The Man Who Ate Toronto

The official story of a city is always told through its politics, its architecture, its famous people. The real story gets told through its food. Every wave of newcomers to Toronto has had to figure out how to exist here, and the first thing they do is open something to eat.

A Portuguese bakery on Dundas. A Jamaican patty shop in Scarborough. A Vietnamese place on Spadina that outlasts three recessions.

Chatto understood this before the food world made it fashionable. He documented Toronto's restaurant scene at the moment it stopped being polite and started being serious. That was the point when this city went from somewhere you had to apologize for to somewhere you'd go out of your way to eat. That transition matters. And nobody else wrote it down the way he did.