From the book Carnivore Chic: From Pasture to Plate, a Search for the Perfect Meat, by Susan Bourette. Copyright © Susan Bourette 2008. Reprinted with permission of Penguin Group (Canada).
Violent winter winds lash against the streetcar as it rattles down Toronto's Queen Street West. Past the Gap and Starbucks, it rumbles by a vegetarian café where diners perched in the window can be seen sucking hemp through straws and chops ticking at their tempeh salads, their sallow faces almost obscured by white clouds of steam. Once the domain of hippie bicycle couri ers, the café tonight has BMWs parked outside. The students and artists long ago priced out, the counterculture has given way t o the country club. The restaurant's clients now are soccer moms who come to shop at Roots a few storefronts away and the executives and bean-counters who toil in the nearby corridors of commerce.
The streetcar clatters to the next stop. The doors open and riders are assaulted not only by a chilly blast but also by the overp owering and unmistakable whiff of hot dogs on the grill. Dressed in a tuque and fingerless gloves, the vendor works frantically at h is cart folding dog to bun, his workspace clearly segregated. On the left, he has his Polish sausages and frankfurters. On the right , that's where the veggie dogs go. Just like the bacon bits and HP Sauce are relegated to one side, condiments like corn relish and sauerkraut to the other. The streetcar lurches forward again, crossing an invisible dividing line, into a neighbourhood that not so long ago looked like a vintage postcard come to life, circa 1956. A place where Euro-style delis are filled with sausage links that hang like stalactites from the ceiling, buttressed against old-world butcher shops and grubby bars. Slavic-looking men keep shop, th eir noses shaped like the kielbasa that decorate their stores, their mustaches about as long and coarse as the brooms they push. Sho ps like the Prague Deli, where you can order from the same bill of fare served up here for decades: classics like gypsy goulash, tri pe soup and perogies slathered in sour cream and bacon.
But recently there's been an invasion, one quite unlike the arrival of the first immigrants, starting in the 1920s. The delis and butcher shops are still here, but the street is being crowded by upscale shops like Art Metropole, the Downward Dog Yoga Centre and Clafouti Patisserie et Café. A haute onslaught, pouty models sharing the sidewalk with guys in bloody aprons. These days, it's a haven of carnivore chic, hallowed ground to the hipster-cognoscenti, most of whom see the old survivors on the street as kitsch r ather than tradition. Those like the twenty- and thirtysomethings standing here beside me tonight for an introductory course in butc hering.
We're shivering in a cold, cramped room at the Healthy Butcher, a place where the new and old commingle. The smell is as old as t ime - hearkening back to the days when the caveman clubbed his first woolly mammoth. But the aesthetic is as fashionable as the late st Marc Jacobs, as hip as the new iPhone. We are culinary tourists here, the new face of Queen Street West.
