The Big Smoke
Toronto is the largest city in Canada and the fourth largest in North America. The Greater Toronto Area holds 6.3 million people from every country on earth, speaking over 200 languages, eating food from every culinary tradition that exists. It is one of the most genuinely multicultural cities in the world — not as a marketing claim, but as a daily lived reality that you notice within an hour of arriving.
The city sits on the north shore of Lake Ontario, which is large enough to look like a sea from the waterfront. The CN Tower anchors the skyline. The Financial District runs south toward the lake. The neighbourhoods spread east and west — each one with its own identity, its own food, its own particular version of what Toronto means.
The City
Toronto rewards exploration beyond the obvious landmarks. Kensington Market for independent food and vintage clothing. Chinatown immediately adjacent to it. Little Italy on College Street. The Distillery District for architecture and galleries. Ossington Avenue for restaurants that are consistently better than anything near the CN Tower.
The waterfront has improved significantly over the past two decades. The Islands — accessible by ferry from the harbour — offer an unlikely green escape from the density of the city, with views back toward the skyline that make the crossing worth it every time.
History
Before the skyscrapers, before the financial district, before the incorporated city of Toronto that emerged in 1834, this land was known as Tkaronto — a meeting place recognised by Indigenous peoples long before European settlement arrived. The name survived the colonisation and the renaming and eventually came back into common use as a reminder of what was here first.
The city incorporated in 1834 and spent the next century building itself into an industrial and rail hub. Factories, transportation networks, the infrastructure of a growing economy. By the mid-20th century the character of the city shifted — immigration waves from Europe, then from Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa transformed Toronto from a largely Anglo-Protestant city into something far more complex and interesting.
In doing so, Toronto eventually surpassed Montreal as Canada’s financial capital. That transition was not just economic — it reflected a broader shift in the country’s centre of gravity. Montreal had dominated for a century. Toronto took over and has not looked back.
Toronto Film Festival
TIFF — the Toronto International Film Festival — is one of the most important film festivals in the world. It runs every September and draws filmmakers, studios, critics, and audiences from across the globe. Unlike Cannes or Venice, TIFF has always been oriented toward the audience as much as the industry — public screenings, accessible ticketing, a democratic approach to what gets shown and who gets to see it.
The festival has become a key moment in the awards season calendar. Films that premiere at TIFF often go on to compete at the Oscars. The combination of critical attention, industry presence, and genuine public enthusiasm makes it a unique event. Furthermore, it reflects Toronto’s broader character — internationally connected, culturally serious, and genuinely open to the world in a way that feels earned rather than performed.
MuchMusic
In the 1980s and 1990s, MuchMusic was the Nation’s Music Station. Based in Toronto on Queen Street West, it operated out of an open-concept street-level studio where passersby could press their faces against the glass and watch the VJs work in real time. That was not an accident — it was a philosophy. MuchMusic was built on accessibility and a deliberately rough, guerrilla-style production aesthetic that set it apart from the highly polished American equivalent.
MTV broadcast from a studio. MuchMusic broadcast from a street. The difference mattered. It meant the channel felt like it belonged to the city and to the audience rather than to a corporation. VJs were personalities, not presenters. The interviews were unscripted. Artists came in and talked like people rather than performing a promotional appearance.
For anyone who grew up in Canada in those decades, MuchMusic was the primary way music was discovered, debated, and absorbed. It launched careers. shaped taste. made Toronto feel, briefly and genuinely, like the centre of the music universe. By the early 2000s the channel shifted toward reality programming and lost much of what had made it essential. What it was in its peak years remains a specific and irreplaceable part of Canadian cultural history.
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BeaverTail
The BeaverTail is a fried dough pastry shaped like a beaver’s tail — flat, oval, crispy at the edges, soft in the middle, covered in toppings. Cinnamon sugar is the classic. Nutella exists. So do combinations involving lemon and icing sugar that make more sense than they sound.
The origin story is specific. In 1978, Grant and Pam Hooker started selling them in Killaloe, a small town in Ontario. The recipe came from Grant’s grandmother — a simple fried dough that fur traders and working people had been making through Canadian winters for generations. The Hookers turned a family recipe into a business. That business eventually spread across the country and became one of the more recognisable Canadian food traditions.
In Francesco’s Kitchen, the BeaverTails episode shows the full process from scratch — dough preparation, stretching technique, frying, and topping. The dough-stretching is harder than it looks. Francesco demonstrates this clearly. The finished result is worth the effort. These are a winter essential — best eaten outside in the cold, ideally near a skating rink, definitely warm and slightly too messy to eat neatly.
The name references the Canadian Fur Trade — a defining chapter of Canadian history that shaped the economy, the geography, and the cultural exchange between Indigenous peoples and European settlers. The pastry carries that history lightly. It is primarily just very good fried dough.
For more on Canada — covered in full on NAO. Toronto interviews include Nathan Bishop MacDonald and Antonietta De Giovanni — both worth reading alongside this guide.
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