Our city’s underappreciated food courts
Many people rely on them, but don’t fully recognize the value that they offer
Every day, thousands of people in Toronto eat in food courts. Whether beneath one of the downtown skyscrapers or in a mall, there’s a paper plate continuum of communal dining room tables that, if laid end to end, might stretch for kilometres.
Despite so much time and money spent in food courts, they’re an overlooked part of the city. Understandable, as many are generic and nearly indistinguishable from one another, repeating the same chain restaurants at each location with only the furnishings slightly different.
Yet even these can be useful, especially for the increasing number of nomadic “creative class” workers who don’t have a formal office and often find cafés or libraries to work in. Some food courts, like the new one in the Bay Adelaide Centre downtown, even have free Wi-Fi and electrical plugs. The seat “rental” — the cup of coffee or tea lingered over for hours — is cheaper than at cafés, too.
Food courts are part of a long lineage of quick and convenient public eateries that go back to the days before fast food outlets took over. Think of department store lunch counters like those at the old Kresge and Woolworth stores, though not many people under 40 will have memories of them.
Cities used to have big cafeterias too, the most famous being the Automats, once the largest restau- rant chain in the world, said to serve 800,000 people a day through coinoperated vending machines where the food was behind a little glass door. It was sparkling, stainless steel dining in the age of mechanical reproduction, but they too declined as the fast food giants dominated the scene.
Toronto has had such trouble figuring out how food trucks and food carts will work, but we’ve got all these courts waiting to be reimagined, and some of them already show the potential they have. What is a food court but a food truck caravan without wheels?
Food courts in slightly out-of-the-way malls are often largely free from chain restaurants, like the one at First Markham Place with more than a dozen stalls selling a Pan-Asian selection of food.
Downtown, Toronto’s most interesting food court is hidden in the Village by the Grange condo community at McCaul and Dundas Sts. There’s a McDonalds here, but the majority of the stalls are independent, mom-and-pop-style places. It’s busy by day, filled with OCAD University students as one wing of the school is attached to the food court.
It’s a weirdly wonderful space, with vestiges of the old-timey “village square” decor left over from when it opened in the late 1970s. Today the Village is a jumble of everything, like Toronto itself with the food to match: Greek, Korean, Japanese, Mexican, Thai, and so on. There’s a pho stall and even a Belgian waffle and cupcake bar.
Helena’s Kitchen offers meat loaf, pierogies, latkes and other Eastern European foods while Karine’s serves an all-day breakfast from what must be the only food stall in the city with a big Victorian chesterfield in it. A few of the places, like Karine’s, serve food on proper plates, not Styrofoam, and asks people to return their dishes.
It’s a shame it isn’t open late, but for whatever reason, Torontonians seem to think of food courts as only a convenient day time thing. An enterprising food court owner could pull in the food truck crowd with some creativity. A liquor licence could turn it into a fantastic beer garden, though that might be too European for Toronto.
Food trucks and Asian “night market” events in Toronto show there’s a desire for fast food variety, but the bonus with food courts is they’re heated all winter and you don’t have to eat standing in a parking lot. Shawn Micallef writes every Friday about where and how we live in the GTA. Wander the streets with him on Twitter @shawnmicallef.