Address: 319 Augusta Ave.

Slinging burgers since: October 2009

Burger boss: Brock Shepherd

Specialty: The Lamb Bam burger ($9.95) is made using naturally raised, organic lamb, ground in house and dressed with dijon mustard, kimchi, and blue cheese, all between a soft Cobs bun.

Their $5 Burger Week special: The Hop Burger: a naturally raised local beef burger infused with hops and topped with a house-made chipotle aioli.

Fun Fact: Burger Bar owner Brock Shepherd is also responsible for Toronto craft brew house Kensington Brewing Company.

Burger Week happens May 30-June 2 at participating restaurants, culminating in the Burger Day event June 3 at Wychwood Barns (76 Wychwood). Read all of our Burger Week spotlights at www.thegridto.com/tag/burger-week.

Address: 461 King St. W.

Slinging burgers since: March 2010

Burger boss: Chris Kalisperas

Specialty: Burger ($15) with Quebec brie, smoked bacon, iceberg lettuce, pickles, and tomatoes.

Their Burger Week special: A lamb burger with wild-leek aioli, heirloom tomato, housemade pickles, and feta cheese, all on an Ace Bakery bun. $15 with fries.

Fun Fact: Chef Chris Kalisperas is an alumni of fine dining Midtown institution Centro.

Burger Week happens May 30-June 2 at participating restaurants, culminating in the Burger Day event June 3 at Wychwood Barns (76 Wychwood). Read all of our Burger Week spotlights at www.thegridto.com/tag/burger-week.

Battleship is so loud, in fact, that many viewers won’t be able to hear themselves think. Which is okay insofar as there’s not all that much to think about. This is not a film that’s concerned with subtle or esoteric details, and if you do miss anything, chances are a character will reiterate it for you before long. The dialogue often feels like descriptive video for the visually impaired, and the plot is similarly perfunctory: spaceships touch down in the Pacific Ocean and the U.S. navy (led by a bored-looking Liam Neeson) is our last line of defense. The combination of an inflated epic running time, assaultive volume, and dumbed-down storytelling is straight out of the Michael Bay playbook, and at times Battleship feels like a mash-up of Pearl Harbour (strapping naval heroes) and Transformers (marauding robotic alien invaders).

But Berg doesn’t have Bay’s eye for arresting huge-scale scene compositions, nor his authentic douchebag grandeur. This is more like Michael Bay Lite, with previously recorded AC/DC tracks doing the heavy lifting that an original Aerosmith rock ballad would otherwise accomplish. As a wayward young man who finds purpose (and a way into Brooklyn Decker’s pants) by joining the U.S. Navy, Taylor Kitsch is blandly aerodynamic and only vaguely heroic in the face of intergalactic intruders. His best moment comes after he’s been tasered and reduced to a mass of quivering, whimpering goo—a sight gag that neatly mirrors the viewer’s own sensory overload.

2. But unfortunately, writes Edward Keenan, our dear mayor is still totally off-base about the five-cent plastic bag fee.

3. It was a very good week for many people in Toronto, but especially for this guy.

4. What happens when four of our favourite chefs create their own gourmet versions of KFC’s Double Down? The answer: these delicious creations.

5. Don’t haul your bike out of storage to ride around in this good weather without getting a tuneup from one of these fine bike repair shops.

6. Do you live for the daily drama and sheer hilarity of Toronto’s City Hall? If so, the Necessary Angel Theatre Company is working on a play that you will love.

7. It’s not every day that a street in Toronto gets a little bit longer, but Ossington Avenue finally stretched out south of Queen Street this week.

8. Which summer blockbuster will reign supreme? In this chart, we pit the season’s eight most anticipated movies against each other to get some perspective on their true supremacy.

9. Sure, your high school house parties were legendary. But have you ever been to a super-secret mega-mansion party before?

10. And with that, we wish you a lovely Victoria Day weekend. Catch some sun, light some fireworks, and treat yourself to a really, really nice beer.

1. A judge has ruled that Conservative MP Ted Opitz‘s win in last year’s federal election, in the Etobicoke Centre riding, is void after examining “irregularities”  in the voting paperwork.

2. Live Nation announced it would be selling $4 beers at its amphitheatre concerts this summer—but Toronto was left out of the plan.

3. After Black Sabbath drummer Bill Ward pulled out of the group’s reunion tour, his picture was removed from all the band’s photos on their website.

TRENDING UP

1. Twitter has added a “Do Not Track” tool to its site, allowing users to avoid “behavioural tracking” and stop the site from collecting personal information.

2. Ridley Scott is planning a sequel to 1982′s Blade Runner.

3. A movie centred on former News International CEO Rebekah Brooks is in the works.

The accompanying profile of attachment-parenting guru Dr. William Sears was titled “The Man Who Remade Motherhood,” despite the fact that his movement—based on co-sleeping, extended breastfeeding, and babywearing—has, y’know, the word “parenting” in its title. The 4,122-word article contained the word “father” only six times—including perhaps-related mentions of Sears’ father leaving when he was a month old and his wife (and co-author) Martha’s father dying when she was four. (Is it any wonder they fixate on moms?)

Well, I’m a dad who feels pretty damn attached to my two-year-old. I even occasionally wore my son Emile in a sling (until he stopped digging it after a couple months), though I’d never actually heard of attachment parenting at the time. But even if I had, there wouldn’t have been much there for me. On the vast Ask Dr Sears website, the peripheral AP Fathering section gets but three paragraphs, ending with a “for more information on fathering, see Fathering” message, which leads only to a “page not found” error. I don’t know how much more information might be missing, but clearly it’s not being accessed very much or someone might have noted the dead link.

Among the sparse paternal mentions, Sears does say “fathers also help to nurture their babies by loving and supporting their wives” and that “while mother preference is natural to the baby in the early years, the father is not off the hook. The father creates a supportive environment that allows the mother to devote her energy to baby matters.”

Important to be sure, but dads are more than support staff. It is not the 1950s, which is when the deeply religious Sears’ opinions on working mothers seem to have been formed, prompting feminist responses like Elisabeth Badinter’s The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women. But perhaps it wouldn’t be so undermining if men were allowed more than token roles in child-rearing. We may not be able to breastfeed, however, attachment parenting puts so much focus on mothering that it necessarily keeps fathers on the fringes.

But so does parenting culture in general; it might as well be called “mothering culture.” There are mommy blogs, mothering message boards, women’s “parenting” magazines, and stacks upon stacks of parenting tomes that, unless very occasionally denoted with a dad in the subtitle, are for female readers. Even most daddy blogs seem to boast a primarily female readership.

And advertising? Well, that’s almost exclusively aimed at mamas, too, often mocking us supposedly bumbling dads as if Don Draper had written the copy. Why are moms so stressed out these days? Could it be that the Parent-Industrial Complex is a billion-dollar industry preying on the fears, insecurities, and anxieties of women while essentially ignoring men? (Yes, dads feature heavily in the trailer for this week’s baby book-turned-movie What to Expect When You’re Expecting, but alongside Louie and Up All Night, they are rule-proving exceptions.)

I am as involved as I possibly could be—and since my wife finished mat leave, we share the parenting equally. But what I do not do—and what many, if not most, other dads’ also don’t do—is peruse parenting books, blogs, and message boards (unless it’s for this column). Maybe it’s a guys-don’t-use-maps stereotype, but I derive great pleasure from winging it, just like moms and dads did before the parenting industry exploded over the past couple decades. Just like they do in the foreign cultures that attachment parenting aims to emulate. I do look up specific things, like ear infections or toilet-training, but I don’t stress myself out with preemptive research or pointless overthinking and certainly don’t subscribe to an all-encompassing parenting philosophy written by a stranger who has never met my son. I hardly need Sears’ 767-page book to tell me to love, respect, and cuddle my kid. (I don’t need a marketing label, either—I just call that “parenting.”)

Dr. “no cry” Sears says to follow your instincts, but then he denigrates instincts like my own, which balance structure and independence (including sleep-training, which Sears dubs “convenience” parenting by people with “hardened hearts” that will break your baby’s brain) alongside as much snuggling as E will tolerate.

“Studies on troubled teens and psychopaths have shown that these persons have one abnormal feature in common: a lack of caring,” he also fearmongers. “Not so the children who are the product of attachment parenting.” (Though I sure do like the part where he unironically slags his “prophets-of-bad-parenting-advice” competitors as “some third-party advisor who has no biological connection to your baby, no knowledge or investment in your baby, and isn’t even there at 3:00 a.m. when your baby cries.”)

Now, the overall purpose of attachment parenting—to raise happier, healthier children—is wonderful and I don’t want to pick solely on Sears. The Guardian reports that a recent study by the University of Warwick into 50 years of parenting books “says every manual designed to offer support and advice to women has had the opposite effect, leaving them dispirited and feeling inadequate.”

Well, I’m a man who doesn’t feel dispirited or inadequate. While my wife worries unnecessarily about being a perfect mother and career woman, feeling guilty about this or that, I thrive guilt-free on making it up as I go along based on my son’s cues. E loves daycare, having his own room, and independent play just as much as he loves brunching, co-napping, and the dance routine we do every morning to “Life’s a Happy Song.” Fatherhood is vastly more epic and intense than I expected, but it goes a lot smoother the less you stress about it.

I do get that men and women parent differently. Emile and I play rougher, watch more superhero cartoons, build more forts, and go out for more waffles. I taught E to growl before he could even talk, and his mom probably wouldn’t have done that, either. But different doesn’t mean more or less important. I don’t need nor want props for being involved, but I would like to see parenting culture stop freaking moms out and stop subjecting dads to the sexism of lowered expectations.

So am I dad enough? Here’s the thing: I would never actually ask myself that question—and moms shouldn’t either.

Maev Beaty recently had a similar epiphany: “It was the best show that I’ve seen in about five years,” says the ubiquitous Toronto actor, at the start of a new play about Toronto City Council. “If we could,” she tells the audience, “we would take you there right now.”

Civility is a new “theatrical work-in-progress” by Necessary Angel Theatre Company, conceived and shaped by its artistic director, Daniel Brooks. Brooks is something of a legendary figure in the Toronto arts scene: working primarily as a director, he has collaborated on many of the best-known shows by playwrights Daniel MacIvor, Guillermo Verdecchia, and John Mighton. So when he was first spotted hanging out at Council meetings last fall, there was reason to believe he was up to something.

That something quietly premiered in a workshop production at the Lower Ossington Theatre for two performances last weekend. It was the culmination of a five-week rehearsal process that involved Brooks bringing a small team of theatre artists (both actors and designers) to City Hall for the April and May Council meetings. As things had settled down politically by then—taking a turn from the apocalyptic to the banal—the group found itself focusing not on the major dramas but on the little details: the gestures, the movements, the procedures, the nuances of every councillor’s sigh. And indeed, Civility is as much a tribute to the rituals and rhythms of Council as it is to the particular characters involved; the things that are eye-glazing in a nine-hour meeting are hilarious when rendered as tightly choreographed movement-based interludes and clown-inspired physical comedy.

The show opens with the players casually wandering in to take the seats at their desks. A small red digital clock on the back wall counts down the seconds from “5:00.”  Beaty, her hands full with a coffee, a glass of water, and a stack of Council documents, unsuccessfully attempts to navigate the belt stanchions separating the stage from the audience. You just know that this is something she witnessed a councillor doing, and you try to figure out who it was.

The stage manager and sound designer, seated at desks on either side of the performance area, serve as the clerks. The stage manager even has a laser printer, from which she distributes “motions” to the performers, who themselves are situated along a long desk in the centre, a microphone at each seat.  Much of the comedy comes from the show’s attention to, and the characters’ obsession with, minutiae. To list the procedural quirks reproduced in Civility would be to give away many of the jokes.

But it’s not all riffing on the little things. Much of the show consists of actual episodes from City Council and the Budget Committee, presented in word-for-word reenactments: impressively, such scenes are even funnier and more compelling when transferred into an explicitly theatrical context.

Beaty portrays every female member of Council, some with uncanny accuracy. In one vignette, she plays Pam McConnell, delivering a speech congratulating the St. Lawrence Market for being named the best food market in the world by National Geographic. (See the original starting at 21:00 here.)  In another, she plays Frances Nunziata, burning with rage as she clashes with Mary Fragedakis over civic appointments. (See the original starting at about 3:15 here.) The latter vignette, with Beaty taking on every role in the melee, is a particular tour de force.

Two original interviews conducted by the cast are presented as verbatim monologues. Christopher Morris, embodying Doug Ford, spits out the label magnate’s gregarious tirade at a rapid clip—and entirely in the nude. Deco‘s expansion across North America, for example, is illustrated through confident, directional tugs of his penis. Perhaps even more eyebrow-raising, however, are Ford’s candid admissions that he dislikes dealing with ward issues (“The constituents are kind of boring”) and that he considers Marci McDonald’s Toronto Life cover story on the mayor to have been an even worse smear piece than those put out by the Toronto Star; he says he personally phoned up Tony Gagliano—CEO of St. Joseph Communications, Toronto Life’s parent company—to complain. Later in the show, a City staffer (whose name is withheld for obvious reasons) compares Giorgio Mammoliti’s thumb-based vote-whipping to a “fascist state” and observes that Mayor Rob Ford possesses ”such enormous discomfort outside his own world.”

That, however, is more or less the extent of the Ford talk. The mayor has no greater presence in Civility than he does in the real City Hall. His influence is sometimes felt, but he plays no substantial role in the proceedings. What interests Civility’s creators is everything else about City Council, everything else about the city.

The show’s final movement brings us the deputation of Hubert Mantha, a 71-year-old Seaton House resident who addressed the Budget Committee last December. (See the original starting at 1:22:15 here.) Mantha, played by Morris, speaks slowly and plainly: about the shelter in which he lives, about inequality more broadly, and about the inanity of a budget that is focussed on cutting despite the enormous wealth that is apparent in our city. His subsequent exchanges with councillors Janet Davis, Raymond Cho, Sarah Doucette, Joe Mihevc, and Josh Matlow follow. And here we see why this show—both City Hall itself and Civility the play—matters. We see why civility matters. We see that City Council and the things they do are often entertaining and funny, yes, but also monumentally important to the lives of the people in Toronto, and especially to those who are the least well off. The dialogues, the interactions, the personalities, and the decisions they make have direct effects. It’s entertainment with a purpose.

Speaking to director Brooks a couple of days later, I ask him what his plans for Civility are. Where does it go from here? Some of the people who, unbeknownst to them, function as characters in the show would surely like to see it. “I have no firm plans,” he says. “There are a number of things that could happen. I mean, I think it’s a piece that could be run in a theatre. But it’s also the kind of thing that we could do every month, once a month. I need to catch up on my taxes and my sleep, and once I do that, which could be next week, I’ll start considering my schedule.”

There’s further room for it to grow. After all, Brooks teases, he has yet to include the extensive conversation he just recorded with Giorgio Mammoliti.

Moving back to Toronto, Souroujon opened Pikto (55 Mill) in Toronto’s Distillery District in 2003, offering everything from printing services and workshops on fashion photography to digital-darkroom and studio rentals. While Pikto is focussed very much on the digital aspect of photography—”most of the professionals have moved to digital; actually, just about all of them,” he says—that doesn’t mean film has completely vanished.

“We do printing and scanning and we do process black-and-white as well,” says Souroujon. “But there are big issues with processing, because the machines are not meant to run a few rolls; they’re meant to run a lot of rolls in bulk. That’s why we stopped doing C-41 [colour negative film] about a year and a half ago.”

The people who are still taking advantage of film tend to fall into one of two groups, say Souroujon. “There’s some people that are maybe starting—some students or younger people that want to experiment who have never tried film,” he says. “And definitely there’s fine-arts and portrait photographers who are still hanging on to their film. I think it’ll always be there for certain people. It has a certain magic to it. But I don’t see a lot people doing 100 per cent of their work on film—it’s going to be more and more rare to find people doing that.”

Souroujon believes the reason some people are still drawn to film isn’t so much the way it looks—which he thinks can be largely emulated digitally at this point—but the idea of producing a tangible object. “That’s maybe what people kind of miss these days: the end product. It becomes a real object,” he says. “A lot of the printing we do is chromogenic prints, which are basically silver halide prints. So even though it’s digital, it’s still very much in the tradition of photographic prints.”

This is further reflected in the way even the casual photographer chooses to print select images. “It’s become different now,” says Souroujon. “Instead of printing thousands of prints a year, like you used to with film, what they’re doing now is, if they really like an image, they want to put it on their wall or give it as a gift. There’s all sorts of new things you can do, including canvas wraps and plexi mounts, and you can do photo books as well. With our photobook software, you can actually connect and make an Instagram photobook. It’s really for when you have a special image and the screen doesn’t give you that feel. The end product of photography is still some sort of object.”

With CONTACT in full swing this month, an especially busy period for Pikto’s lab and digital darkroom has come to an end, but the in-store gallery is still operating at full tilt. “There’s about 500 shows around the city [during CONTACT], and we print a lot of them and frame a lot of them, so it gets extremely busy in March and April,” says Souroujon. “Then May tends to be more people coming to the gallery rather than producing work.”

Pikto’s gallery—currently displaying Aaron Vincent Elkaim’s “A Co-existence: Lost in the Wake of Zionism”—is an essential component of the business for Souroujon. “The gallery is where photography is meant to be. It’s all about the art of photography and the emotion of photography.

“So, to just do products and services was one thing, but we wanted to also feature photographers. We’ve seen a lot of photographers develop their careers going through Pikto, and it’s one of the most rewarding things that we do, for sure.”

La Belle Jacmel evolved out of the St. Clair Bakery, a former Macedonian bakery at St. Clair East and Kennedy Road, that was taken over three-and-a-half years ago by Luckenson Junior Cineus, his father Luc Elie, and their cousin Marie-Claire Point du Jour, who began augmenting the trays of baklava with Haitian breads and cakes like pain patate, a sweet potato pudding, and tablet, a cashew brittle made with ginger- and nutmeg-scented caramel. Haitians from all over the GTA (there are approximately 1,130 in Toronto proper, as of 2006) came in search of a taste of home, pushing the limits of the little bakery.

“People needed somewhere to sit,” says Junior, of the family’s decision to move to their new, larger location. “They would come in, order, and eat their food right off the top of the bakery showcase.” The three took over a former Coffee Time in the same plaza, which had already been redecorated as an ornate Middle Eastern restaurant. They transformed it quickly into La Belle Jacmel, named after the southern Haitian city where Mrs. Point du Jour was raised. The decor remains a mishmash of giant classical murals, bright orange trim, and giant chandeliers, all adding up to a sort of gaudy Scarface-chic.

“In a way, it’s very Haitian,” says Roland Jean, an artist who is originally from Port-au-Prince. Jean arrived in Canada three decades ago, when the Haitian population here was almost non-existent. He only eats Haitian food about once a year, when his sister visits from Miami, but recently, he accompanied me on a pilgrimage to La Belle Jacmel and when Point du Jour brought out plates loaded with her home cooking, his face lit up. “Oh my,” he said, “I haven’t had a meal like this in 10 years.”

Jean began to explain the dishes with great excitement: legumes, a soft stew of spinach, carrot, parsley, and tender beef on the bone; griot, puffy cubes of orange-marinated pork, slow roasted, then fried crisp; fried peppery plantains; a beet salad with mayonnaise; and pikliz, a vinegary coleslaw fired up with scotch bonnet peppers.

“Wait a minute,” said Jean, “is this riz djon djon?” Junior smiled and nodded, and Jean dove in. This is Haiti’s staple side of black rice and green peas cooked with djon djon mushrooms and a hint of coconut milk, giving it a mix of sweetness and earthy richness. Haitian cuisine, Jean explained, is similar in many ways to that of other Caribbean nations (rice and beans, plantains, and fried pork are standard ingredients), but the country’s French heritage adds a depth of flavour that sets it apart.

The menu at La Belle Jacmel is always evolving. More traditional fare from across Haiti is being added, including two of the standouts that Point du Jour placed on the table with a smile: lalo, a spicy combination of watercress and spinach with bits of shredded pork, slow-cooked until it’s almost creamed; and mais moulé, a coconut milk–scented coarse polenta with soft red beans.

According to Junior, there were once as many as six other Haitian grocery stores in Scarborough (though no restaurants), but the last of them closed in January. Since opening this fall, La Belle Jacmel has become the community’s hub, hosting film screenings, lectures, gospel singing, and dance nights with zouk and rumba music blaring under the nightclub lights. Weekends feature special dishes: Friday is fritay night (fried plantains) and Saturday lunch is goat-head soup.

Junior spent many years operating bakeries in the large Haitian communities of Queens, New York, and Newark, New Jersey, and he hopes to create a vibrant place where Haitians can eat, dance, and speak exactly the way they would at home. He has imported everything from Haitian-grown mangoes to Cola Couronne (a popular Haitian pop), with an eye towards authenticity, but he also hopes to welcome the broader city, too.

“There’s this thing in the Haitian community,” he says. “We live to greet people. This is something that is in the Haitian blood.”

La Belle Jacmel, 3537 St. Clair Ave. E., #SCR 647-477-1112.

Fortunately, those days are over. Olmeca Altos Reposado, a new offering at the LCBO, is priced under $40, which used to be the price of the bad “oro” (which were typically made from sub-standard agave and coloured with caramel to mimic the look of a nice, aged tequila). Unlike those, Olmeca Altos is legitimately aged for six to eight months. It’s also made in traditional fashion, by crushing the agave with a Tahona wheel, an implement made from volcanic rock.

The result is a light, crisp, straw-coloured tequila with a nice agave syrup-citrus taste. It’d work awfully well in almost any tequila cocktail, since most of them call for a light reposado, and it’s notoriously hard to work with woody anejos. It would even do well on its own (maybe followed with sangrita), which is practically unheard of for a tequila at this price point.

There’s probably no need to hoard, since it’s a general release and there appears to be plenty to go around but, since we’re in sheer disbelief at the arrival of such an affordable tequila, we just might head over and pick up a couple—just to make sure we’re not dreaming.