Two kilometres of Greek restaurants along Danforth Avenue, and a food festival in August that closes the road.
Danforth Avenue east of the Don Valley became the centre of Toronto’s Greek community from the 1960s, when migration from Greece — particularly from the Peloponnese and the islands — reached its peak.
The stretch between roughly Chester and Jones is Greektown, officially designated, with bilingual street signs in Greek and English.
The Greek population has since dispersed to the suburbs and the strip has diversified — there are now as many Italian, Japanese and modern Canadian restaurants as Greek ones — but the concentration of Greek food remains the highest in North America.
Eating
Souvlaki, gyros, grilled octopus, saganaki flamed at the table, and a good deal of lamb.
The long-standing names include Messini for gyros, Athens Pastries for spanakopita and baklava, Pantheon, Christina’s and Astoria. Several have been in the same family for decades.
Beyond Greek: Allen’s is a proper Irish-Canadian tavern with an enormous whisky list and a garden. Globe Bistro, Auberge du Pommier further afield, and a growing run of small places at the eastern end.
Taste of the Danforth
Held over a weekend in August, closing Danforth Avenue to traffic for around a kilometre and a half, with food stalls, music and around a million attendances. It has run since 1994 and it is one of the largest street festivals in Canada.
It is enormously crowded and it is genuinely good.
The neighbourhood
Riverdale, south of the Danforth, is one of Toronto’s more attractive residential districts — Victorian and Edwardian houses on a hill, with Riverdale Park East giving the best downtown skyline view in the east end, especially at sunset with the Don Valley in front of it.
Withrow Park hosts a Saturday farmers’ market.
Playter Estates and Pocket are the small pockets of older housing either side.
The bridge
The Prince Edward Viaduct carries Bloor Street across the Don Valley to become the Danforth. It was built in 1918 and — crucially — the engineer Roland Caldwell Harris insisted on including a lower deck for a future subway, over considerable objection.
The subway arrived 48 years later, in 1966, and used it. Without that deck, Line 2 would have cost a fortune more.
The viaduct is also the setting of Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion. The Luminous Veil, the barrier of steel rods added in 2003, was built after a long campaign following a great many suicides.
Practicalities
Line 2 runs directly beneath — Broadview, Chester, Pape, Donlands and Greenwood stations all serve the strip.
Most restaurants are open late by Toronto standards, and the street is busiest on summer evenings.
More Food & Drink
St Lawrence Market
A market since 1803, in a building wrapped around the old city hall, and the peameal bacon sandwich is not optional.
Little Italy and College Street
Espresso bars from the 1950s, a street that fills when Italy plays, and some of the best restaurants in the city on the blocks around it.