13 more things I hate about dining these days
"Dive bars", "hidden gems", ugly plates, influencer face and other battles I'm sure to lose.
Mikey Dislikey has seized control of the airwaves yet again. But worry not! We’ll be getting to more libraries and especially more lunches once he gets all this stuff off his chest. Next week: the Parliament branch and a couple Cabbagetown classics.
Calling regular bars “dive bars”
Both Toronto Life and the Star have published lists of Toronto’s best dive bars in recent months. Both are stuffed with places that no one who takes their drinking seriously would ever consider an actual “dive”: Squirly’s, Farside, the Communist’s Daughter, Grossman’s, the Done Right Inn. Each of these bars boasts a level of intention behind their offering that, to me, stretches the term “dive bar” to the point of meaninglessness. Farside has cocktails and video installations; Squirly’s has an excellent menu; the Communist’s Daughter has vinyl nights.
In other words, these are regular bars. And regular bars are great! Pubs, watering holes, friendly neighbourhood haunts—each a treasured part of the drinking ecosystem, regardless of whether the furniture is a little ratty or the bathroom graffiti a hair too vivid. Those are signs of a bar well lived. In the last few years, though, these supposedly seedy signifiers have titillated food and culture writers (to say nothing of influencers) in a way that suggests they are uncurious about how the most committed bar-goers go about their bar business. Calling these sorts of establishments “dives” is to shrink the horizon of what a bar can or should be.
What exactly is a dive bar? As a drinking buddy of mine put it, a dive bar is a place you wouldn’t take your mother. It’s a subjective standard—one man’s Ronnie’s is another’s Bar Isabel—that nonetheless cuts to the quick of what this conversation is dancing around: dives are at the bottom of the pool of available drinking locations, where the shabbiness is a product of neglect and not curation. They are bars that sell $5 bottles of macro-beers, well drinks and little else. They have terrible Google Reviews if they have any at all. They are bars that are just kind of sketchy.
Dozens of places like this operate around Toronto, and they are never covered by the local food media. Bars like Sun Fa and Ice Queen in Parkdale, or Honour Snack Bar in Kensington Market. They persist because they perform the vital social function of providing neighbourhood drunks a space to safely congregate and commiserate. Without the artifice of tasting notes or hi-fi sound systems to tickle our intellects, dives force us to reckon with the knowledge that going to a bar is largely about getting buzzed and talking shit. It’s as true when done over a couple Molson Exports as it is over a bottle of low-intervention Tempranillo.
You can feel the cost of living increase in real time whenever a rag confers “dive” status on a bar that serves $12 pints. What was once a pejorative to stigmatize a certain class of drinkers has been appropriated as a badge of authenticity by people with robust Aeroplan balances. Meanwhile, a few doors down, the actual dive and its patrons are being squeezed off the block altogether. Beware when Toronto Life comes knocking at your local’s door.
Death to “hidden gems” as well
After “dive bar,” “hidden gem” might be the most abused term in the world of hospitality. In January alone, I saw it used to describe everything from Michelin-recognized cocktail bars to buzzy, brand-new Dundas West noodle spots. How can a restaurant be hidden if it opened up mere weeks ago on a major thoroughfare? And it’s already on Ambassador??
A restaurant cannot be a “hidden gem” if it has an Instagram account, a public relations push or a few hundred Google reviews. If it has any of those, it’s a place you just learned about and are now trying to pass off as insider knowledge. And that’s my racket. Shove off!
Restaurants not telling me where they are
Speaking of restaurants on Instagram: put your damn address in your bio. The field is there for a reason, and that reason is to get me to your front door and then give you my money. Your social media manager probably thinks they’re doing something mysterious or even coquettish to build your brand, but all they’re doing is making me close the app and pull open Google Maps, where I’ll encounter customers’ reviews and their terrible, terrible photos of your food. Just give me the goods up front, honey.
Also, being served ads on Instagram for restaurants that are nowhere near me
I can’t tell if this is an Instagram algorithm issue or another example of your social media manager being bad at their job. Regardless, I should not be seeing ads for restaurants in Vancouver, or Montreal or Thunder Bay. You will not be converting those impressions, buddy. And to rub it in your face, I will be clicking through to your profile, just to drive up your ad spend. Your margins can’t handle that waste.
Food influencer face
You know what I’m talking about. The raised brow, the wide-open eyes, the half-opened mouth, all before the brain has registered what the thing tastes like.
Eating with Tod is the biggest offender, but he’s more a symptom than a cause. Everything is video now, and what plays on Reels and TikTok are exaggerated reactions played for immediate serotonin hits. Viral food + dumb face = views. It’s a formula that keeps the influencer industry lumbering along, even as the uniformity of the reactions whittles away the returns with each view.
Some of us have more refined palates, a preference for nuanced critiques from sources with cast-iron principles seasoned with a dash of homespun wisdom. Someone like dinewithkent, a fella from Houston who loves nothing more than a harshly lit strip mall restaurant—a kindred spirit if I ever had one. He’ll show you how a man can try a dosa for the first time and keep his dignity intact.
Let me hold onto the drinks menu for a little bit
What’s with all the rush in getting the drinks menu off the table? Is there some sort of worldwide menu shortage that requires a coordinated conservation effort by every restaurant in existence? The food menu, sure, I understand that we want to keep the clutter down. But I’m going to have a second, and probably a third, and realistically we could even be looking at a fourth beverage, and I haven’t exactly had the chance to memorize the thing yet. Patience, please.
Let me pay and get out of here already
Nothing turns me against a restaurant faster than being held hostage by the bill. I can accept it in Barcelona, but on home turf, that 20-30 extra minutes spent sobering up against my will puts a damper the rest of the evening. I have places to be, man [citation needed].
Bizarrely enough, the French, of all people, have proven to be innovators here. Many of the restaurants I visited in Paris two summers ago were using QR codes to settle bills efficiently and elegantly. All the ordering was still done through paper menus and human servers; only the payment was handled through a QR code printed somewhere visible but unobtrusive on the table. While there’s no avoiding the fact that QR codes are inherently kinda ugly to look at, the Parisians work them into the overall mise en scène with the sort of grace and effortlessness that they’re known for. Impatient tourists can get on with their lives, the staff don’t have to look at the tourists’ revolting physiques a minute longer than necessary, everybody goes home happy.
“Walk-ins welcome!”
Lies.
Restaurants with customized dinnerware
These dishes used to mean you were dining somewhere sophisticated and important. Nowadays, every other King Street bistro serving “comfort food classics” just like “Nonna used to make” is blowing through their seed money on dinnerware and typeface licences. Worse than their ubiquity is the carelessness with which the wordmarks are applied—big and obvious, shouting at you through social media, as opposed to the subtle marks of distinction that tasteful monograms once implied. Tacky!
Wagyu burgers
We need to talk about Wagyu burgers. “Wagyu” literally means “Japanese cow”, and unlike fancy French wine or Scotch whisky, the term isn’t protected in Canada. That Wagyu going into your $20 burger is not made from cattle hand-raised by low-intervention farmers in Kagoshima prefecture. Most likely, it’s Alberta Angus blended with a few cows who may be able to claim Japanese parentage—the kind of mix that Arby’s used in their Wagyu burger a few years ago.
And if your Wagyu burger really was 100% Wagyu, it would be a waste of good Wagyu. The extra fatty marbling that is the hallmark of proper Wagyu can be transcendent when eaten in steak form—A5 Wagyu being so rich and fatty that a proper serving is usually just a few thin slices. Grinding it, turning it into a patty and grilling it to hell results in the most expensive version of a cheap burger. Quit playing yourself.
When there’s nowhere to my put coat
The number of restaurants and bars in Toronto that fail to account for fact that we wear winter coats for 30% of the year never ceases to amaze. Coats are among the most expensive clothing items owned by Canadians and easily the most essential, but here we are, forced to toss them into unsightly piles or squish them beneath our asses, sleeves dangling from our seats into the salty grime of a barroom floor. I’m not asking for much: a $15 coat rack from IKEA, a couple more hooks beneath the bar. We can solve this.
People camping out at cafe tables
I featured Larry’s Place in the Libraries & Lunches series last week because my wife and I actually managed to secure a table there for once in our goddamned lives. It’s a gorgeous cafe whose popularity means there’s never a spot to sit down and enjoy a cup of coffee. A lot of those spots are taken up by oafs with laptops, no doubt churning out solipsistic Substacks that no one in their right mind will ever read. Cafe seats in our urban cores are simply too hard to come by for you to turn them into a mobile office—go to one of our 100 libraries if you’re going to be there for more than a half hour.
13. Barbershops that are also bars
They’re still doing these things, by the way—I count at least five of these operating in Toronto as of 2026. I don’t want my barber anywhere near booze, and I don’t want my booze anywhere near Barbicide and beard trimmings. That’s like having your dentist running a burger joint. Yuck.
