Bad Accent

I have a fond memory of eating my first Turducken at Southern Accent. So when I saw that this venerable restaurant has set up shop at College and Ossington, after the Honest Ed's building is slated for razing, I wanted to drop by. On Tuesday, I finally made a visit after a yoga class.

Though the Summerlicious festival was over for this year, they still offered the $28 prix fixe. Since it was a few bucks cheaper than the items separately, I gave in to the sales pitch. In a nutshell, the 3-course meal was the worse I've had in quite a while. It was an edible and filling dinner. But in no way would I describe this as restaurant-quality food.

Least offensive was the chilled soup. Essentially, it was bland tomato soup. Given that something like a watermelon gazpacho with herbs isn't hard to make, this was just lazy cooking. The Cajun jambalaya was a mess. The rice was mushy and heavy, with tasteless shrimp and grassy collard greens. In contrast, the tomato-based sauce was so overpowering you can't taste the sausage or anything else. Even the root-beer float was a joke. The vanilla scoop tasted like the $5 2-gallon no-name ice cream you buy at No Frills. Even then, I wouldn't serve it still embedded with solid chunks of ice.

Three Muses

Saturday night, I went to an early show at the Burdock. Because of my trek from The Beaches area, traffic, and a quick dinner, I arrived at the tail end of opener's Mark Fossen set. After a short break, The O'Pears (Meg Contini, Jill Harris, Lydia Persaud) took the stage. This trio didn't have a backing band tonight, though they did play various instruments including ukulele and guitar.

As such, they aren't strictly an a capella band. Still, the most obvious thing about these singers were their harmonies. Most pop songs may have some backing vocals on the chorus. The O'Pears' folk-tinged numbers have 3-part lines interwoven throughout. Even the new songs, which had more pop sensibilities, emphasized their resonant vocals. Their music left the packed room in breathless silence, although whoops of delight did break out.

Persaud mentioned that this was their 5th anniversary as a band. It's amazing they haven't had more mainstream success given their advantages. In addition to their voices, to put it bluntly, these are young, photogenic, quite attractive women. Also, media-friendly personalities can be fleshed out without too much embellishment: the sexy one, the cute one, the sassy one. They just need a more connected agent and a deliberate strategy of creating one or two cross-over pop hits.

Beach Ball

I almost missed Retrocity's 80s a cappella show at The Beaches Jazz Festival on Saturday afternoon because of numerous traffic delays. With summer construction, subway closure for system upgrade, and other head-aches, taking transit to the East end was a nightmare. However, it gave me a chance to see what's been happening in other parts of Toronto that I don't visit that often.

Parts of Queen St. E have completely gentrified, especially starting from just over the bridge at the DVP all the way to The Beaches. The section between there and Yonge St. was an odd mix of new development and run-down buildings, indigents and chi-chi pedestrians.

Retrocity's audience is, seemingly, skewing older and older with each show. On the other hand, the 80s is more than 30 years ago now. As always, they have a wonderful variety of arrangements of tunes. One negative was the amount of time doing soundcheck. They had time to do this before their show. It sounded like the sound-tech was fairly green as most of the instructions came from band members. On the other hand, when you have so accomplished singers, you listen to them when they tell you the feedback is coming from the 80 Hz range.

Eastern Hoe-down

I missed opener The Pick Brothers Band at Yonge-Dundas Square for Indie Friday because I was scarfing down some BBQ. However, I arrived in time for head-liner Ria Mae. This Halifax native (though currently residing Montreal) has recently changed her sound from its indie vibe to more of a pop sound. As an out queer artist, she had a good following of young queer kids cheering her in the front row.

The sound was worse than usual at this venue. Tonight, it was mostly an indifferent tech crew who seemed to ignore what was going on on stage. Several times, Mae had to wave to get their attention. When she switched to her guitar for some older tunes from her indie days, its contribution was barely audible. Mae reminded me of Tegan and Sara, queer artists who have embraced more pop. Which is to say, without their instruments, they are all quite awkward dancers with diffident stage presence. She can write catchy tunes though from Clothes Off to Bend. At the end of the show, I noticed several curious bros who were impressed enough with her dance numbers to search for her name on the advertising billboard.

I See Piggy

On a beautiful Friday evening, I headed to Dundas St. W around Ossington St. There were now, of course, so many choices in the area. I decided to try a BBQ place called Smoke Signals. It was early yet so I had my choice of seats. Glancing over the 1 page menu, I picked the brisket platter ($22). It came on a cafeteria tray my dinner of coleslaw, potato salad, pickles, and 0.5 lb of brisket. Despite the deliberately utilitarian plating, it was an excellent dinner with nice flavours. I liked the little touches such as potato chips in the salad for the crunch and dialing back the acidity from the cole slaw. I did not ask for any BBQ sauce but I did get a nice spicy hot sauce. The brisket was tender and fatty enough to stand on its own. However, if you pick the lean option, you may want to get some sauce. It was an enormous meal, but hopefully I can burn some of it off as I plan to go to an outdoor concert that promises some dance-able music.

Fast Bass

Small, to-go sushi counters are a native part of the fast-food scene as much as sandwiches and soups. There have been 2 in my building. But some are slightly better than others. I found one on my lunch excursions at Sheppard and Warden. Mika Sushi is primarily a take-out place with only a two-seat table and another spot by the window if you want to eat there. The rolls are pre-packaged though freshly made. With the amount of traffic going through, at least around lunch-time, the containers probably aren't sitting there all there.

I actually got a vegetarian set for $11.99. As such, I got fresh made rolls of vegetarian dragon rolls, spicy crispy roll, and tofu pockets. The portions were quite large and I was happy with the flavour. It also came with your typical desultory miso soup and salad.

On another day, I headed in the opposite direction to Yonge and Sheppard. Here was a cluster of small eateries. I opted for the Buddha Bowl ($10.99). It's not really vegetarian as there is white tuna in the poké dish. However, it was a nice mix of greens, brown and white rice and other ingredients. The fish was tastier than the last poké I had from Poke Guys near City Hall.

A Bit Sketchy

The Toronto Fringe Festival expanded this year to include The Theatre Centre, The Great Hall, and several site-specific locations. I only had a chance to see one show this year, an early afternoon spot at the Phelan Playhouse with sketch troupe Life's A Betch. As a play on the title (ie, beach), a soft instrumental version of Girl From Ipanema played before the show. The foursome began by walking down the center aisle as chanting monks. But as it was a Michael Jackson pop song, one of them eventually sang out the words, breaking their vows of silence. This gag would return several times throughout the set. Another one involved oblivious elites blithely going on with their meal on the sinking Titanic. Yet another had a video "unboxer" attempting to open a new iPhone.

Unfortunately, both the recurring sketches and most of the one-offs were generally weak. There were two stand-outs for me. The first was an awkward funeral scene, the awkwardness being that mom didn't actually die, leading to increasingly absurd encounters with grieving visitors. The second was a community production of Grease, where the director's attempt to try and get the performers to ad-lib/scat over some shoo-be-dos and ram-a-lams resulted in some worrisome Freudian slips.

Rain Dance

The sky was pouring Friday afternoon as I was heading home from work. I really wanted to see Tanika Charles play a free show at the Harbourfront outdoor stage. Finally, it stopped raining though the sky was still a dark gray. I took a chance and headed down to the lake. Luckily, the rain held off the rest of the night and the show wasn't canceled.

Ms. Charles was her usual high-energy self and led the crowd through several funky numbers. Most were preceded by a short, funny story about their origins. Both the songs and stories detailed a rather eventful romantic life but they make great dance songs including Soul Run and Endless Chain. Her "working for the man" song Parkdale got cheers from locals who know the area quite well. But I missed her women back-up singers. Though her band covered well, a man singing falsetto didn't have the same R'n'B group vibe. And they certainly didn't do any of the Supremes-style choreography.

Funky Fruit

With the holiday week-end over, I thought I needed an early pick-me-up. So Tuesday afternoon, I headed over to Sheppard and Yonge, which I had previously thought was a wasteland of cars and condos. And although that was mostly true, they have lured in a few restaurants at ground level to give the street some interest.

One of which was the tiny HCafé, an offshoot of Uncle Tetsu. No surprise that they had Japanese cheesecake here, though obviously not made on site. But since their specialty was dessert there was a wide variety of ice cream, several types of madeleine (which I tried a few weeks later), the sticky dough dessert mochi, and Daifuku fruit mochi.

Each mochi came in different sizes, depending on the fruit inside. So $3.55 got you either 4 little blueberry ones, a large strawberry or kiwi, or 2 medium peach. The small blueberries were good, though too small to have any filling. The best was the peach, which lent a wonderful perfume to the bean paste. The strawberry was disappointing, perhaps because they used the bloated but bland sort you find in most grocery stores. The kiwi didn't add much except a lot of juice.

Walking on Sunshine (and Rain)

This year, due to the 150th anniversary of its founding, Canada Day's celebrations were larger than usual. On Saturday, given all the various sites around Toronto, I decided to check out the activities at Humber Bay Park. But it would be fun to get there by walking along the lake.

So I started my 10 km stroll at Harbourfront. The area was packed, though it probably wasn't just due to the long week-end. A lot of folks were there to see the giant rubber duck floating by the dock, a $150,000 rental that got some people riled up. But it was all grinning faces today as everyone took selfies near the mallard. This was the idealized Canada: happy, diverse people mingling in cheerful peace.

Between Harbourfront and Roncesvalles, the walk was hit and miss. There were some quiet gems including a quiet, peaceful park at Bathurst. But mostly you were blocked off from the lake by either industrial and municipal sites or private docks and waterfront clubs. This was the preserve of white money, leaving the rest of us the roaring traffic of Lakeshore Boulevard.

The view brightened up considerably after Roncy. The lake was available again and groups of mostly visible minorities were having picnics or playing in the park. This was the mirror image of The Beaches neighbourhood in the east, where close to 90% are white. But the sand wasn't nearly as nice. Sights along the way: Sunnyside café, a park where muscular men were lifting not iron but their own weights in various gymnastics/acro exercises, a pedestrian bridge offering a soaring view of downtown.

As I finally approached Humber Bay Park, the sky darkened. It was partly due to the rather frightening proliferation of densely packed condo towers, but mostly from the approaching storm. So I made a rather quick pass through the butterfly sanctuary. The rain came pouring down and I heard one song from Sate before they shut down due to fear of lightning. With no end in sight from the wind and water, myself and numerous others decided to head home. In my case, a transit shuttle heading to Old Mill station that meandered through some West-end neighbourhoods.