Email: letters@nowtoronto.com
Hottest restos list missing east-end spice
Come on! You guys have to get out of the west end more. Nothing in east Toronto worthy of your T.O.’s Hottest Restaurants list (NOW, April 4-10)?
Queen East. Danforth. Even Dundas East and Gerrard have some jewels. Put a few kilometres on your high-top Converses and venture out of shouting distance from the shop.
Bob Carreau
Toronto
A dash of Salt and Church Aperitivo
Any list of where to eat in Toronto that fails to include Salt on Ossington or Church Aperitivo on Queen West is incomplete. Both are restaurants serving great tapas, Salt from the Iberian Peninsula, Church Aperitivo from Italy.
I have been to both many times and continue to return for the delicious food and the perfect service. Someone at NOW has really missed the boat on this.
Brian Stein
Toronto
This End Up for Vietnamese
No offence to Bahn Mi Boys (which I love), but This End Up at Dundas and Gladstone has the best Vietnamese-style pork belly sandwich in T.O. – not to mention the spectacular chicken thigh sandwich and basa fish tacos.
Robert Valeriote
Toronto
Albert Koehl, cycling hero
Re Toronto Cycling Heroes (NOW, April 4-10). Albert Koehl has long been a personal local cycling hero. Toronto is a much safer place to move around in – and not just for cyclists – because of his unselfish contributions over the years. Many thanks to NOW for trumpeting his accomplishments and giving him his due.
Alan Wayne Scott
From nowtoronto.com
Anti-abortion to-do strange in the extreme
Sam James makes great coffee, and I’m no fan of anti-abortion folks (especially when they target high schools), but I fail to see where attacking people who are exercising their democratically guaranteed rights is a good thing (NOW, April 5).
It shows you don’t care for freedom of expression and are irrational and violent, and it reflects poorly on your side of any given issue, especially when other people congratulate you for it.
The biggest threat to the pro-choice movement isn’t a resurgence of anti-abortion activists (they’re still too few in number). It’s pro-choice activists discrediting their own movement by congratulatory behaviour such as this that turns off the general public.
John Atticus
From nowtoronto.com
No shelter from ad storm
Re Shelter Static (NOW, April 4-10). This was wonderful. Thanks to Jonathan Goldsbie for writing it. Adding video billboards to our already tawdry street furniture would be stupefyingly obnoxious. I dearly hope it doesn’t happen.
A.R. Arvelo McQuaig
From nowtoronto.com
Browser writes
In your latest issue you boast in rebuttal to Doug Ford that NOW has 409,000 readers (NOW, April 4-10).
I pick up NOW and browse the letters to the editor, Enzo DiMatteo’s predictable anti-Ford articles and check out new movies. All done in five minutes.
Please do not count me and others like me as readers. We are browsers and skimmers.
How many readers per copy are you counting? Is a person picking it up from the floor of the subway to kill time a “reader”?
G. Lee
Toronto
Rip-off mentality
I agree that Die Hard set the stage for several generations of action movies and is without a doubt still one of the best action movies of all time (NOW, March 20).
However, John Semley loses a lot of credibility when he lists Under Siege as the number-one rip-off.
Under Siege is one of Steven Seagal’s best movies and is a very good rip-off of Die Hard, but how could Semley confuse the Iowa-class battleship USS Missouri with “Die Hard on a submarine”?
Patrick J. Gauch
Ottawa
Irish-First Nations spirit
Deb O’Rourke’s bright, angry piece on St. Paddy’s Day (NOW, March 21-28) does helpfully question our acceptance of the stark racism rife in this annual event.
Concerned readers may further google “Irish anti-racism” to understand the historic “fightin’ Irish” spirit in response to deadly colonialist tactics, an identity that contrasts starkly with the St. Paddy’s onslaught of drunken leprechaun imagery and glittery green hats from Walmart.
However, I do object to the way O’Rourke concluded her piece by remarking that the ultimately flaky Irish (she means the loyalist Orangemen), while bearing a proud rebel legacy, were instrumental in establishing colonialist oppression upon arriving in Canada.
While contemporary bridges supporting solidarity between First Nations struggles and Irish anti-oppression are considerable, curious Paddy’s Day party-goers may find it useful to learn that the first wave of Irish in Canada arrived under arrangements intended to assimilate their people.
Thousands of gravesites in locations such Grosse Isle, Quebec, tell of the treatment of the Irish who made it to Canada’s shores, only to perish of starvation and treatable illness.
Kismet Dyment
Toronto
Savage advice on race
In his Lifestyle column, Dan Savage gave relationship advice to one of his readers that was very admirable in its directness and sincerity (NOW, March 14-20). He recommended dumping the “racist piece of shit” who held negative or derogatory views of coloured people.
Savage was probably not in Toronto (specifically Etobicoke) in the mid- to late 1970s, but if he’d gone to just about any junior high or high school, he would have had to conclude that half the student population were racist pieces of shit.
Varun Shekhar
Toronto
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