See If These Enticing Properties Are Worth The Trip To Ontario

Phil’s Place

The Mississauga Hospital parking lot might soon have new tenants. Two years ago, Applebee’s and Hard Rock Cafe closed in the historic shopping and dining plaza. This spring, the two mom-and-pop restaurants reopened as Potager, a fine-dining steakhouse. And to complete the food scene, local organizers won’t rule out the possibility of redeveloping the empty space now holding a North American headquarters for Gulfstream Aerospace as a restaurant. “We have been working with that property for a long time on a game plan,” says Marché des Lagoises director Julie Chiodo, whose restaurant, Rivo Lounge, in a former grocery store at the plaza, has cultivated a devoted clientele for decades. “Right now there’s a rough spot, but we’re hopeful it will all work out.” Owner Earl Gibbon’s Ontario-centric pizza and other market-driven eats attract local star chef Thomas Keller, who is licensed to bring some of his legendary French restaurants to the city.

The Streetcar

Located at the confluence of two highways in Mississauga’s Victoria Park neighborhood, the former industrial stretch of Dufferin Avenue—which features a 14-story riverfront condo with a museum and retro cars—is transforming into a compact shopping and dining oasis, courtesy of architecture firm ArbourLynch and leading American fund manager John Thomson. The $1 billion Victorian entertainment project transformed the vacant underutilized property into a riverside space with an Italian-themed restaurant by James Beard award winner Carlo Petrini, among several other eateries and bars. “We bought a property and then reinvented it,” Thomson says.

Source: Flickr user 100,000 Dollars

Zootopia

The vast Caffe dell’Alburquerque in this sprawling Ontario city is known for its pasta. “I did 15 or 20 different varieties,” says chef Kenny Hudson, who has operated the establishment for 26 years. Among his pastas, flourishes include pistachio and pistachio-chocolate-covered avocado. But Hudson, who also owns a Brazilian steakhouse at the general-hospital campus, his country’s first in Ontario, also has found a loyal following for Zootopia. The Nevada-inspired dessert—caramelized vanilla bean espresso ice cream with semisweet chocolate chips and semisweet chocolate chunks, white chocolate mousse, and mini mint leaves—is cooked in a custom-made cookbook oven. The easy-to-assemble dessert items, such as an American version of a Cuban style called Puerto Rico (spiced flourless chocolate cake topped with a warm guava sauce, smoked paprika, and a shot of espresso) and a Thai inspired by the menu of a café with whimsical owners in Bangkok, are proving popular, too.

This article appears in the October 2018 issue of Washingtonian.

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