Multicultural Cities

Not About Food
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What I find interesting, is how multicultural midsized cities are. The city where I was raised and where I spend my time when I’m not in Toronto, London Ontario, is known for being a WASPy (White Anglo Saxon Protestant) place, with Anglo Canadian cooking. The demographics have changed a lot in 50 years, and especially in the past 20. When I grew up in the 70s & 80s, I’d say 80 percent of people in my region ate Canadian Anglo Saxon standard foods like Shepherds Pie, Chicken Pot Pie and Meatloaf for dinner. Grocery stores in London didn’t sell fresh parsley in the winter in the 70s because there weren’t enough people who would buy it. Many people were afraid of ingredients like garlic. There were a dozen Chinese restaurants, and Greeks ran many of the pizzerias and steakhouses (as many Greeks did and do across Canada and the States). In the 80s, more Indian restaurants opened up and the Dutch rijjstafel spot closed (still no new Dutch restaurants Or rijjstafel here).

Interestingly, to me, a city the size of Toronto only has 2 Dutch restaurants. Toronto has a dozen Georgian restaurants. Toronto doesn’t currently have any Burmese restaurants, yet Saskatoon (POP 267 000) has a good Burmese restaurant.

In the 80s and 90s, we had 3 good places for dim sum, and we did that almost every weekend. Then they closed. The shawarma shops started opening 20 years ago, and the the Thai restaurants. The mom and pop Cantonese restaurant and Greek greasy spoons started to close as people retired 20 years ago.

The Chain Restaurants and Chain Coffee Shops took over prime real estate on our nicest strip in town, over the past decade, so now, the spot where I had my pizzeria birthday party in Grade 6 is a chain serving pub food. There are some other chains along that strip, including a katsu chain and some cheap Tex Mex chains on the main strip. What had been a fine dining restaurant before March 2020 is now a mediocre chain taco joint.

The independent restaurant owners who are selling the food of their homelands (since ethnic is a faux pas word lately), usually open their restaurants in strip plazas and residential neighborhoods, as well as in parts of downtown which aren’t the most desirable.

In our Market building this week, I noticed we have a new Brazilian snack place. We have had a Bosnian burek place for 15 years. A Korean sells fish now, our fishmonger was Jewish when I was a kid in the 70s and 80s. The German deli was taken over by a Polish woman 20 years ago. The Italian bakery closed and was reopened by a Turkish woman recently. We have a West Indian /Caribbean deli owned by Indo West Indians, so they sell both Indian and West Indian foods. There’s also a New Mexican place offering birreia and other non-Tex Mex food. Yesterday, I noticed a Nigerian restaurant opened half a block from the downtown Market.

Just outside London, in a town called Strathroy, we have some recent arrivals from Ukraine, who have set up a bakery. It’s been interesting in Toronto to visit the restaurants set up by Syrian immigrants, who have also arrived recently.

I’ve noticed some Cambodian and Laotian families have taken over small diners in small towns lately, not just in Ontario but also in Saskatchewan. What is neat is that they offer Southeast Asian foods as well as the bacon and eggs the locals seek out.

Right now, the city (423 000 pop) , around 1 in 5 inhabitants were not born in Canada.

If you ask a visitor what they think of the food in London, or outside Toronto, they’ll often say it’s all chain pub food. They don’t know where to look. They also don’t know what to order. :joy:

Most cities in Canada seem to be a lot like this lately. Many people have blinders on and don’t see the multiculturalism in their own cities.

(My weird friend vent, just for you, @Chemicalkinetics . I have a friend, who I’ve known for 30 years, who only wants to go to chain restaurants when we meet up. I have tried a dozen of the chains within 1 km of her house because that’s her jam, and I’m generally accommodating. I have basically tried almost every level and type of restaurant , whether chain or independent , despite my preference for trying new dishes and new restaurants in my city)

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Thank goodness for the changes and for democracy. In the late 50s my friend’s father who was a pretty adventurous person for a new immigrant(Ukrainian) wanted to buy a house in London, Ont. The real estate agent told him Oh Mr. K I can’t sell you a house here. Thank goodness that things have changed.

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We have a new Burmese place, Razi, here in Ashlandia.
The Indonesian place, Blue Toba, moved DT and the Burmese place moved in.
We’re only 20,000 folks :slight_smile:
Shakespeare draws a varied and hungry audience, I suppose.

:cowboy_hat_face:

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I’m sad to hear that was your friend’s father’s experience.

There was one neighborhood in north London that was especially bad in terms of not selling to non-WASPs. There’s also a famous law case dealing with realty at an exclusive neighborhood for cottages in Grand Bend.

Realtors would warn Jewish, Indian and other buyers when the neighborhood was intolerant.

The neighborhood where I grew up in London in the 70s and 80s, was multicultural, more than average because many people who bought houses in the neighborhood worked at the University Hospital, which opened in 1970 and hired hundreds of new staff when it opened, many of whom came from other regions, and the University, which also would have had a more diverse population.

As late as the early 70s, one family friend who was an Indian doctor from Uganda with an Irish wife, was told they couldn’t buy a house in the neighborhood I mentioned . There were more tolerant and inclusive neighborhoods less than a km away, and thats where they bought their house.

The Jewish community in London has been around a long time. Many of the stores where I was a regular, many of which have closed over the past 20 years as retail has changed, were owned by Jewish business people.

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London is very different to the rest of the UK, in so many ways.

Just one example. Spending on transport, per capita in 21/22, was £1212 in London, compared with £448 in the North East and £588 here in the North West. The lowest, the East Midlands only benefits to the tune of £394.

Many will say, only half joking, that London is a different and separate country to the rest of the UK. It is often that stark a difference.

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I don’t disagree.

London is to the UK as Miami is to Florida.

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I wonder if she has a bad experience. When I used to drive to Toronto (and really any city) and eat at mom and pop restaurants along the roadtrip rather than McDonald or BurgerKing. A few times can be surprising enjoyable. Most of the time are average. However, one time I went to a mom and pop restaurant and it just very subpart. Not disgusting, nor toxic, but probably even a bit worse than McDonald or Burger King, and not cheap too. Since then, I get a certain level of appreciation why people like to eat at franchise because they know what to expect. The downside of eating at chains is that it can be boring. However, there are so many chains I haven’t been to forever. For example, there is a Round Table Pizza franchise which I haven’t been to for 25-30 years. I haven’t been to a Dairy Queen for 15 years. So I probably give some of them a try.

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She changed after she got married and had a kid. We used to try a lot of indie restaurants, all over town, from 1993-2008. We still went out to quite a few spots in Toronto once she started dating her husband - he is Argentinian Canadian, so that opened up her horizons foodwise, then she and her husband moved back to our midsized city from Toronto right before the baby arrived in 2013. She became “a chain within 1 mile of her house “ person when she had her kid in 2013.

We did go to an indie restaurant patio last year in late April, the first time to travel more than 1 mile from her house in years, the kind of place I’d been suggesting since 2013, and I thought maybe things were going back to how they used to be. It turns out the patio was convenient because she had the day off and had gone downtown to get Botox, and this cute little patio was just a block or 2 away. :exploding_head:

This isn’t that she is afraid to leave her house. She has been to Cuba for a vacation 2 times since Aug 2022. I hope she isn’t reading this thread.

:joy:
I’m 18 months older than she is, have not spent any money on Botox, and honestly, choosing a restaurant for my friend’s birthday is a priority for me, over a location convenient to where I get my teeth cleaned or my hair cut. :rofl:

Different strokes for different folks :joy:

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I think there’s a lot in that. And it’s also about the availablility of that familiar food. I have a nephew and niece who spent several of their young years living in the States where they would regularly eat at chain restaurants and that’s what they looked for when they returned to the UK. On the other hand, I have another nephew who was born in Spain and lived there for his first years and I don’t believe ever ate at a chain until the family moved to the UK. He has always had a much wider enjoyment of food, which we’ve tried to foster. He has always said that, when Uncle Harters takes him out for dinner, it isnt always the most enjoyable food but it is always interesting. I regard that as a win for Uncle Harters.

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Maybe. Back on Chowhound, I think I said something that I am more exploratory on foods compared to most of my friends. However, I am pretty lazy/boring when it comes to clothing. I rarely go to any mom and pop clothing stores. It is interesting that your friends used to be interested in indie restaurant 15 years ago, probably priority has changed much for her.

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That is so sweet.

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Same. Owing to my field , I don’t require ‘work clothes’ of either the blue collar or white collar type. Therefore, my fashion sense hasn’t changed appreciably since 1992 or so. Jeans/T-shirt/flannel with real shoes in the winter, tshirt/shorts/Birkenstocks in the summer. I have a few button ups shirts and khakis for ‘nicer’ places, and a suit that is more or less reserved for weddings (unlikely at my age) or funerals (I have at least one more that I sort of wish would just happen already).

That’s more or less it. I’ve found picking up plain color tshirts at thrift stores is relatively easy and cheap.

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I was in (West) Berlin in 1965 as a high school student. It was amazing even then. Vibrant and cosmopolitan Crossed over into East Berlin for a day tour. Sobering masses of rubble; not much else.

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The story gets better, food wise. The Spanish family would visit each year, usually staying with us, over Christmas. We’d go shopping at the supermarket, taking the young lad with us. He’d be four or five at that time. We said he could have anything he wanted but only one thing. Every time, he’d make straight for the fish counter and want whitebait. Which he ate with ketchup - cos he was only four or five. I doubt the “American Two” would have even recognised a whitebait at that age, let alone even considered they might want to eat it.

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Canadian here- I loved fried smelts as a kid! Same size as whitebait!

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You should come back. A LOT has changed in the last 60 years :wink:

Less rubble, for example.

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Interesting quote about Miami and its type of diversity. Back when I lived in Miami back in the 1987 to 1989 timeframe, there were 3 main groups. Anglos (which meant white and could be of Italian, Irish, UK, German, etc. derivation), Cuban and Haitian. Each group (Anglos had less of a defined central area) was fairly mixed but with a clearly defined segregated “home area”, with Calle Ocho being the center of the Cuban community, Liberty City was the center of the Haitian community and the Anglos were all over the place. There were Venezuelan/Central American communities but they were smaller and more diffuse at that time.
I left a month before the Lozano shooting and the riots, not sure how that impacted the area, though it sounds like it was a horrible time. Miami was a crazy place to live as the TV show Miami Vice was wrapping up its final season. People thought I was living in drug central, and it was true that the drugs were everywhere but most people just ignored them. Two of my friends did lose their spouses to drugs, though. I saw the same thing in DC a few years later but DC was crack not regular cocaine. A distinction without a difference, I guess.
The thing that really struck me about Miami was the food/cuisine. We used to go to Versailles on Calle Ocho and the guys playing dominos across the street as we parked our cars reminded us we were in a different community. And the Cafe Cubano carts. Lord, I loved that coffee!
Odd, I have not thought about my time in Miami for years. Wonder how the old crew is doing. We scattered in the days before email and Facebook.

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Len Deighton wrote 9 (or 10) books that were in a large part about Berlin’s post war period, I wonder if you have read them? They start with Berlin Game, Mexico Set and London Match. The BBC filmed them but the books were much better. There were scenes set in the rubble of Berlin where the protagonist’s father organized soccer games for kids, in part just to feed them a good meal.
I have always wondered if the books were accurate because they “felt” real, albeit with a bit of spy vs. spy embellishment.

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my first (and so far only!) encounter with whitebait was when I lived in New Zealand for a year or so. A coworker brought in a whole container of it, and proceeded to make a big ol’ pan of whitebait omlet.

Very subtle flavor. Really nice…

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I live in Brooklyn, NY and was raised here. Have been eating fried smelts since I was a child. Still eating them, whitebait, fried anchovies, etc whenever they’re offered. Mainly found in old line Southern Italian & Greek places in NYC.