Toronto's Ethnic Buffet

[ukw]

A US journalist's account of Toronto, from the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/tr...tml?ref=travel

When I tell my friends in Toronto how much I love their city, they often say, “Really?” I always assume they imagine I’m just trying to be gracious, or perhaps — with characteristic Canadian modesty — they’re reluctant to acknowledge how easy their city is to love. But they also have a great deal of justifiable civic pride, and a clear sense of why Toronto is such a special and unusual place to live and visit. There’s more to this understated city than many people might realize.

It’s a great walking town, and part of what makes it so much fun to explore is the range and variety of the neighborhoods in which the city takes pride, and which have resisted the homogenization that has occurred throughout so much of New York City — from Yorkville, with its fashionable shops and department stores, to Old Town, where you can find the St. Lawrence Market, an immense covered structure offering a huge selection of foods and crafts, and where, on Saturdays, local farmers sell their produce. Some of the neighborhoods are known for their architectural beauty: the charming Victorian houses along the tree-lined streets of Cabbagetown, originally a working-class Irish enclave; the equally attractive brick mansions and neo-Gothic cottages of the Annex, a district of artists, professors and students who attend the nearby University of Toronto; the brick rowhouses and manicured lawns of Roncesvalles and the mansions of Forest Hill.

...

As much as, if not more than, any North American city, Toronto celebrates its multicultural heritage. There is an online multicultural calendar devoted to listing the lectures, religious and national holidays, and street festivals sponsored by the city’s range of communities. Often, it strikes me that the city is more successfully integrated than the cities of its neighbor over the border. Of course, even the most naïve tourist has only to glance at the newspapers or catch a few minutes of the nightly TV news to learn that Toronto has its share of poverty, prejudice, gang violence and political scandal; my most recent visit there coincided with the embarrassing revelations and the furor over the drug use of the controversial mayor, Rob Ford. Some complain that Toronto is too proper, too predictable, too staid, that it lacks the joie de vivre of Montreal. But casual travelers and most longtime residents agree that the city’s pleasures outweigh its shortcomings, that its streets are clean and safe and that its people (2.6 million in Toronto; 5.6 million in the metropolitan area) are polite, pleasant and helpful in ways that can sometimes startle those of us who come from somewhere else.

At restaurants in Toronto, I notice racially and ethnically mixed groups of friends even more often than I do in New York neighborhoods celebrated for their diversity. I see a much wider variety of visitors to the city’s excellent museums: classes of children lying on the floor and drawing at the Royal Ontario Museum, which features stellar collections of Asian and Middle Eastern art and of Canadian painting, and at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where popular recent exhibitions have included shows of Ai Weiwei’s work and of ephemera connected with David Bowie’s career. Everywhere, glimpses of residents going about their daily routines — the Sikh policeman directing traffic, the Vietnamese and Filipino reporters broadcasting the TV news, novelists from the Caribbean reading their work at the city’s annual International Festival of Authors — testify to the welcome that Toronto has given the immigrants who have sought refuge here.

...

From there we went on to the Lahore Tikka House, where the tandoori oven turned out succulent kebabs (lamb, chicken and beef) and baby lamb chops, accompanied by perfectly cooked nan and a choice of biryanis and vegetable dishes. The food seemed closer to what I remember eating in northern India than to anything I’ve tried in Manhattan, or even in the Indian neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens.

Overall conclusion: Toronto gives the USA's NYC a run for its money in terms of authentic food, true integration, and true diversity.

[ue]

Are you sure you want to be throwing around such rosy articles of Toronto here?

Seriously, though, this was a great article and highlights one of the finest parts of Toronto - ethnic diversity. Great to see the city getting exposure for this on a well distributed paper like the NYT.

[New Brisavoine]

Originally Posted by ue

Are you sure you want to be throwing around such rosy articles of Toronto here?

As Robert Charlebois of Montréal used to say about Toronto in one of his songs: "mais si je me rappelle bien ça fermait un p'tit peu trop tôt."

PS: That's the song:

• Video Link

[mrnyc]

toronto stories always remind me of columbus, the booming toronto of ohio. relatively speaking.

[dc_denizen]

It's sad that Ukw is trapped in the crushing conformity and uniformity of Bethesda and DC and not the rainbow-hued ethnic buffet of Toronto and Mississauga.

[ukw]

Originally Posted by dc_denizen

It's sad that Ukw is trapped in the crushing conformity and uniformity of Bethesda and DC and not the rainbow-hued ethnic buffet of Toronto and Mississauga.

correct I am not where I want to be.

[MolsonExport]

It's all due to the pea meal bacon sandwich.

[isaidso]

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

It's all due to the pea meal bacon sandwich.

It's the maple infused horseradish that pulls it all together.

[vanatox]

There is a thread here discussing this article...Worth a look...

http://forum.skyscraperpage.com/showthread.php?t=210035

[sopas ej]

When I tell my friends in Toronto how much I love their city, they often say, “Really?” I always assume they imagine I’m just trying to be gracious, or perhaps — with characteristic Canadian modesty — they’re reluctant to acknowledge how easy their city is to love. But they also have a great deal of justifiable civic pride, and a clear sense of why Toronto is such a special and unusual place to live and visit. There’s more to this understated city than many people might realize.

It’s a great walking town, and part of what makes it so much fun to explore is the range and variety of the neighborhoods in which the city takes pride, and which have resisted the homogenization that has occurred throughout so much of New York City — from Yorkville, with its fashionable shops and department stores, to Old Town, where you can find the St. Lawrence Market, an immense covered structure offering a huge selection of foods and crafts, and where, on Saturdays, local farmers sell their produce. Some of the neighborhoods are known for their architectural beauty: the charming Victorian houses along the tree-lined streets of Cabbagetown, originally a working-class Irish enclave; the equally attractive brick mansions and neo-Gothic cottages of the Annex, a district of artists, professors and students who attend the nearby University of Toronto; the brick rowhouses and manicured lawns of Roncesvalles and the mansions of Forest Hill.

...

As much as, if not more than, any North American city, Toronto celebrates its multicultural heritage. There is an online multicultural calendar devoted to listing the lectures, religious and national holidays, and street festivals sponsored by the city’s range of communities. Often, it strikes me that the city is more successfully integrated than the cities of its neighbor over the border. Of course, even the most naïve tourist has only to glance at the newspapers or catch a few minutes of the nightly TV news to learn that Toronto has its share of poverty, prejudice, gang violence and political scandal; my most recent visit there coincided with the embarrassing revelations and the furor over the drug use of the controversial mayor, Rob Ford. Some complain that Toronto is too proper, too predictable, too staid, that it lacks the joie de vivre of Montreal. But casual travelers and most longtime residents agree that the city’s pleasures outweigh its shortcomings, that its streets are clean and safe and that its people (2.6 million in Toronto; 5.6 million in the metropolitan area) are polite, pleasant and helpful in ways that can sometimes startle those of us who come from somewhere else.

At restaurants in Toronto, I notice racially and ethnically mixed groups of friends even more often than I do in New York neighborhoods celebrated for their diversity. I see a much wider variety of visitors to the city’s excellent museums: classes of children lying on the floor and drawing at the Royal Ontario Museum, which features stellar collections of Asian and Middle Eastern art and of Canadian painting, and at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where popular recent exhibitions have included shows of Ai Weiwei’s work and of ephemera connected with David Bowie’s career. Everywhere, glimpses of residents going about their daily routines — the Sikh policeman directing traffic, the Vietnamese and Filipino reporters broadcasting the TV news, novelists from the Caribbean reading their work at the city’s annual International Festival of Authors — testify to the welcome that Toronto has given the immigrants who have sought refuge here.

...

From there we went on to the Lahore Tikka House, where the tandoori oven turned out succulent kebabs (lamb, chicken and beef) and baby lamb chops, accompanied by perfectly cooked nan and a choice of biryanis and vegetable dishes. The food seemed closer to what I remember eating in northern India than to anything I’ve tried in Manhattan, or even in the Indian neighborhood of Jackson Heights, Queens.

Hahaha! This Francine Prose woman has never been to Los Ángeles, perhaps. Maybe NYC isn't the "ethnic buffet" she wishes it was, but I think Los Ángeles could give Toronto a run for its money.

LA's public transit website; notice the other languages listed near the top:

metro.net

I was very surprised to see Toronto's transit website to be all in English, I was expecting it to at least be bilingual English/French.

[ue]

^ While Toronto has so many interesting neighbourhoods with unique shops, I do find it ironic that the neighbourhood they list right after proclaiming the city not an outdoor mall, Yorkville, is one of the few that act like an outdoor mall. Bloor St in Yorkville is often touted as Canada's 5th Avenue.

Originally Posted by sopas ej

Hahaha! This Francine Prose woman has never been to Los Ángeles, perhaps. Maybe NYC isn't the "ethnic buffet" she wishes it was, but I think Los Ángeles could give Toronto a run for its money.

LA's public transit website; notice the other languages listed near the top:

metro.net

I was very surprised to see Toronto's transit website to be all in English, I was expecting it to at least be bilingual English/French.

Yeah, well, I was surprised to hear Spanish on the intercom on the LA Metro only for key transfer points, and not all stations, considering the large Hispanic population in the city. I mean, even Portland's MAX is fully bilingual, English-Spanish, and it certainly doesn't have as many Spanish speakers as Los Angeles. You win some, you lose some.

I can tell you that, having been to both cities that, while LA is still a very diverse city, Toronto just exudes multiculturalism on a completely different level. And it isn't dominated so much by one particular minority ethnicity like Southern California is. Toronto is a city where you hear dozens of languages on the street all the time. You do hear get this on the streets of LA, but it isn't to the same extent as Toronto.

There's also something to be said for the racial harmony and ethnic mixing that occurs in Toronto moreso than in most US cities. But LA does bilingualism better than Toronto, I suppose. Of all the languages you hear on the streets of Toronto, Canada's other language, French, isn't one of them. There isn't much incentive for born and bred Torontonians to learn a second language either, like there is in LA with Spanish. Again, win some, lose some.

[Doady]

I think the problem with the way people see culture is they see it as homogeneous. But that is not true at all.

Cultures interact with other, borrow from each other, share things with each other, overlap with each other. Cultures are not discrete entities that developed in isolation from one another. And cultures are still developing, and constantly evolving.

Even defining a particular culture or nation, that is difficult. Everyone will have their own definition.

Cultures therefore are inherently multicultural to begin with. I think Canada did not delude itself into thinking that it could be a homogeneous nation, and was forced to confront this fact in large part due to Quebec, although ironically it is Quebec that has most obnoxious and discriminatory nationalist policies in Canada.

Nations are merely ideals, especially the idea of nation-state, where the boundaries of state and nation are one and the same. Unless the state completely isolates itself from the rest of the world, I don't see how it could be a nation. How more people are going to get killed and persecute for this goal of a nation-state? Let's not forget, genocide has happened in Canada too...

What the article describes about Toronto is a good example of the two-way relationship between immigrants and their "host" culture: immigrants borrow from Toronto's culture, and Toronto itself borrows from their cultures. I think this is an important lesson.

If you want new immigrants to be more "Canadian", then you also have to allow immigrants to contribute to Canadian culture and help shape and define Canadian culture, just like immigrants from Europe did decades and centuries ago. As I said, no cultures are static, cultures are always evolving. To expect culture to stay the same doesn't make sense.

So I think what the author is describing about Toronto is not unique to Toronto. But then again, the author never said it is either.

Originally Posted by sopas ej

Hahaha! This Francine Prose woman has never been to Los Ángeles, perhaps. Maybe NYC isn't the "ethnic buffet" she wishes it was, but I think Los Ángeles could give Toronto a run for its money.

LA's public transit website; notice the other languages listed near the top:

metro.net

I was very surprised to see Toronto's transit website to be all in English, I was expecting it to at least be bilingual English/French.

I'm not sure how the non-English languages options on LA's public transit website provides evidence about the level of integration and quality of food in LA. Perhaps you can explain it to us.

[miketoronto]

This article touches on one of Toronto's greatest assets.
Other cities may have diversity. But Toronto's diversity is on a whole other level than other places, and you can feel that when you go out eating in Toronto.

This is from the census, and covers the Toronto Metropolitan Area:

Population

Top Immigrant Populations:

South Asian: 833,085
Chinese: 531,635
Black: 397,175
Filipino: 230,075
Latin American: 117,005
West Asian: 96,650
Southeast Asian: 90,990
Arab: 74,990
Korean: 61,300
Japanese: 61,300


Top Ethnic Origins

English 777,110
Chinese 594,735
East Indian 572,250
Scottish 545,365
Irish 543,600
Italian 475,090
German 262,830
French 249,375
Filipino 246,345
Polish 214,455
Portuguese 196,975
Jamaican 177,305
Jewish 137,165
Ukrainian 130,350
Russian 118,090
Spanish 105,740
Sri Lankan 104,980
Dutch (Netherlands) 98,925

[jd3189]

It’s a great walking town, and part of what makes it so much fun to explore is the range and variety of the neighborhoods in which the city takes pride, and which have resisted the homogenization that has occurred throughout so much of New York City — from Yorkville, with its fashionable shops and department stores, to Old Town, where you can find the St. Lawrence Market, an immense covered structure offering a huge selection of foods and crafts, and where, on Saturdays, local farmers sell their produce. Some of the neighborhoods are known for their architectural beauty: the charming Victorian houses along the tree-lined streets of Cabbagetown, originally a working-class Irish enclave; the equally attractive brick mansions and neo-Gothic cottages of the Annex, a district of artists, professors and students who attend the nearby University of Toronto; the brick rowhouses and manicured lawns of Roncesvalles and the mansions of Forest Hill.

For those who are familiar with the Spike Lee thread, this is what I was talking about. Gentrification has been doing this to NYC. Hopefully the US can learn from Canada's example and Toronto find a better way to make the city nice for people again instead of making it bland and homogeneous like the suburbs.

[brickell]

Originally Posted by miketoronto

Top Immigrant Populations:

South Asian: 833,085
Chinese: 531,635
Black: 397,175
Filipino: 230,075
Latin American: 117,005
West Asian: 96,650
Southeast Asian: 90,990
Arab: 74,990
Korean: 61,300
Japanese: 61,300

Is Black a new country that I haven't heard of? Is it on the Black sea perhaps?

[dc_denizen]

You're right. LA can only offer an existence of stifling conformity and uniformity, compared to toronto.

Fyi, this is why the lady in "the hours" moved to toronto to be a librarian.

[ue]

Originally Posted by dc_denizen

You're right. LA can only offer an existence of stifling conformity and uniformity, compared to toronto.

Fyi, this is why the lady in "the hours" moved to toronto to be a librarian.

Why do you always have to question anything positive about Toronto? Do you have an unresolved issue with the city? I don't know anywhere in this thread where anyone has proclaimed LA to be a uniform city. It is anything but.

[inSaeculaSaeculorum]

Los Angeles' diversity equity doesn't match Toronto on paper, perhaps, but it's much more entrenched and goes back farther in time, and its metro needs to be accounted for rather than the city proper. Once you do that, you realize that Los Angeles has diversity in larger, more meaningful numbers, where the sheer population numbers results in minority ethnicities having real political power (asian, black and latino.) In fact, its so entrenched that if you're coming from guatemala or vietnam or whatever, immersion/assimilation is hardly necessary (their children will assimilate anyway) as these cultures have already been largely enmeshed in the metro's cultural fabric. That to me is a more important marker of diversity than having a "sikh policeman," or whatever this NYT author, whom is very much treating diversity as a novelty, observed. But yes Toronto has a Carribean dude reading literature at some place which is very cute and Toronto sounds absolutely lovely, don't get me wrong. Plus no city in north america does ethnic food better than Los Angeles largely because ethnic eateries here cater to their own population rather than whitewashing it for white americans.

[Nouvellecosse]

Originally Posted by inSaeculaSaeculorum

Los Angeles' diversity equity doesn't match Toronto on paper, perhaps, but it's much more entrenched and goes back farther in time, and its metro needs to be accounted for rather than the city proper. Once you do that, you realize that Los Angeles has diversity in larger, more meaningful numbers, where the sheer population numbers results in minority ethnicities having real political power (asian, black and latino.) In fact, its so entrenched that if you're coming from guatemala or vietnam or whatever, immersion/assimilation is hardly necessary (their children will assimilate anyway) as these cultures have already been largely enmeshed in the metro's cultural fabric. That to me is a more important marker of diversity than having a "sikh policeman," or whatever this NYT author, whom is very much treating diversity as a novelty, observed. But yes Toronto has a Carribean dude reading literature at some place which is very cute and Toronto sounds absolutely lovely, don't get me wrong. Plus no city in north america does ethnic food better than Los Angeles largely because ethnic eateries here cater to their own population rather than whitewashing it for white americans.

The author is commenting on the forms of diversity that are the most visible and easily recognised by a casual, outside observer. That doesn't mean that these most visible types of diversity characterised by more recent immigrants is all the exists there. It isn't. The diversity is extremely entrenched and although I can't personally comment on how it compares to LA, I can comment on Toronto and diversity there certainly exists in the ways you describe.

In fact, my mother and uncle have both lived there decades ago and often describe their time in Toronto (where I was born). She moved there in '65. The major defining characteristic at that time was the diversity and the ethnic neighbourhoods with not only the typical ones like Chinatown, but also Italian, Portuguese, Jewish, Korean etc. and there were numerous ethnicities without defined districts as well. These groups were well established at that time. This is not something that happened overnight.

[isaidso]

Originally Posted by inSaeculaSaeculorum

Los Angeles' diversity equity doesn't match Toronto on paper, perhaps, but it's much more entrenched and goes back farther in time, and its metro needs to be accounted for rather than the city proper.

There seems to be an entrenched American perception that immigration in Toronto (and Canada) is more recent than the corresponding immigration to the United States. You realize both nations were built by immigration and settled at the same time? Might it surprise you that the first Chinese migration to this continent was to Canada (1788) and not the United States?

Sure Canada's first wave of immigrants was European followed by Asian, but the same is true of the US. The African wave came third with the most recent being latin American. Latin Americans in Canada are the only immigrant group that are less entrenched. Nova Scotia's African population have been there for over 200 years. They started arriving in the 18th century.

Btw, Toronto's immigrant populations are spread throughout metro, out to Oshawa in the east, and Hamilton to the west. Many of the areas with the highest % foreign born are on the perimeter: Markham, Brampton, Woodbridge, etc. Some of these places are pushing 70% foreign born.