From a culinary point of view, the hugely successful Luminato art event did something extra special this year. The organizers decided to celebrate the art of food at the Distillery, and set up what they called The Long Table, One table One city, a 650-foot table for chefs to sell some of their food street-style. [...]

Celebrating my 10th year of involvement with Toronto Taste for Second Harvest, I teamed up with a great entrepreneurial team — Esther Benaim and Maggie McKeown of Great Cooks on Eight. We had a great time putting out stuffed dates with blue cheese and wrap with prosciutto di parma and catching up with fellow chefs [...]

Last year was a first. Never before had restaurant leaders sat down to a professional event with such a high-minded name as Terroir, A Sense of Place. Essentially, terroir means that you can taste a place because the land and meteorology imparts unique flavours to the food that emerges from it, the animals who feed [...]

How lucky can you get? My friend and Torito Chef Carlos Hernandez has invited me to cook with him at the Montreal High Lights Festival. This year’s ninth annual winter festival includes 14 Toronto chefs strutting their stuff in key Montreal restaurants. We’re going to be in very esteemed company. The other invited chefs are [...]

Rosa Maria Tortorici and I are ecstatic to report that our collaborative project was a huge success. Together, we devised a way to pull together a Spanish language lesson — with a nod to Rosa’s Living Spanish language school — while simultaneously conducting a Latino cooking class, which was my contribution. We sold out to [...]

I’ve teamed up with my friend Rosa Maria Tortorici, who runs Living Spanish, a unique Spanish school, where she takes her students outside the classroom and to cafés, to the market or into her home to cook them a meal, all in Spanish. This way, she says, real life inspires their language learning and not [...]

The twelve annual Toronto International Latin Film Festival opens tomorrow, but the ball got rolling on last Wednesday night. Festival director Raül Galvez and his wife Kim hosted a launch bash at the Drake and put on a fine spread: a great selection of Latino canapés and jamon serrano courtesy of Catch Fine Foods. Delicious. [...]