makes a very good loaf of bread for family dinners. He told me: if Covid didn’t kill you, you would have become a very good baker. This is the recipe he uses for his boules/ round loaves..
The party of the season was Uncle’s 95th birthday dinner at a Chinese restaurant. We had a sectioned-off area for 50 guests, a grand banquet and a beautiful Autumnal birthday cake. Dining with Uncle, whose has lived most of his life without the intrusion of mobile phones, I did not dare to take pictures of the food we ate together. However I have photos of the birthday menu and the birthday cake (a caramel pumpkin spice latte cake – it was truly wonderful).
Given that many meals were taken with our extended family, we did not dine out much by ourselves. Richmond Station was a restaurant recommended by St Lawrence Cousin where we had the Chef’s Menu with a (shared) wine pairing. All good and delicious, greatly marred for me by the very loud diner seated near to us. Sometimes people get very excited about what they have seen and done and in their enthusiasm for sharing these experiences they go overboard (and we get over bored). It’s rare not to find a Mr or Ms Motormouth when we dine out and this is part of the risk when not eating in our home environment.
The dinner was excellent, however the lighting was very low. Here are a few photos I managed to take, to give you an idea of the presentation. When I was a very young child I had a set of ‘scratch and sniff’ stickers, with smells like apple, orange, grape etc. Someone should manufacture a set of such stickers for restaurants to give out as promotions, to entice people to walk in and try their food. In the meantime, photos will have to suffice.
Toronto has very good coffee shops and very good cake/ pastry/ bread shops. In an ideal world your good coffee shop also sells very good cake. On a surface level, as I did not have time to dig deeper into other local areas, I can highly recommend Balzac’s Coffee Roasters and Dineen Coffee Company.
If you are wondering what a London Fog is, I ordered one and saw it being made: place one Earl Grey teabag into a mug, add some boiling water to cover the teabag, steep for around 2 minutes until you have extracted the rich, brown essence of the tea, discard the teabag, add hot steamed milk as you would to a latte (made with espresso). You can add a pump of vanilla syrup if you like. This may be as close to a Malaysian teh tarek you can get without the sugary excess of condensed milk, and calling it London Fog is quite humorous.
For coffee and cake there is also the European-inspired Amadeus Patisserie (Yorkville branch at 1235 Bay Street, Toronto M5R 3K4) which we discovered on the way to Eataly, the Italian food emporium.
Amadeus Patisserie
I am very fond of Eataly as it provides a kind of European comfort when I am away (the London branch is in Broadgate Circle, 135 Bishopsgate, London EC2M 3YD). I have visited branches in Dubai and Boston, and the downtown Toronto branch (Manulife Centre, 55 Bloor St W, Toronto, ON M4W 1A6) follows a similar layout.
What this really means is that you can dine-in or dine-out. If you want to pick up a few supplies for a home-made sandwich, a cake or bottle of olive oil to bring to a dinner party or some Italian and even Canadian cheese, this is your place.
Eataly
Every guidebook/ travel article/ travel video will recommend someone’s favourite area to explore. We had a walk around Kensington Market and I can say it is not an area I enjoyed. The mood was downbeat (despite it being another sunny Toronto day), the street layout was messy and the shops looked tired. The one reason to come here is the brilliant Blackbird Baking Company. My heart is racing even as I type out these words. There is a more convenient downtown location in St Lawrence Market.
Apple Galette and Lemon Blueberry Scone, with the crust as crisp and the interior as soft in reality as it looks in the photos
One area I did like was the Distillery District, on account of there being many interesting shops and cafes. I love ice cream but Scooped was not open in the morning so we took ourselves off to Waterworks Food Hall to share two scoops after a ramen lunch. Toronto’s public transport system is marvellous and with the help of Citymapper, we managed to get everywhere without fuss.
I have not listed everything we ate in Toronto, or every place we visited. I can only say that with a bit of discernment, we did not have a bad meal on holiday. Toronto Cousin just sent me a photo of the 2-inch layer of fresh snow in his backyard, a reminder that we should stay put in London for the moment.
Finally, I did sneak one photo of the lobster dish at Uncle’s birthday dinner, when he was being ushered to give a speech and to receive a birthday certificate signed by Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada.
In the next post we go on a day trip to the world famous Niagara Falls.