Bloor Street Market is the new Loblaws store that arised from the ashes of the Valu-Mart that was below the Manulife building at Bay and Bloor. The new store design does not really change the layout, but the store has gotten a fresh fascade with some stone facing, and new cabinets and counters. The butcher and fishmonger areas are much more approachable and there’s a large focus on convience foods (pre-cooked foods at the deli, salad bar, prepackaged ready-to-heat meals.

There’s quite a concentration of grocery stores on Bloor. With the new Market by Longo’s , a larger Rabba’s, the exclusive Pusateri’s and Whole Foods all a block away from this location. At least I have a lot of choices. What I like is that these are grocery stores, not supermarkets. There is no pharmacist, there is no 1 hour photo lab, no consumer hard goods – pure grocery. If they can concentrate on good, fresh product, they may get a lot of loyal customers who prefer to walk than drive to get groceries.

(pictures to be added shortly)

(this post is also titled, why I must justify purchasing this knife)

Butchering your own meat from a primal cut is not new. In fact it’s done in small towns with local butchers for quite some time. Toronto chef Ryan Donovan has started having demostrations of how to do it and this hopefully starts a trend. Already you can buy whole loins of beef from Costco to make your own steaks, this just allows even more freedom.

Squeemish? All meat has to come from animals…

The Wyre is a daily email provided by xyyz.ca. The target audience is men in Toronto but they have provided lots of valuable information useful to the general Toronto public.

Recently they published XYYZ: GuyMaps – Jacob Richler’s Guide to Fine Food Shops in YYZ, a map of all the fine butchers and fishmongers in Toronto. Included is my favorite butchers, Cumbrae’s and the Healthy Butcher.