The usual morning… woke up, got some things done, answered some email, did the New York Times crossword, checked Facebook to see what my American peeps were up to, then went to Tims for a coffee and a donut. Then walked about 20 minutes up the road to pick up the rental car. We got a cute little Nissan Versa SR in electric blue metallic with the sport package. Nice! I didn’t take a picture of it, but here’s one from Nissan’s website:

It’s fun to drive and it handles well. That’s what matters. Anyway, we picked up a couple of Rob’s longtime friends at their house not far from the hotel, and then we met even more of Rob’s longtime friends at Seasons in the Park restaurant in Queen Elizabeth Park.

It was nice meeting new people (I believe that I’d only ever met one of them before today) and the food at Season’s is always excellent. The waiter, André, was charming and attentive. Rob and I both had cod and chips, a favourite there.

Of course, the main draw for Seasons at the Park is the setting, high atop a hill overlooking Queen Elizabeth Park and downtown.

Back to the hotel and we can see they’re setting up for the Friday night shindig, which usually means live music, arts and crafts, and food trucks. We decided to do that for dinner tonight.

Now, last year when we were down here on a Friday, one of the food trucks had rotatoes. That’s a whole potato, spiral cut on a skewer, fried to potato chip crispiness, then rolled in some very artificially-flavoured powder of which there are probably 30 varieties. It’s anything but healthy, but WOW are they delicious and you can tell by my face last year that I was beyond happy to have rotato access that day:

Well… the food trucks were scarce, there was nothing worth having for dinner, and there wasn’t even a rotato truck on hand! Humph. The band playing was decent, “Bealby Point”, and apparently they’re locally famous.

Their drummer, who looked way too young to touring in a band, was holding his Vic Firth brand drumsticks all the way at the back end instead of at the fulcrum, meaning he’s going to have to single-stroke every fill. That’s an interesting choice of grip - it made me tired just imagining playing a whole set like that.

Anyway, we decided to blow off the food truck idea and just have dinner at the hotel. We chose a spot outside for the people-watching and were eventually ‘rewarded’ with seeing a CyberTruck in the wild.

At this point in time, knowing what we know about Elon Musk, you can’t possibly look cool driving one of these metallic cheese wedges.
We were greeted by a waiter who looked to be all of twelve years old and we both ordered very dry martinis, mine with a twist and Rob’s made with Bombay Sapphire gin, no twist. What we got was a not-dry martini with a twist for me and Rob got an ounce of Bombay at room temp in a highball glass. We put the drinks on the room and bailed for a better place. All of our usual places were crowded, but Rob suggested a little corner place across the street called “Catch 122”

Music was coming from inside, which turned out to be a little jazz trio. They were good.

So we got a table. Neither of us were hugely hungry after the big lunch, so Rob got fresh-baked focaccia with three dips and I had a vegan dish (shocker) called a watermelon tiradito. This was one of those times when I had no idea what would show up, but the ingredients listed sounded interesting:

It turns out that ‘compressed watermelon’ is one of the strangest things I’ve ever eaten. And if you’ve been reading these travelogues for any length of time, you know that I’ve eaten some strange things. The big things up front are homemade taro chips, which I’m now addicted to.

The red stuff that looks like stewed tomatoes? That’s compressed watermelon. Even stranger, when you move all the foliage off the top, you can see that it’s sliced, it’s dense, and it’s… floppy. Honestly, if you’d told me that it was raw liver, I’d have believed you. If you told me it was watermelon, I’d have suggested you get yourself checked out at a clinic somewhere. But in spite of it looking, flopping, and cutting like raw meat, the taste can only be described as ‘extreme watermelon’. It was fantastic. One of the best dishes of the trip so far. OH, and they actually know how to make a dry martini here as well. Bonus!

For dessert, Rob had a big slab of cheesecake and I continued with the “I have no idea what’s coming” theme and ordered:

…and yet again, whatever I thought might be showing up at the table was eclipsed by what actually showed up. This was absolutely incredible.

We finished off the night with an espresso martini, which also went above and beyond, with cocoa powder designs on top.

I think we may have a new favourite restaurant on the North Shore.

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