THE CHATTER
Gastronomic barbarity finds its nadir in the mall food court
For $12 at a used bookshop in Yorkville, I recently acquired an old paperback copy of The Joanne Kates Toronto Restaurant Guide – a long out-of-print collection of restaurant reviews written by Kates during her legendary tenure as food critic for the Globe and Mail. Published in 1984, nearly every bistro, buffet and brasserie appraised in the guide was shuttered some time over the last three decades, as you might expect. But I was pleased to read the author’s droll assessment of one illustrious culinary emporium that continues to endure.
Here is what Kates, on page 74, writes about lunch at the Eaton Centre’s basement food court, The Eatery, where, she proclaims, “gastronomic barbarity finds its nadir”: “It’s a multi-racial fast food zoo, from chow mein to latkes, from croissants to burritos, from cacciatore to crepes. This is mass feeding at its most varied and sophisticated, the domain of microwave and MSG and plastic, but so cleverly masked, my dear, that if you hold your breath you might almost believe the signs that call it gourmet.”
In the more than 30 years since Kates descended into the bowels of this esculent retreat, much has changed. A $120 million renovation in the early 2000s rechristened the old Eatery as the Urban Eatery, which was lavishly expanded into a sprawling, ersatz food-court Mecca festooned with gleaming big-box burger chains and fashionable frozen-yogurt stands. But the Kates analysis remains true despite the facelift. What she immortalized so cannily in 1984 is the charm that persists down there in the shopping mall food court, which in its endearingly vulgar way is an oasis of culinary kitsch. There’s an unmistakable note of amusement in her denunciation, as if Kates could hardly help but be delighted by the tawdriness of the enterprise. It’s not haute cuisine, to be sure, but there is something appealing, something comforting even, about how reliably tasteless mall food court always seems.
It’s a place where teenagers yawp and chuckle over mounds of fried rice in styrofoam containers; where a couple on a budget shares sips from a fountain soda. It’s a refuge from shopping, bearing all the bustle and tumult of the mall proper only amplified by cataracts of cheap fatty food.
Maybe it is, as Kates says, “the bread and circus capital of Babylon.” I wouldn’t want it any other way.