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By Melinda M, March 8, 2010 5:00 pm

The Canadian Music Fest starts this Wednesday, March 10 and you can see a lot of great shows right here in Ossington Village. We’ll just let you know which venues in the neighborhood are hosting events for the festival. The full schedule is posted here.

The Painted Lady has a full line-up of bands and djs all 4 nights of the fest, and around the corner on Queen @ Dovercourt, The Social will be hosting CMW DJs on Thursday and Saturday.

The Garrison on Dundas is hosting 2 nights of Eye Weekly showcases featuring indie bands like Cadence Weapon and The D’urbervilles.

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By Melinda M, February 7, 2010 12:15 pm

Still trying to decide how to spend your Super Bowl Sunday? If you want to watch the big game or do something less sports-oriented, here are some choices in the Ossington/Dundas area.

The Painted Lady is hosting a SuperBowl party with large screen TVs and a special menu including varieties of hot dogs. They are even conducting a football pool so you can really have something to root for.

Reposado celebrates “Superbowl Stupor” at 5PM with free munchies and $5 tall boys.

The Dakota Tavern continues with their usual live music lineup starting with Lickin Good Fried at 7 and house band the Beauties at 10p.

Communist’s Daughter hosts their regular Sunday afternoon jazz starting 4:30ish.

The Garrison’s Wavelength series continues tonight with bands playing from 9p- late.

You can check out some art at AWOL open til 5 with a new exhibition this weekend.

There are likely more events happening, but this is a start. Have a great Superbowl Sunday!

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By Brians, December 8, 2009 10:06 am

Last Wednesday night the Dakota Tavern, the little underground music joint which caps our row of great merchants on Ossington turned 3 years old with a party complete with great musicians.

The Dakota is really what Ossington is all about. I would consider it like a metaphor for the street itself – sometimes too commercial (line-ups and bouncers), sometimes too rowdy (yep, there are drunk people coming out), but mostly hip and accessible, and serving some great food. It’s was born like the street itself, bringing life out of an old broken down basement bar, and like the street itself has an uncomfortable but cordial relationship with the Portuguese bar that sits atop and to the south.

For my friends with kids who don’t go out much any more I always suggest the Bluegrass brunch which they serve up on Sunday afternoons. It’s a family style brunch served in front of some great bluegrass musicians, and there are always lots of kids dancing to the morning to mid-afternoon music.

One of the mainstays of The Dakota are The Beauties, who play Sunday nights. It’s a night where musicians come to listen to other musicians, and if you go often enough you might see Fiest, or Ron Sexsmith, or one of a number of talented Canadian musicians take the stage.

Last Wednesday night the audience just this crowd. Talking to a few people in the crowd I don’t think I met anyone who wasn’t a musician.  I couldn’t stay late into the set, but managed to stick around for few songs from Justin Rutledge, another regular at the Dakota.

This month every Tuesday Jason Collette (of Broken Social Scene fame) is doing a Basement Review – a multi-disciplinary variety show with poets, songwriters and great musicians.

Update: Also noticed tonight that the Crooked Star is turning 5 this week. Don’t forget to head over and wish them a happy birthday.

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By Brians, November 10, 2009 1:18 pm

Today the city council met to discuss the Ossington Restaurant study and the recommendations presented by the city planner Jeff Markowiak. The amendment to the city laws prohibits restaurant sizes to less than 175 square metres and restricts any second floor use or patios by restaurants on this small local strip. Unfortunately council voted to pass this restrictive amendment.

While there were about 15 presenters who opposed the motion, the council decided to ignore them to support what they called the ’silent people’ who don’t come to these sorts of meetings. There were both local residents and business owners who presented and many, including myself, mentioned the fact that they weren’t consulted on what was going on in the neighbourhood.

After everyone presented Mr. Pantalone spoke for about 10 minutes presenting a case that disputed the evidence presented by the people who spoke at the meeting. He again cited his usual ‘An Ounce of Prevention is worth a Pound of Cure’ mantra to justify his position. He stated that one of his challenges was to balance the interest of local business owners and businesses.

Many of the other councilors spoke up and supported Mr. Pantalone and they all seemed to think the city planner had done a great job in the ’study’  and that it was standard practice to simply have a town hall meeting just before the study is complete to get the feeling of what local residents are thinking.

A number of councilors spoke up and said that there were avenues to go through to work around the by-laws presented, including going to a committee of adjustment. A few business owners, as well as city planners I talked with after the meeting say that this creates an unfair burden on the business, both the local business owner and the building owner, to go and meet with the city. And from what I understood from prior experiences conveyed to me, a single local resident can veto any amendment proposed. This does not create a level playing field for entrepreneurs, especially because restaurants on Dundas and Queen are not subject to the same rules. Any proposal to the city of adjustment takes time and money, and not something that would be undertaken by most small local businesses. They would just go somewhere else.

Another issue raised by the councilors was that this was a balance between business owners and local residents, but this wasn’t in evidence at all. Both local residents and business owners were represented at the meeting.

Mr Pantalone, to his credit, offered to meet with the business owners before the 30th of November when some adjustments can be made to the bylaw. The local business owners are intending to take him up on the offer.

Local residents should too. We will be setting up a website where local residents can support the local businesses and their community in order to allow the entrepreneurship on the street to flourish and grow. Look forward to something posted here.

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By Brians, October 29, 2009 10:51 pm

I was invited to sit in on a get-together tonight at one of the local Ossington businesses where about 25 of the local business owners came together to discuss the future of the neighbourhood. It was a powerful group of people, not by wealth, but by conviction and love of the neighbourhood. A true group of local entrepreneurs supporting both employment and the arts.

They were there to put together an organization to counter a proposal being organized by Deputy Mayor, Joe Pantalone. After a first strike at enterpreurship in May when he, pretty much single-handedly, stopped growth on Ossington with a moratorium on new businesses on the strip, he intends to push through a proposal to drive a nail through that coffin by imposing a harsh new set of bylaws which, essentially, kill all potential for the neighbourhood to grow and develop.

Local entrepreneurs are, as you can imagine, enraged.

The new proposal being floated before council will essentially end entrepreneurship in the area of the city. The proposal include such restrictions as:

• Limits on Restaurant Size to less than 1800 sqft – hardly enough to make money. (as a former restaurant owner, I can confirm this)
• Removing any potential of the restaurant use to ‘entertainment purposes’. Currently 20% of the eating area of restaurants can be designated.
• No patios are permitted anywhere. Whatsoever! (too bad for summer lovers in the city)
• No second floor restaurants. (where’s the cool local flavour in that? and what about cool rooftop patios? – and there are no other current restrictions on that anywhere else)
• Limits on window and door openings. (these don’t consider in other places)

The moratorium was imposed in May and I can’t see where there’s been any local study take place. The restrictions proposed replace the moratorium and are the same ones that have been imposed on College, Queen West, and Queen East. There’s been no discussion with local owners or residents. In fact, these regulations have been imposed suddenly, with a sense of local malice.

As a resident of the neighbourhood I haven’t been polled, asked, or even invited to a resident’s association to talk about how the great entrepreneurship and development in my neighbourhood affects me.

While the people I met with tonight seemed like a bit of a rag-tag group – busy, and struggling entrepreneurs struggling against comfortable local, government and, perhaps, corporate interests – I think they are genuinely protecting the vibrancy of the neighbourhood. If its a good neighbourhood in the day, at night, and on the weekends for residents and visitors, they succeed, and we all succeed – as residents, businesses, as a city, and as a culture.

Let’s hope they do, for all of our interests!

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By Brians, August 15, 2009 2:09 am

Ossington broke out into song and dance tonight with the Ossington Blackout Street Party. It was quiet to start, with bars turning off their lights and just having candles and acoustic music. We stopped in the Crooked Star for a pint, and while it was hot inside, the atmosphere was fun and people were enjoying themselves. Along the street, in parking spots there were games of musical chairs, foozball, and jugglers.

Then right around 10 the party broke out. Fire jugglers, samba drummers, and all sorts of musicians, including the organizer, Michael J. and Richard Underhill, of the shuffle demons.

Here’s a set of the pictures with music accompaniment:

If you have more, let me know and I’ll add them into the mix. Keep an eye on the facebook and yelp pages, for more pics.

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By Brians, August 5, 2009 8:54 pm

Come to Ossington on Friday August 14th for the a fun night in the best neighbourhood in the city. Michael Johnson, the troubador of Communist’s Daughter, and advocate for less cars through his streets are for people campaign, is organizing a party in celebration of the 6th Anniversary of the Toronto blackout.

This should be a great night. There should be no lights, no mics, no amps, some good acoustic music.

There should be a lot of venues involved. While walking the street tonight I saw signs on Reposado, Painted Lady, Foxley Bistro and BQM.

They have a facebook page here.

And don’t forget about the Yelp Ossington Pub Crawl next week.

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By Brians, July 24, 2009 9:43 am

I’m a big fan of Yelp. It’s a review site for everything under the sun, but their big focus is restaurants and events in the city.

If you love Ossington and want to check out all the bars on the street (or a good lot of them) Kat, from Yelp, is organizing a Ossington Pub Crawl and Scavenger Hunt.

It should be a fun night to go an check out the whole neighbourhood. Go sign up on Yelp and come join us!

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By Brians, July 15, 2009 11:14 pm

When I was at the community meeting a few weeks ago talking about Joe Pantalone’s sudden and un-explained moratorium on new restaurants on Ossington, someone in the meeting asked why you could find lots of restaurants on the street, but you couldn’t buy a damn tomato on the strip.

As Toronto Life has pointed out, there’s been a big growth in gourmet food stores throughout Toronto. Salt Wine Bar, is also looking like they are going to be having a gourmet food shop attached to the restaurant. So maybe they’ll be selling fancy organic tomatoes, but probably not what the fellow was looking for, and probably for more than he’s willing to pay.

In other news, it looks like Chef Paul Boehmer is opening a place on Ossington. Did he get his application in before the deadline?

And Ossington hits the National Post yet again with a full summary of all the goodies on our fair street.

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By Brians, June 29, 2009 1:44 pm

The long anticipated Union Restaurant has now opened along Ossington. After Toronto Life gave him a blog to document his process, he only gave them about 6-7 cryptic posts about the progress of the place. Today I learned from Melissa Davis of YDF in her post documenting her visit last night to the new restaurant.

After pronouncements of “Opening Soon” hitting the headlines I think those who lived in the neighbourhood were quite skeptical. While we were awaiting this opening, other places like The Painted Lady and BQM opened and set themselves in as neighbourhood fixtures.

What is even more astounding is that the most recent blog post on the Toronto Life blog is on May 1st proclaiming that they were “almost” there. Shouldn’t we be kept more up to date than that?

In any case, here’s the info for the place:

The website, according to YDF, who seems to be ‘in the know’ is www.union72.ca, but it doesn’t seem to be operational as yet. UPDATE: The website is up and running.

We’re now looking forward to The Saint (another upcoming restaurant hyped by Toronto life, but not open) and Salt, both who seem to be on the verge of opening, but have been on the verge for months.