Ready, set, eat!
Taste of the Danforth has united a city for 25 years
When Peter Hadjis opened the Palace Restaurant on Pape Ave., just north of Danforth Ave. in 1983, there weren’t many Greek restaurants on The Danforth strip.
“Next to us were mostly fruit markets and clothing businesses. It was mixed, Italians and Greeks, some Chinese. That’s it,” said Hadjis.
Now, 35 years later, the Danforth is known as Greektown and is home to the city’s biggest annual food festival — Taste of the Danforth — which celebrates its 25th year this weekend from Friday evening until Sunday night at 10 p.m.
And Hadjis, now 78, has become a neighbourhood fixture. He’s chatty, warm and always eager to talk about food. Passersby stop to say hello. Guests at his restaurant brag online about lucking out when he tends to their table.
But in spite of marking a milestone, this year’s celebration is bittersweet as it comes three weeks after a gunman fired shots into the neighbourhood, killing two people, 10-year-old Julianna Kozis and 18-year-old Reese Fallon, and injuring 13 others. It is also the 100th anniversary of the 1918 anti-Greek riots that targeted the Greek community in Toronto’s downtown core.
The riots — that were marked in a ceremony and photo display at City Hall last week — are not well known to many Torontonians. But they inadvertently shaped the city’s future, leading to the east end creation of Greektown and the food festival that organizers say draws more than a million visitors in recent years, generating millions of dollars for the local economy and charities across the GTA.
The riots began in early August 1918, a few months before the First World War officially ended, when a drunk and belligerent veteran was kicked out of the Greek-owned White City Cafe on Yonge St. near Carlton St.
It just so happened that a convention for war veterans was taking place in the city and word got out that one of their own had been disrespected. Soon thousands of people (accounts vary from 5,000 to 20,000) descended on that intersection and for three days looted and destroyed the Greek businesses in the area.
Tensions were already high between the Greek community and those patriotic to Canada’s war effort. Greece had remained neutral during the first years of the war and its government didn’t allow Greek nationals abroad to fight in the war if they did not have citizenship in their new countries. However, people believed they were unpatriotic, which led to feelings of resentment toward the small community of a few thousand Greek immigrants.
Still, the damage was done and the Greeks abandoned what is now the city’s downtown core.
The 1960s and ’70s saw the largest influx of Greek immigrants to Toronto, spurred on by political and economic instability in Greece. A 1976 article in the Star estimates about 30,000 mostly first-generation Greeks settled on the Danforth. There didn’t seem to be a particular reason why the Danforth was chosen, but a 1984 Star article on Little Athens (as it was dubbed back then) quotes a Greek business owner:
“Who can say why we located here? One guy opens a shop and it starts. Like other ethnic groups we were short on the language. So we located where we could find affordable housing, buy necessities and speak our language. Now we know English, so there’s a great deal of movement all over.”
In 1994, a year after the local Business Improvement Area officially gave the neighbourhood its Greektown moniker, 23 restaurants along the Danforth got together—mainly Greek and Italian—to offer sample-sized bites to passersby to promote their businesses during the slow summer months, creating the first Taste of the Danforth. About 5,000 visitors came to the small festival, organizers say.
“For a few years, it was nothing special,” says Hadjis, who remembers serving dolma, moussaka and roasted lamb at the first event.
“It was very few businesses from Chester to Pape (Aves.) and it was about getting people to know the area and try the food they wouldn’t know how to order.”
The idea caught on and Taste of the Danforth become one of Toronto’s first food festivals, predating Taste of Little Italy and Ribfest, which both started in 1999.
By 1996, the festival got so big that the streets had to be closed for the first time.
Now Taste of the Danforth stretches two kilometres along the strip from Broadview to Donlands Aves. The food also goes beyond Greek and Italian bites, reflecting the changing demographics of the neighbourhood with plates that include Chinese sesame balls filled with read bean paste, Turkish pizzas, Japanese gyo- zas, Jamaican-inspired jerk chicken pierogies, Indian butter chicken, Filipino halo-halo and Mexican tacos and street corn.
“Whatever you’ll try, it’s good. That’s the important thing,” says Hadjis.
“People like it and are coming back, telling their friends and family. People aren’t disappointed.”
He predicts this year’s festival will be the best, adding that people have already made a point of dining specifically on the Danforth in the last weeks to show unity with the neigh- bourhood in the wake of the gun attack.
The festival’s opening ceremonies on Friday will include a moment of silence for the victims of the shooting as well as acknowledgement of the first responders and civilians who attended to the injured.
“What happened was a tragedy, so I think people are going to think positive,” said Hadjis. “People are going to come out and support that we’re in a good city. We’re going to be OK. When people come here, they have to know that we have to come together like a family.”