Toronto “Summerlicious” is a food festival organized by the city, which encourages people to try out different restaurants by offering special three course fixed-price menus. Now in its 16th year, this year it runs for 2 1/2 weeks, from July 5th to 21, with over 200 restaurants participating, many offering both a lunch and dinner “Summerlicious” menu. There’s an application and vetting process, with the city selecting which places may participate, to make sure that people get to enjoy only the best food.
I believe that Simmerlicious menus are to include three or more choices of an appetizer, a main course and a dessert, and at least one dish in each category must be a vegetarian option. Restaurant offer their 3-course meals at three price-points : $23, 28 or 33 for lunch and $33, 43 or 53 for dinner.
While Nick and I make a point of getting to at least one new-to-us restaurant during the festival, I find that there’s an added ongoing benefit, in that it gives me a chance to easily check out a whole bunch of tantalizing menus, for a wide variety of restaurants in and around our neighbourhood, on their site, giving us lots of ideas for places to try in the future.
This year, we chose to have lunch at a relatively new restaurant — it opened in the fall of 2017 — called Northern Maverick, located at the corner of Bathurst and Adelaide Street West.
It’s a large place where they also brew their own craft beers. We had picked up some of their beers in the adjoining shop a few times and really liked them, but had not yet been to the restaurant.
In few words, we were very pleased with our selection of places to try for Summerlicious 2019! The food, service and comfortable environment were all excellent and we look forward to going back.
Here are some photos taken during our time there. (We went for a late lunch last Thursday.)
Nick was in the mood for a burger and fries, which wasn’t a Summerlicious option for the lunch menu (although it is for the dinner one), so he went à la carte and I chose from the prix-fixe menu.
This worked out perfectly, as the appetizer I had (Vegetable Pakoras) and the dessert (Housemade Maple Ice Cream) were definitely generous enough to serve two.
I had Buttermilk Fried Chicken for my main course, described as “Ontario Chicken, Housemade Cornbread, Slaw, and Mango Habanero Sauce. Unprompted, they added a second sauce, a creamy herb one, to my plate, as well.
To drink we had some of their in-house brewed beer – Dry Hopped Grizette for me and Vienna Lager for Nick.
Everything was delicious!
↑ Non-beer drinkers need not worry, there is a full bar, as well, and, of course, a variety of alcohol-free beverages. ↑
↑ The beer brewing tanks are upstairs. ↑
As mentioned, we’d been to their adjacent beer shop before, so these next photos were taken last summer …
↑ The large outdoor patio was sparsely populated when we were there last week because it was really hot and muggy out, however, you can see that it gets fully used on nicer days. ↑
Thank you for reading and wishing you a great week end. xo loulou
