There’s another new market in town… This one is more focused on art, collectibles and food creations.

The Queen West Market is held on the second floor of the Spin Gallery building at 1100 Queen Street just west of Dovercourt in a beautiful loft space with fantastic floor-to-ceiling windows. It’s open on both Saturdays and Sundays from 11am -6pm.

By the way, booths are still relatively inexpensive for those artistically inclined… could be fun.

Technorati Tags: Artists, breads, Craft, market, Beaconsfield, Queen St. W, Queen St. W

Cool Hand of a Girl is a great little cafe in the Junction on Dundas West, just 1 street east of Keele. Among other tasty bites, they serve up delicious sandwiches. My personal favourite is the tarragon chicken salad sandwich… mmm… good stuff. Perhaps the secret is that the chicken breast is from a Mennonite farm, or perhaps it’s the tarragon. They have many organic options and host art on the walls from local artists. Brunch on weekends is a good call, although they can get quite busy so don’t show up too hungry, for you may end up — as my friend Chris might say –”hangry”.

Technorati Tags: brunch, Cafe, Dundas Street , espresso, family business, homemade, latte

Kieran Huggins and Kevin Branigan have been working on an online trip planner for the Toronto Transit system called MyTTC.ca. It’s been a fun side project for them over the past year or so.  Kieran just announced the site is now available for public tire-kicking and feedback. Their site is cool… you should go give it a try.

The backstory is interesting. As Kieran writes on the site, he and Kevin are not the TTC. They’re just two software developers who decided this needed to be done. As they detail on the MyTTC About page, the idea was born out of frustration with the official TTC site, which has always been impossibly hard to plan trips with.

I share their pain. Several times after moving to Toronto I tried using the official transit web site to figure out how to get around the city. After much wailing and gnashing of teeth, I simply gave up. All the route maps were and still are provided only in PDF format, instead of simpler and smaller GIF or JPEG images. The system maps — which are the only way to figure out which route map you need — are gigantic PDFs that take ages to download and render. (Don’t try to find these maps from the main page of the TTC website, which for some reason links prominently to even stranger and less useful maps on the Toronto.ca site.) Meanwhile, the new beta TTC site has no system map yet, and no trip planner. A forlorn spot on the beta site home page proclaims, "Future home of Trip Planner".

Tragic.

So if you’re an entrepreneur who wants to buld your own trip planner, how do you get the data? Woe betide you, for the TTC won’t give it to you. The information sits in a database somewhere in the bowels of the organization, where it is periodically used to generate the aforementioned PDF route maps and now the new route pages on the beta web site. But the TTC won’t make the raw data available for public use. So Kieran and Kevin had to compile an entirely new dataset of their own by pulling the information out of hundreds of PDF route documents. Then they had to scrub it, by hand, because the data was buggy buggy buggy. The scrubbing continues.

Wow.

Unlike the TTC, Kieran and Kevin are making their dataset available to anyone who wants to play with it. This means anyone can build their own Toronto transit map or trip planner now. It also means we are a step closer to having Google Transit support, since all that’s needed to enable that is a suitable data feed. (Google has offered in the past to set up Google Transit for Toronto. Vancouver, Montreal, Ottawa, and even Fredericton have Google Transit support. Toronto? Sorry. No data from the TTC.)

Shame on you, TTC. Shame on government organizations that hoard power by keeping public data under lock and key.

And congratulations, Kieran and Kevin, for rolling up your sleeves and building a great public service that Toronto really needs.

[cross-posted on MyOwnPirateRadio]

Sorauren Park in Roncesvalles, at Sorauren and Wabash Avenue is getting its own farmer’s market on Mondays.
It starts this Monday, July 21st at 3pm, and will run to approximately 7pm.

How nice to have so many farmers markets that we can choose from. There seems to be one every day of the week somewhere in Toronto.

Technorati Tags: breads, cheese, Farmer’s Market, fresh fruit, organic, Roncesvalles, Toronto

Catch some fantastic works by local and somewhat-local artists displayed outside in front of Nathan Phillip Square this weekend.
It’s free and well worth the visit.
Friday 10am - 8pm
Saturday 10am - 7pm
Sunday 10am - 6pm

Technorati Tags: Artist, Toronto

Wild Thing opened last month on the corner of Borden and Harbord. The shop serves up high quality espresso with organic milk, along with homemade gelato and grilled sandwiches. This is a great place to meet a friend or do some work. Soon there will be wi-fi and there are a few sockets to plug in laptops. The space is bright and clean with lots of tables.

Not only is this place great for adults, they have also built a kiddie area with a table to draw on, and equipped the ladies bathrooms with baby changing tables. How thoughtful.

But wait, there’s more.

The delicious gelato is made without the typically-used chemicals (called stabilizer), and contains fresh fruits rather than prepackaged pastes. The milk and sugar are organic. They even serve the gelato in biodegradable cups.

I’ll be back for more gelato… and coffee.

Technorati Tags: Cafe, coffee, espresso, latte, local business, organic, Little Italy, Harbord St

In Corktown, just up from the Distillery District, a Jamie Kennedy Cafe hides in an unsuspecting alley. 4 Gilead is bright and beautifully designed and serves up delicious cafe fare from 8-6 on M-F, 8-4 S&S. As one might expect, nearly everything is excellent. Why not try it and see if you can find an item that is sub par? Could be a fun game. Cookies, danishes, breads, salads, sandwiches… the menu is not large but it’s worth a drop in for a snack. Between 11am - 3pm there are additional options to choose from on the ever changing a la cart menu.

Technorati Tags: Artisan, Cafe, coffee, Corktown, pastries, pastries, sandwich, breads, Toronto

A lovely looking wine bar called Pic Nic just opened last week on Queen East. The interior uses beautiful wood combined with stone and concrete. Very inviting. The menu, while not extensive, looks yummy so far, with a great selection of wines, cheeses and meats. There is a salad nicoise on offer, and a few other options that sound enticing. Cocktail hour, here I come.

Technorati Tags: cheese, cozy, Design, Riverdale, queen st east, Toronto, wine, wine bar

If you haven’t been to this mysterious place… you should. Delux at 92 Ossington is a great place to procure an excellent dinner.
A celebration, perhaps? A reward? Any reason will do, just make sure you have a reservation, as a lot of people have already figured out the truth about this special place on Ossington.

I recently heard about a Community Shared Agricultural system operating in Ontario. Plan B Organic Farm sells a share of their harvest to a local household in return for weekly delivery of fresh organic local fruits and vegetables. This type of system has been successful in Europe and Japan since the sixties, and allows farmers stability and startup capital to buy seeds and jumpstart their operations. It’s a system that benefits everyone involved. By eating fresh local food we get more vitamins and nutrients to keep us healthy, while carbon emissions are also reduced.

Technorati Tags: family business, fresh fruit, local business, organic, Toronto