Monday, December 29th

Up betimes and out on a Monday between Christmas and New Years to see two lovely American people from Atlanta who are on a mini break and have requested a walking culinary tour. This is hard on Mondays, because the St. Lawrence Market is closed and you never quite know which businesses in the city are going to be closed for a cheeky week off. Also, there’s a shrimp allergy.

That said, I sort of enjoy the challenge. Toronto has so many good food options that it is practically impossible to fail to make people happy. With the cold, you can sell the PATH as a feature rather than a bug, and the city’s food halls are good enough that you can use them as waypoints to warm up. She’s never had poutine and apparently jerk chicken isn’t much of a thing in Georgia, so Rasta Pasta goes down a treat. Throw in a final stop at Wanda’s Pie in the Sky, and everybody is full of great food and sugar and a small amount of alcohol.

My philosophy on these tours is that I want to be a good ambassador for the city, maybe explain how everything works if possible, act as a low level concierge to get them where they should go based on their tastes. At Sanagan’s they are fascinated by scotch eggs, so I send them a couple blocks from their hotel to the Queen and Beaver. Happy people. I do feel weird about drinking a beer before noon, but these folks are on vacation and you’re their short term friend. He went with Dominion City Sunsplit. She went with an autumnal cocktail with maple in it. I went with Common Good’s Ronin Rice Lager, which will make Grover happy.

I stop by Burdock’s Kensington location to talk to JENKINSON! I refer to John that way because of the Mitchell and Webb skits called Get Me Hennimore, which feature a hapless sales assistant whose manager gives him convoluted instruction and who is always set up to fail by circumstance. John is extremely competent and holds a PhD. He bears no real similarity to Hennimore, but the cadence of his name tickles my brain in a particular way and here we are. We schedule some time later in the month to talk about Burdock’s rather dramatic increase in presence and reputation over the last few years.

It’s my last shift in the booth, and mercifully, the music has stopped being Christmas music. During the shutdown at 9 PM, I’ve never been happier to hear the opening strains of Pink Pony Club. I’m not great during December because of the dark and I threw out my lower back at some point during the early days of the booth. I’m going to be glad to be out of the cold. 

Tuesday, December 30th

I am finally on what amounts to a Christmas break. Because of the unexpected amount of tourism that had been booked during the break, there is even enough money to contemplate some upgrades around the house. Frankly, having held at least fifteen different jobs during the year, there has been enough excitement. I drink coffee and eat salad and remain hydrated. Not every day should be a roller coaster.

It emerges that Goose Island’s Toronto location is going to close. I suspect a lot of people didn’t realize it was still open. I have mixed feelings. Less corporate money is a sign of the times, and honestly, Goose IPA is once again good as they seem to have reverted to the original recipe or at least made it more West Coast. The brewer who has been working there has been doing good work and periodically used Ontario hops, which is more than you can say for most Ontario breweries. That said, wouldn’t you rather spend the money on something local? It is not the kind of news that is going to inspire think pieces in this climate. Just another victim. 

Wednesday, December 31st

I’m generally mindful of the fact that people are complaining of their grocery budgets. Personally, I’m lucky that I can cook and while there is money kicking around, once you’ve been in the position of having to make do, it’s very hard to let go of the sense of thrift that accompanies the position. Having pointed out on social media that the scrounging trifecta is in play (day before a statutory holiday, day before flyer day, post Christmas period), I’m off for a scrounge. 

I find the food discourse online fascinating. Inflation and shrinkflation are bummers, certainly, but I’ve not actually been in a position where I set a menu for the week and then shop towards it since I became a writer. There’s too much variability in income for that kind of planning, especially with my bar tab in play (much reduced these days). It’s interesting to watch middle class people who have cobbled together bits and pieces of information deal with the disruption to their preferences. Were people actually getting through a pound of raspberries on a routine basis? Here are some examples of the kind of things I mean:

Which oil should I use and is seed oil bad and why is avocado oil so expensive? How many grams of protein do you need a day? Are eggs good or bad? Is the organic version worth more? Is the rotisserie chicken good for you or bad for you? You have to wash your rice unless you don’t. How many grams of fibre should you eat a day? Is fruit just empty sugar calories? Maybe diet soda is bad for you or possibly not? Inflammation is a thing, probably! Milk is bad because cows are bad, so I’ll drink almond milk which has turned California into a desert. Also, why is beef expensive now? Does best before mean worst after?

It’s almost as though it’s intentionally obfuscatory. Writing about beer, especially in the mid 2010’s, I found that my colleagues, especially the married ones, usually had more household budget for ingredients. David Ort had a sous vide for goodness sake, and wrote a pretty good cookbook with it. When you consider that I was able to put together a public facing beer and food pairing course at a collegiate level, you might marvel a bit at the absolute resource to kill ratio I manage to achieve on an ongoing basis. If I had money, I’d be dangerous. I have a bad tendency to balance the equation with time.

Grass fed ground beef is somehow on sale for 3.88 at the Loblaws at Bayview and Moore, and there’s some decent looking Tilapia at significant markdown. The Loblaws at St. Clair has Shropshire Blue and Lavender and Honey Goat’s Cheese marked down. The Sobeys across the street is basically paying me to haul away chicken thighs. There’s protein for weeks in the freezer. Is this a good use of my time? At this point, I just view it as a hobby. I periodically have to be talked out of buying a remaindered spiral cut ham. Eternity can be measured in ham.

Thursday, January 1st

It’s a new year and I decide to upgrade the mattress, since the old one is eight years old and that lower back injury from the booth is nagging at me. It has gotten to the point where the mattress sags and you begin to think you have sciatica when really you’re just stiff. The 11.5” Sealy Eurotop will arrive in the morning. People make New Year’s Resolutions. You don’t have to think about sleeping better; you can just decide to fix the problem. 

Friday, January 2nd

It’s not immediately obvious to people, but in addition to being large, I’m semi-professionally burly. During the pandemic I spent about four years as Head Porter at The Symes event space over in The Junction. I had gotten to the point where I was moving hundred pound stacks of chairs for several hours at a time. Sometimes, towards the end I didn’t use a dolly, just hoisted them as a farmer’s walk. I was setting up eight foot wooden harvest tables by myself after carrying them across the room the length of a football field two at a time. Brute force is almost never the answer, but if you know about leverage, you can astound people. 

I think when I was lifting heavy in my 20’s, I was up to 10×330 on deadlifts. I never thought about a PR lift because that’s how you get hurt, although I did leg press half a ton. I was nerdy enough to calculate my Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2nd Edition bend bars lift gates, which put me at 18/65. Part of me wants to get back to the gym to give that scoundrel Don Tse a run for his money.

Sometimes, if I’m hoisting mattresses into the skip or flinging stolid objects about, people look at me as though I shouldn’t be able to do that. It’s good fun manhandling a large piece of furniture. Especially if you’re doing intellectual work, it’s good to remind yourself you exist in physical space. 

The new mattress pretty much immediately works towards fixing the lower back stiffness and I suspect that within about a week, I’ll be moving around without grumbling quite as much.

Saturday, January 3rd

Prompted by the dispiriting news on America’s illegal tampering with Venezuela, Robin gets in touch to see if I would like to go for tacos at Eastbound. Although we don’t see each other very much these days because we’re working on separate projects, it’s always fun to hang out. People still seem to want the podcast back. It seems to be a condition of hanging out that beer should be involved and this means that hanging out can begin to be expensive, not to mention catastrophic to the next day’s productivity.

Eastbound still has their Imperial Belgian Wit on (not to mention the best ever version of their Base Camp Saison), and with tacos on board the crawl progresses to the West Cork for Guinness, Avling for a Dark Lager and Raspberry Blast respectively, and Rorschach for a laugh. Matt Reiner is on site (we’re not sure he ever leaves the building), and we get to try a Chimichurri flavoured Dark Lager. Novelty gives way to Rorschach’s new Goodness Stout and an Irish Spice Bag, both of which I heartily recommend. I think they’re making the curry sauce in house and I wonder if there’s a slightly sour note to it that’s a little calamansi. 

Rorschach is typically underrated as a brewery, as a kitchen, and as a neighbourhood hang out. You should go if you haven’t. Matt once dropped in conversation that their pizza dough starter has yeast that was harvested from a Saison. They haven’t made Saison in five years, so that starter has been cooking the whole time. That takes some doing.

On the way home, we hit Super Bargain, one of Robin’s neighbourhood hangouts, where the people of Cabbagetown still drink Labatt 50. So much for Dry January. I am too old for last call and the promise of a comfortable bed wins out. Eventually you live long enough to be your own chaperone. 

Sunday, January 4th

Slept in. Caught up on Fallout Season 2.