Parts & Labour in Toronto is one of those places one one keeps reading about on the web and in print, which supposedly delivers "modern" [in your face] "Canadian cuisine" and I certainly went fully forewarned, for example:
dine.TO noted it was "the new cultural hub of Parkdale - the hip west end neighbourhood in downtown Toronto," and
torontolife.com had said that "Chef Matty Matheson's macho resto-bar was one of the early arrivals on Parkdale's restaurant row, and it remains one of the best,"
but it also made the contrasting statement that it is "the rowdy restaurant and bar responsible for at least some of the intermittent griping about “Partydale” and its community-destroying ways, ..."
and the Toronto Star said that it "fails to deliver satisfaction with its stunt cooking and prison-like decor."
Plus I went for Sunday brunch which I ordinarily avoid like Ebola, but the menu looked much like a and its normal one with eggs added. The music schedule is announced boldly outside, it has a huge bar with pricy cocktails/etc., and a lot of common tables.
I'd read such conflicting opinions of their famous burger ("the best" to "falling apart") that I ordered the fried chicken with collard greens and grits below and a fried egg on top in a bowl. The chicken skin was nicely crisp but had a strange sweet and salty batter and it was impossible to pick it up so I asked for a plate on which to separate it from the other ingredients - semi-successfully. I was a sucker in ordering the wine, a demi-carafe of Niagara Broken Press because of its neat name and reasonable price, not bad at all! The music was canned stuff from what we used to call the "lower 48 states" excepting one Canadian piece by Neil Young, but I guess a full day of him, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Gordon Lightfoot and the Band might grow wearing, but it sounds pretty good to me.
Anyway, my bill without bottled water but with a double espresso corrected, was 70.06 CAD, including something I hadn't noted before - a huge "HST tax," euphemistically called a Harmonized Sales Tax.
Bonus: the Design Exchange lobby.
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