Indholdsfortegnelse for February 2022 i Toronto Life

DIGITAL EDITION FREE FOR PRINT SUBSCRIBERS Your Toronto Life subscription now includes free access to the Toronto Life and FASHION digital editions. In your digital newsstand store, search “toronto life” and “fashion magazine,” download/open the apps and follow the prompts. SUBSCRIPTION EXPIRY To find out when your current subscription expires, check the mailing label. BILLING AND RENEWAL NOTICE Invoice and renewal notices are printed one week before they are mailed to you. With delivery time, it’s possible that your payment or renewal order will cross in the mail with our invoice or renewal notice. FRAGRANCE-FREE ISSUES Some issues of Toronto Life include perfume strips. If you prefer to receive your copy of the magazine without perfume strips, please write to us at the address listed below. MAIL PREFERENCE On occasion,…

The absolute worst thing about working in an office, pre-pandemic, was the commute. I can still remember the slog of trying to get to and from work in a rush-hour subway car, the unpleasant experience of being squished in so tight I couldn’t even reach for my phone in my pocket. I vividly remember the disappointment of standing on a platform at Bloor-Yonge station when a car would pull up too packed for anyone else to squeeze on. For years, I had heard vague rumblings about the city’s plans to build another subway line to ease the pressure on the system created by riders like me. The new line was going to be called, appropriately enough, the downtown relief line. It sounded marvellous: maps showed how it would travel under…

You spent the holidays recovering from Covid. How are you feeling now? I’m fine. I had a minor cough but no flu symptoms. I was relegated to the basement but my family supplied me with food, so I was well cared for and able to work throughout. Do you know how you were exposed? No, but I’m out every day and evening meeting with members of the community, so it could have been anywhere. We’ve also had a number of outbreaks in the division. I was supposed to have my granddaughters one weekend in December, so I figured I’d get tested, and lo and behold. How has Omicron changed your day-to-day schedule? It’s meant I’m back to daily meetings with the mayor, the chief medical officer of health, Chief Pegg…

$149 Retail price for “the Sheriff,” a 24-inch “cockuterie” board made by a Toronto company. Other sizes include the 14-inch “Deputy” and eight-inch “Stocking Stuffer.” $182,430 Cost of Prince Harry’s security detail (courtesy of Canadian taxpayers) during his visits to Toronto in 2017 and 2018, per a CBC report. Harry met with the PM and toured the CN Tower. $2,500,000 Price tag for digging up the cremated remains of roughly 500 people at St. James’ Cemetery on Parliament Street. The cemetery embarked on the project to stabilize a disintegrating slope on the south side of the Rosedale Valley. $43,000,000 Asking price for Taylor Thomson’s Bel-Air mansion. The billionaire heiress (sister of David, daughter of Kenneth) listed it after buying a $49-million Santa Monica estate from Vice co-founder Shane Smith. $924,000,000…

CREATED FOR Registering for your wedding is one of the most fun parts of being engaged, but it can also be overwhelming with so many products to choose from. We found four local personalities with amazing taste to share their ultimate picks for a registry that will help you create the newlywed home and lifestyle of your dreams. Deddy “Oswald” Ruddock Meet Deddy “Oswald” Ruddock, a loving father and chef who has made delicious home cooking easy and accessible via the Deddy’s Kitchen YouTube channel. Amassing over 250,000 subscribers in just over a year, Deddy has widely shared his favourite Jamaican meals and his message of love with the world. “Everyone loves a great home-cooked meal, but it starts first with love and lots of patience,” he says. His five…

1 Famiglia Baldassarre’s tortelli di zucca mantovani People stand in line for an hour or more during the week to get a taste of Leandro Baldassarre’s incredible pastas. The menu changes daily, but this seasonal staple is so popular that it spawned its own line of hoodies adorned with the name of the dish. Perfect pockets of handmade pasta are stuffed with squash or pumpkin and crushed amaretti cookies, then tossed in a butter sauce and flicked with parm to balance all the sweetness. Yes, it’s elusive, but the payoff is worth it. (And you might even score some merch while you’re at it.) $18. 122 Geary Ave., famigliabaldassarre.com 2 Sugo’s spaghetti For a classically comforting, back-to-basics binge—and over the past couple of years, that’s where our heads have been at—there’s the…

CREATED FOR WORLD CLASS CANADA ON NOVEMBER 23, Toronto Life hosted a glitzy party to celebrate its annual list of the city’s most influential people. Guests gathered inside Yorkville’s Harry Rosen to fête the 50 prominent Torontonians featured in the December issue. Guests ascended an escalator to the party on the upper two floors of Harry Rosen on Bloor Street, where guests were treated to passed hors d’oeuvres and mixed drinks. Partygoers could choose from a list of signature cocktails at the World Class bar, which featured premium brands like Ketel One Vodka, Tanqueray No. Ten Gin, Don Julio Blanco Tequila, and Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch Whisky. Guinness and Harp were also served on site from a dedicated booth neatly tucked beside the DJ. Here are some of the signature…

EGO BOOST START The TSX dips by more than two per cent—its biggest daily drop in the past year—as the arrival of Omicron spooks investors. Kal Penn, of Harold and Kumar fame, is tapped to play the role of Raptors superfan Nav Bhatia in an upcoming biopic. Stoners and basketball fans rejoice. An altercation at a CFL game prompts one Argo to jump into the stands and punch a Ticats fan, igniting an all-out brawl. The New York Post documents the skirmish. Ontario passes the Working for Workers Act, making it illegal for bosses to contact their employees outside of operating hours. John Mulaney, the SNL alumnus notorious for cancelling his Toronto shows, announces a new tour with stops pretty much everywhere except for… you guessed it. Twitter erupts with…

MARK HLADY founder and CEO of TriplePlay, an app for remote social events COMPANY HQ: Remote FOUNDED: 2020 EMPLOYEES: 8 HOW MUCH YOU RAISED INITIALLY: “$1 million in pre-seed investments. It went toward paying for servers and hiring a few employees. Me and my co-founder, Yuri Takhteyev, are both engineers, so we built the app ourselves.” YOUR TURNING POINT: “In the fall of 2020, when TriplePlay was in its early stages, we sent it out to local businesses, tech companies and non-profits. The feedback was really positive. A bunch of users said being on the app was the first time they’d felt part of a community since the pandemic started. From there, the company grew organically.” YOUR BIG-TIME BACKERS: “A bunch of prominent angels and VC firms in North America,…

During the week, Andrea Ciccone and 2 her husband, Ben Leoni, live in a two-bedroom condo in Liberty Village, which they bought for $605,000 in 2014. She’s a regional sales manager at Vivier Pharma and he’s the owner of a product design company. Andrea and Ben are pretty outdoorsy: they enjoy hiking, biking and snowboarding, and for years they’d load their gear onto the car most weekends and hightail it to Tobermory, Old Baldy or Blue Mountain. Eventually, spending more than five hours in the car for a day’s adventure got exhausting. They started chalet shopping and, in February of 2017, found a three-bedroom 1950s fixer-upper located next to a ski club in Beaver Valley, listed for $289,000. They bought at asking and embarked on a full-scale, four-year gut renovation,…

Under the Influence This year’s list of the most influential Torontonians hit with a bang. Our number-one choice was not a single person but a huge network of tech-savvy Good Samaritans who rescued us from the province’s bungled vaccine rollout, and readers were verklempt. “Helluva job!” “Order of Canada!!” and “Is there a Nobel Prize for this???” were a few of the comments. “Vax Hunters is how I was able to secure appointments for my elderly father, myself and my senior neighbours (who had no access to the internet). They’re a stellar example of what can happen if people come together for the greater good. Thank you isn’t enough.” —@Baciandrio, Twitter “Read Jason McBride in Toronto Life on how Vax Hunters made sure we got a shot. Let us see…

Well, it happened again. We knew that case counts were rising, that the race to beat the fourth wave was a losing bet, with little glimmers of hope vanquished by Premier Ford’s announcement of another shutdown. Yet Omicron still felt like the ultimate betrayal, especially among the triple-jabbed and perma-masked who’ve adopted conscientiousness as both a defence and coping mechanism. Torontonians once again did their bit, lining up on frozen streets, waiting for booster shots. That collective response should give us something to feel good about. We’ve proven we’ll do whatever it takes to kick Covid to the curb. “All the marijuana charges we laid back then seem ludicrous now”—Police chief James Ramer, p.22…

My husband and I are having a birthday party for our 10-year-old daughter, so we asked each parent to show us proof of their kid’s vaccination. In the end, three families sent us a joint email saying their children wouldn’t be able to attend unless we ditched the vax rule. We want to protect everyone’s health, but we don’t want to sabotage our daughter’s party. What should we do? —Unhappy Birthday, Morningside Heights Rather than debating viruses and vaccines with these other parents, try a simpler solution: plan an outdoor activity. Take the kids to Morningside Park, where they can skate, build snowmen and roast s’mores in a fire pit. If you celebrate outside, the chances of transmission are extremely low. Do it right and the kids won’t just stay out…

JOAN LATCHFORD was many things in her life: teacher, nun, TV producer. By the age of 20, she’d crossed the Atlantic nine times in search of a sense of purpose. She found it almost by accident. After leaving her convent in the U.K. in the late 1950s, she returned to Toronto and bought her first camera—a Hasselblad. “Instead of paying bills, of which I had a number, I decided I would get something that I really wanted, which was a good camera,” she once said. She soon switched to a Leica, set up a darkroom in her basement, and started a photography career, knocking on magazine editors’ doors to sell her images. Her clients included the CBC, Chatelaine and the National Film Board’s stills division, which commissioned her to capture…

THE BUYERS: Connie Sarvanandan, a 51-year-old real estate agent, and Francis Michaud, 45, chief financial officer of a media company, flanked by their kids Maya, 16, and Logan, 14. THE STORY: The Sarvanandan-Michaud family live in a five-bed, five-bath detached in North York that they bought in 2013. Francis and Connie had been planning to downsize once the kids went off to university, but with property prices climbing, they decided to mobilize sooner. Last summer, they set a budget of $2 million and started searching for a three-bedroom near Yonge and Eglinton, which they figured they could rent to help cover the mortgage until the kids moved out. OPTION 1 SHERWOOD AVENUE near Mount Pleasant and Eglinton Listed at $1,550,000 Sold for $1,485,000 In early August, Francis and Connie viewed…