July, 2005

Dear read­ers, Toronto friends and my beloved Kens­ing­ton Mar­ket fam­ily, this is not goodbye.

My daugh­ter Ruthie is leav­ing home to study at McGill and it’s time for both of us to leave the nest. Although I’m mov­ing soon to the beau­ti­ful Ontario town of Strat­ford after many years of liv­ing in this city’s best neigh­bour­hood, I’ll be back.

I’m tak­ing the sum­mer off to set­tle into my new home. That’ll be no mean feat hav­ing spent 25 happy years in my lov­ingly restored Vic­to­rian row house on one of the busiest streets in the heart of Kens­ing­ton. But I plan to visit my one-of-a-kind for­mer ‘hood, eagerly and often.

After 16 years of writ­ing about food for this news­pa­per, my col­umn will re-appear in these pages in Sep­tem­ber. As usual, it will be a place to share my undy­ing pas­sion for food and cooking.

It was the lat­ter, along with a life-long search for roots and that elu­sive thing called home, that drew me to Kens­ing­ton – Canada’s most orig­i­nal, still flour­ish­ing, fiercely feisty out­door mar­ket — in the late 1970s, a few years after arriv­ing here via North Bay, Edmon­ton, Alberta, and Lon­don, Eng­land, where I spent 15 for­ma­tive years.

It’s tough to find roots and home when you’ve been raised in a peri­patetic, sec­u­lar Jew­ish fam­ily that stands out like a loaf of car­away rye in a white-bread, white-collar North Lon­don sub­urb in the 1950s and ‘60s.

It’s even trick­ier to grasp those con­cepts when your father dis­owns his rough-and-tough Mon­treal fam­ily and your mother is a holo­caust refugee with almost no sur­viv­ing relatives.

As my brother Eric says suc­cinctly: “We’re wan­der­ing Jews.”

Enter Kens­ing­ton: an eclec­tic eth­nic mix of mer­chants housed in wall-to-wall shops and eater­ies inter­spersed by res­i­dents of every age, shape and colour.

It’s a wild and whacky mish-mosh of tumble-down build­ings, hand-scrawled signs, gen­tri­fied houses, noisy traf­fic and food smells of every kind.

These few densely pop­u­lated blocks have been a wel­com­ing home to waves of immi­grants since fledg­ling days a cen­tury ago when this was called the Jew­ish Market.

Today, Kens­ing­ton is a micro­cosm of cos­mopoli­tan Toronto: Caribbean gin­ger beer meets New Age head-shop meets fair trade cof­fee meets Por­tuguese chorizo, vegan muffins, Chilean empanadas and vin­tage clothes.

And it’s always in a state of flux. Dur­ing the two weeks it took to com­pile this guide, two eater­ies opened and my favourite Per­sian food shop Alvand (source of the ulti­mate lime-soaked pis­ta­chio) closed.

What bet­ter place for a once root­less, food-loving bohemian like me to find both fam­ily and home.

Like any fam­ily, my adopted one has its ups and downs, its affec­tions and feuds, its laugh­ter and its tears. This vibrant com­mu­nity is relent­lessly real and never dull.

Take the time in the 1980s when a thank­fully short-lived bar a few doors from my house attracted a ques­tion­able clien­tele. One night, I was awak­ened by the yelling of a dis­sat­is­fied cus­tomer who promptly drove his car down some steps and through that establishment’s front door.

Like any fam­ily, we some­times disagree.

Many, opposed to the snazzy Fresh-Mart super­mar­ket which opened in a for­mer cloth­ing store some months ago, call it “cor­po­rate” and “not a Mar­ket place.”

Kens­ing­ton has been evolv­ing since its incep­tion and is going through rapid change as I write. Peo­ple here have diverse rea­sons for oppos­ing Fresh-Mart. Most, like me, feel this store is sim­ply out of place and that the uni­verse will unfold as it should and always does in Kensington.

As in any good fam­ily, if you’re in cri­sis, help is at hand.

My friend Joe Fre­itas of the inim­itable housewares/clothing empo­rium Sas­mart has fixed a leak in my gar­den house, replaced fuses and sup­plied plates at a moment’s notice for food pho­tos to accom­pany this column.

Some years ago, when my kitchen win­dow mys­te­ri­ously fell out of its frame with a huge crash, I ran across the street to the amaz­ing Por­tuguese restau­rant Amadeu’s. Lovely Chris Vitorino, son-in-law of own­ers Celeste and Amadeu Goncalves, didn’t miss a beat. We rushed back to my house, he fixed the prob­lem and made me promise to always call in an emer­gency. Of course, I did.

In Sep­tem­ber, 2003, Chris died of a rare blood dis­ease at the age of 29. My Mar­ket fam­ily mourned and, at the nearby funeral home, we gath­ered to con­sole each other and say our heart­break­ing goodbyes.

Like any fam­ily worth its salt, we know how to have fun.

Where else would a statue of Al Wax­man, located in Belle­vue Square Park, be dressed in a hand-knitted scar­let hat and scarf in the thick of win­ter and, more recently, a black vel­vet yarmulka stud­ded with shiny beads?

Walk through Kens­ing­ton Mar­ket at twi­light when mer­chants kib­itz with each other as they sweep the side­walk and you’ll feel the magic.

This is a bit­ter­sweet time for me but I know I’m going to be missed by the cher­ished fam­ily I’ll be missing.

The other day, I dropped by “Casa” – our affec­tion­ate nick­name for the bulk food-cum cof­fee shop Casa Acore­ana that’s this Market’s hub – for my morn­ing espresso.

“I haven’t been able to get out for a smoke it’s so busy,” grum­bled Ossie, sec­ond eldest of the four won­der­ful Pavao broth­ers whose father Luis opened this won­drous place as a tiny gro­cery store 40 years ago.

“So when are you leav­ing?” he con­tin­ued brusquely, not look­ing up as he poured cof­fee into my usual small blue cup. “In mid-July,” I answered warily.

“You’d bet­ter come by here for a hug before you go,” came the firm reply.

That’s my Kens­ing­ton Mar­ket fam­ily: tough on the out­side but irre­sistibly ten­der at heart.