Gusto 501 Restaurant

By Luca Maria Francesco Fabris - 1 October 2020

Toronto contrives to be both a metropolis and a small village.
For Europeans - even Europeans accustomed to living in a large and populous city - at first the capital of Ontario appears to be out-of-scale, what with its raised highways running from one end of the city center to the other, carrying endless cars (in truth, all neat and tidy). As for the many skyscrapers, the great number of towers stacked and huddled together downtown, once full of offices and now filled with apartments, today they compete extravagantly to be noticed.

In spite of the large population and the many ethnic groups that live here, in the end this is a “together” community. After just a few days in Toronto, a new arrival feels like a Torontonian. Sometimes you feel you know more about this place than you do about your own.

Toronto is a city in perennial growth. After years sprawling inland, it now has a new residential vein to mine, attracting people from all over the planet as the city rediscovers its long coastline along the waters of the inland sea that is Lake Ontario. Initially, this growth was on the west bank; now, the east bank is all abuzz.

Important new architectural buildings are going up, most of them residential, mixed or university buildings. It goes without saying that a planned expansion for hundreds of thousands of inhabitants brings with it commerce and entertainment. Here, commerce and entertainment came first, following the redevelopment of the Old Distillery area into one of the city’s most popular nightlife spots. A few blocks further north, on King Street East, entrepreneur and restaurateur of evident Italian origins Janet Zuccarini has created a restaurant that is one of the hottest tables in town, not just for its cuisine, but for its architecture too.

I arrived under lashings of snow at Gusto 501, a new architectural design from Partisans that won me over, on the word-of-mouth...