Just east of Spadina, at the northernmost end of the University of Toronto campus, lies the illustrious, inscrutable, incomparable Madison Avenue Pub. Spanning three properties, the enduring student spot is essentially the Avengers of pubs—a super-pub if you will: six floors, 10 bars, four fireplaces, a handful of billiard tables, and five outdoor patio spaces across all levels. Parking is cheap across the street, and it’s free after dark on Bloor or Spadina. There are half-priced starters and $3.32 domestic bottles until 7 p.m. every day.

Even more significantly, everyone has a story—or at least a strongly-worded opinion—about the Maddy. This labyrinth of libations turns 30 this year, and it probably holds a few of both your fondest youthful memories and booze-soaked, regretful secrets. So what else happened in 1983? Trudeau was Prime Minister, and the world was introduced to the McNugget, R.E.M.’s debut record, Murmur, and MJ’s Moonwalk. And yet, in many ways, it feels like the Madison hasn’t aged a day.

Instantly, the smell of youth and Corona wafts over to you from all corners. If you’re truly—truly—“low maintenance,” the Maddy is the perfect place to prove it. To start, the easy, non-threatening clientele remains slightly unaffecting: boys wearing ball caps because they actually like sports, handcuffed boyfriends sitting silently while the GF downs shots with friends, that small corner of older dudes still hoping to score. And the girls. God, so many girls, wearing almost everything that makes you cringe. The bartenders round out the atmosphere: They hit the varying degrees between totally charming and just plain annoying. If there’s one thing I remember most vividly about the times I spent here, it’s that I always seemed to be waiting for a drink. Thankfully, the price of a rail bevy ($3.50, taxes in, on Thursday nights) is low enough to silence any frustration.

Many regular patrons don’t know much about the Madison’s charmingly humble beginnings. In 1975, David Manore met a girl named Isabel. According to a 2010 “Lives Lived” obituary published in The Globe and Mail, Manore was a passionate “renovator of older homes in the Annex.” A courtship spawned a business partnership, and in 1983, the couple opened the doors of Madigan’s, a sports bar in the basement of an old Victorian at 14 Madison. “It was the best thing that could have happened to both of them,” friends wrote in The Globe, continuing: “Without formal training in design or architecture, David designed, renovated and constructed all parts of his restaurants and hotels, providing many innovative expansions over the years. This included Paupers Pub in downtown Toronto and then the Madison Manor Boutique Hotel next door to the extensively expanded Maddie [sic].” Later, the pair opened a boutique hotel in Puerto Vallarta affectionately named Casa Isabel. (For its part, the Madison Manor features 23 bedrooms modelled after an English bed-and-breakfast sensibility and currently ranks number 65 on TripAdvisor.)

The decor at the Maddy represents a sort of Toronto B.C.—you know, Before Condos (and pretty nightlife with fancy international hotels, etc). The magenta-tinged velveteen banquettes that seem to soak into the floor, the pool tables, and the wealth of brass accents keep up the great British pub tradition. Don’t forget the Home Depot flowerpots, the weathered hanging lanterns waiting to come alive at night, the (vintage!) tube televisions, and the piano (and its Yelp-famous player). The beauty of the Madison, though, reveals itself in the quiet weekday springtime evenings, before the place morphs into a sweaty pool of Venus and Mars under an extreme heat alert.

And with several dozen staffers, the Maddy is a mammoth operation in the vein of hotspots like The Drake Hotel. Despite a whopping capacity of 1,900, crowds are often packed back-to-back, shoulder-to-ass. “We’re still packed all the time: weekends, Thursday to Sundays,” says Jim McCardle, who has spent the last 18 years managing the Maddy and watching Toronto rise up all around this little pocket of the city. “We’re just a gigantic pub with a comfortable atmosphere. You can get lost in here, have an adventure. I think people like that.”

Although the Annex has welcomed a plethora of new bars like the Annex WreckRoom, McCardle is pleased that his little strip hasn’t changed much and remains firmly committed to a relaxed good time. McCardle won’t deny that the Maddy’s core demographic is so obviously college kids, but urges they approach the demographic differently and with a stern hand. Unlike many of its neighbours, the bar has received no suspensions or monetary penalties from the ACGO in the last five years and hardly ever makes headlines for bad behaviour. (Although standing on Madison Avenue at 2 a.m. on a Saturday is enough to turn you sober forever, as crowds disperse rapidly to score a late-night food fix in the Annex.) Love it or not, you’d always choose the Maddy over The Brunswick House, which, past a certain sophomoric age, ceases to even be considered an option.

And yet the Maddy can sometimes be harder to get into than a streetcar at rush hour. McCardle says the bar’s good governmental behaviour comes from a rigorously trained staff. On weekends after 11 p.m., the bouncers only welcome the 21 and over (“so we don’t have the younger kids sitting at home most of the night getting drunk”), and everyone must present a valid ID. (No health cards!) Plus, there’s a no-backpack policy and, weirdly enough, a “smart casual” dress code that frowns upon tank tops, track pants, and flip-flops. (The dress code is barely enforced, however.) A pristine track record and a commitment to vigilance does come at a price: Most of the people I reminisce with agree that the Maddy is a decent place, but has an overly aggressive security detail that can sometimes mess up your game real good.

Aside from all that noise, the Maddy has endured as a sure bet for student-cheap everything. To celebrate 30 years in the business, the pub is rolling back prices like it’s 1983: on the first Tuesday of every month, they’re offering $3-$4 drafts, and $3 bar rail and food specials, plus a contest that includes a draw to win a new Fiat this December. Throughout it all, you can always stumble away with a life lesson or two on how to navigate the meat market and be young in Toronto: If a guy asks you to come back to his frat (there are several within a stone’s throw), one should almost always decline. (Next thing you know it’s 4 a.m. and you’re doing something you shouldn’t while everyone watches.)

But if you manage to manipulate it properly (and stake your claim early enough in the night), the Madison is like that dependable friend with benefits: always there when you need ‘em, especially after midnight.

Madison Avenue Pub & Restaurant, 14 Madison Avenue, 416-927-1722. madisonavenuepub.com.

There were few sports John Francis Scholes tackled that he didn’t master. The Irish-born, Toronto-reared athlete racked up championship titles in boxing, rowing, and snowshoeing during the Victorian era. His first trophy, earned during a 220-yard hurdle race in 1869, was proudly displayed in the Yonge Street hotel that eventually bore his family’s name.

Illustration of John Francis Scholes,
as it appeared in the March 25, 1871 edition of the Canadian Illustrated News.

Scholes entered the hospitality business around 1880, opening a bar and hotel at 185 Yonge St. He moved his business a few doors north to 203 Yonge St. in the late 1890s, christening it the Athlete Hotel. Scholes used it as a base to mentor local athletes, including his sons John (who inherited his amateur boxing skills) and Lou (a champion rower). Scholes’ tough nature carried him through to his end—when doctors indicated a stomach ailment was terminal, he insisted on dying at the Athlete Hotel, where he entertained friends and former competitors.

The Scholes Hotel, circa 1945. City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 1257, Series 1057, Item 537.

Following Scholes’ death in March 1918, the hotel stayed in family hands and adopted their name. Ads for the Scholes’ Hotel offered typical hospitality promises—“good food, cleanliness, and efficient service.” Less impressed were provincial liquor officials, who suspended the hotel’s booze license in May 1946 for overcrowding and the heinous crime of permitting unaccompanied men to enter the women’s beverage room. (At this time, men and women legally drank in separate rooms.)

The business was sold in 1947 to Goody and Harvey Lichtenberg, who renamed it the Colonial Tavern. They secured the second cocktail lounge licence along Yonge Street (after the Silver Rail) and began booking jazz acts. Their first performer showed their enlightened attitude: pianist Cy McLean, who had led the first all-black jazz band in Ontario.

Disaster struck on September 27, 1948. Around 8:10 p.m., a refrigerator explosion blew out a wall and sent four men to hospital. “I just remember reaching for my beer when I went sailing across the table top and toward the bar,” patron Douglas Wilson told the Star. “A seven-foot paneled door landed right beside me.” Refrigeration at the Colonial was cursed: Faulty wiring led to a fire on July 24, 1960 that required a year-long reconstruction effort.

Amid these disasters, the Colonial became one of Toronto’s finest jazz joints. Headliners spanned the jazz spectrum, including Chet Baker, Sidney Bechet, Dave Brubeck, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Stan Getz, Dizzy Gillespie, Benny Goodman, Charles Mingus, and Sarah Vaughan. Not all patrons found the surroundings enticing. “Nobody ever called it an ideal place to hear music,” Robert Fulford grumbled in the Star in 1987. “The ceiling was low, the food bad, the waitresses surly, the patrons sometimes loudly drunk. The room was a tunnel-like hall with a square bulge in the middle. If you sat in front of the bandstand the musicians seemed too loud; if you sat to left or right of them you had the sense of over-hearing rather than hearing the music. There were no good tables at the Colonial, only less bad tables.” Yet Fulford admitted that because of the quality of the music, “none of this mattered.”

The Colonial benefitted from the Yonge Street Mall pedestrian-zone experiment of the early 1970s. Goody Lichtenberg was stunned at how packed his new patio was when Yonge was closed off in May 1971. “If I don’t look excited,” he told the Star, “it’s only because I’m dead beat.” Demand forced Lichtenberg to gather food from another restaurant. Within a week, he hired 20 part-time employees and found they weren’t enough.

Inside, the entertainment line-up changed through the 1970s. Jazz performers faded as the upstairs room gradually converted into a discotheque. A basement venue—whose names ranged from the unfortunate Meet Market to the Colonial Underground—aimed for a younger crowd through local acts like Rough Trade and the Viletones. Upstairs and downstairs didn’t always mix—when bluesman Long John Baldry sent staff downstairs to tell the Diodes to turn it down so that he could play an acoustic set, bouncers charged at the punks with pool cues.

After the Lichtenbergs sold the venue in the late 1970s, the Colonial descended into the general sleaziness of Yonge Street during that era. Ads for the “Bump and Grind Revue” in 1978 promised a combination of rock bands and “exotic Black Bottom serving maidens.” The venue’s strip-club phase ran into trouble when a dancer was convicted for public nudity. City regulations enforcing g-strings were blamed for chipping away at business. Several attempts were made to return to jazz programming, but none took.

In 1982, the City purchased the property. It intended to use it as a connecting link between Massey Hall and the Elgin and Winter Garden theatres to create a mini-Lincoln Center-style entertainment complex. Despite protests from the local jazz community, City Council approved plans to demolish the Colonial in 1987 and replace it with a parkette.

The Colonial Tavern, post-demolition, 1987.
Photo: Ellis Wiley/City of Toronto Archives, Fonds 124, File 3, Item 152.

The following year, the Star’s Christopher Hume laughed at the notion the tiny park would improve its stretch of Yonge Street, viewing it as a hole in the streetscape. “This is one of the few stretches of Yonge where there are significant numbers of historical buildings left,” Hume observed. “It doesn’t make sense to mess it up for the sake of creating an ‘open’ space hardly anyone will use.”

Bracketed by the ghosts of the old banks surrounding it, the former site of the Colonial awaits its next incarnation as part of the Massey Tower condo development.

Additional material from Treat Me Like Dirt: An Oral History of Punk and Beyond 1977-1981 by Liz Worth (Montreal: Bongo Beat, 2010), the January 11, 1937, October 25, 1940, and July 13, 1978 editions of the Globe and Mail, and the March 5, 1918, May 6, 1946, September 28, 1948, July 25, 1960, June 10, 1961, May 31, 1971, February 20, 1979, April 3, 1987, May 9, 1987, and September 24, 1988 editions of the Toronto Star.

The latest addition to the western edge of Dundas’ retail scene is Blue Button Shop. Despite owner Brian Cheuk’s inexperience in the industry, he has managed to assemble an extensive collection of over 30 highly coveted men’s and women’s Japanese brands, many not available anywhere else in Canada, including Haversack, Minotaur, Digawel, Momotaro, The Superior Labor, Decho, Sunny Sports, Evam Eva, Mizuiro Ind, and Still by Hand.

How he got started: Despite the scale of the undertaking, Cheuk’s decision to open his shop was rather spontaneous. “I have no background in retail,” he says. “But I’ve always wanted to open up a store and last year I thought, ‘Well, I’m not getting any younger….’ So I opened up a store.”

Cheuk’s lack of formal fashion-retail experience is offset by his extensive knowledge as a consumer, something that’s allowed him to identify an underserved niche in Toronto’s retail environment. “I find there are some stores that carry Japanese stuff,” he says. “But, at the same time, my stuff is more mature and less streetwear. I’m trying [to attract customers in their] late 20s to 40s or even older, so maybe there’s a market for that. I don’t want to have an age limit—you can still look cool whatever age you are.”

As a long-time fan of Japanese fashion, Cheuk took what might be considered a rather naive approach to acquiring his brands. “I’ve always liked this kind of style—I read Free & Easy and magazines like that religiously,” he says. “And I always look at Japanese websites. I went to to this one called Knocked Out and I really liked the brands they carry, so I decided to contact each brand by email and see who would get back to me. I said, ‘Hey, I really like your brand, I have some of your stuff, would you sell to me?’ and 80 per cent replied back to me saying, ‘Sure, come to Japan, and we’ll talk.’ The trip was planned before I even had the idea of the store—it was a family trip—so last month I went to Tokyo and to Osaka. I spent one day in Tokyo meeting 10 designers. I don’t speak Japanese at all, so with some designers I was using my iPhone and Google Translate at the same time while we talked. And, in Osaka, I met this really cool agent who introduced to me to even more brands.”

A producer’s touch: Cheuk’s background in television production has served him well in his new career. “I’m very good at doing this kind of work, because I’ve been producing TV commercials for a long time,” he says. “It’s mostly just negotiating. What I learned in production is that if you ask, you’ll get it. Just ask. What’s the worse thing they’ll say? No. So you move on.”

Meeting face-to-face is an important part of doing business for Cheuk. “I try and meet with all of my designers,” he says. “And not just through a trade show—I think that if I went the trade-show route, I would be buying all the same stuff everyone else is buying.”

This approach has afforded Cheuk the opportunity to see firsthand the conditions in which his inventory is produced. “I went to a factory in Kyoto and I’ve been to a factory in China myself,” he says. “The difference is night and day. The factory in Japan was the size of this store with six or seven people working there.”

Ethical production is important to Cheuk on a personal level. “Do you really need this jacket? No, you don’t,” he says. “But it makes you happy. I buy clothes to make myself happy, but why build my happiness on someone else’s pain?”

The reno: Blue Button Shop’s eventual home required a complete gut job. “It was a really run-down furniture store,” says Cheuk. “My neighbour upstairs told me they never opened—it was a mess. Everything is completely new—I even changed the toilet downstairs.”

The aesthetic of the shop is quiet and calm. “I like to be relaxed,” says Cheuk. “The change room is a big thing to me. I like to have a chair so you can sit down to try your pants on or put on your shoes. At some other stores, there’s nowhere to sit. And I have mirrors inside the change rooms so you don’t have to walk out with no shoes on looking all gross in jeans that don’t fit you.”

There grows the neighbourhood: With shops like Lost & Found, Woodlawn, The Chief Salvage Co., The Monkey’s Paw, and Grasshopper Records all but a stone’s throw away, Dundas west of Ossington is swiftly becoming a retail destination. For Cheuk, proximity to likeminded retailers is something to be embraced. “Maybe my mentality of building an area is a bit different,” he says. “For example, Woodlawn is great—they carry made-in-the-U.S.A. stuff, so I would like to have a store close to them that’s made-in-Japan. If people don’t buy anything from me, they’ll buy from them. I don’t want to move somewhere that’s in the middle of nowhere. There’s an antique shop next to me that people love to go to and some really nice restaurants down the road, so hopefully we’ll see some foot traffic.”

What’s next: Blue Button Shop opened within a very compressed timeline—in a four-month period, Cheuk has gone from initial concept to contacting his brands to a trip to Japan to an extensive renovation project. “I’ve worked every moment possible for the past four months,” he says. “And I’m still working my day job—I did two commercials.”

And there’s still more work to come. “This is only the beginning, because for A/W [autumn/winter], I have a lot more brands coming in,” Cheuk says.

Rather than burning him out, all this activity has energized Cheuk, for whom—like many of his retail peers—opening a store has been a labour of love. “We’re all just nice people, trying to get by and enjoy ourselves,” he says. “If you want to get rich, you’ve got to work at the bank or something.”

Blue Button Shop, 1499 Dundas St. W.

Jennifer is a 29-year-old receptionist and Toronto Rock cheerleader who lives at Bathurst and St. Clair. She describes herself as a “girly-girl” and says, “I like going to the movies and shopping—it sounds like I’m a 14-year-old girl—and I love travel, and have been to nine countries. I prefer checking out new cultures to going to an all-inclusive, though that would be fun as well.” Mitchell is a 26-year-old social-media manager who lives in the South Core. “I’m outgoing and spontaneous,” he says. “Once I was on a date and said, ‘Let’s drive to Niagara Falls and go gambling,’ and we jumped in a car and went.” He likes working out, being outside, and watching sports.

Jennifer on Mitchell

“When I arrived, I was happy to see I hadn’t been stood up for game seven of the Leafs playoff series. I was also pleasantly surprised that Mitchell is a good-looking guy. The date was definitely off to a good start. He was enthusiastic, friendly, and outgoing. I can usually tell within the first five minutes of meeting a guy if I’m going to want to spend more time with him or not, and I could see us hanging out.

“We discovered we have a mutual friend; we didn’t dwell on it for long, but I found it funny. People think Toronto is such a big city, but there’s always six degrees of separation. I was slightly worried going into this that he’d be someone I’ve dated before.

“We shared tapas. Mitchell always asked if I wanted to share the last item on the plate, instead of just helping himself, which was polite. I got him to check the score of the Leafs game a couple of times because there were no TVs in the restaurant but, other than that, he didn’t pull out his phone at all.

“When the bill came, we ended up splitting it. It was only $27. [Editor's note: The Hook-Up's restaurant partners waive the first $100 for our dates.] Usually, I feel that if a guy is interested, he’ll offer to pay for everything. I know that Mitchell is just starting a new job, so maybe it was a financial thing. That was the only slightly awkward part of the night. I am pretty sure I’ll hear from him again.”

JENNIFER RATES HER DATE

Overall: 8

Conversation: 9

Vibe: 8

Mitchell’s manners: 9

Mitchell’s laugh: 8

Mitchell’s shoes: 6

Mitchell on Jennifer

“When I met Jennifer, I was relieved, because I thought she might cancel since the Leafs were playing in game seven. Right off the bat, we were joking about being set up, and whether one of us would cancel because of the game. I thought she was put together nicely, and was very attractive.

“As we moved inside, the conversation continued to the point where we had to make an effort to stop talking so that we could order drinks. We also chose a bunch of different dishes to try.

“Jennifer has traveled a fair amount, which I really liked because traveling is a passion for me, just like being active. There were some points where I thought the conversation trailed off a bit, but Jennifer did a good job picking it up. It was a very easy, low-pressure date. I didn’t mind the fact she was a bit older than me, but I think she might be looking for someone closer to her own age. We could be at two different stages in our lives.

“The bill came and we kept on chatting, and, when we went our separate ways, we ended up on the same streetcar. We continued to check our phones to see if there was any update on the Leafs game, and before Jennifer’s stop I asked her for her number. Is there a spark? I’m not too sure, but I am open to seeing her again and seeing where it goes.”

MITCHELL RATES THE DATE

Overall: 8

Conversation: 8

Vibe: 8

Jennifer’s smile: 9

Jennifer’s sense of adventure: 7

Jennifer’s wine choice: 9

Special thanks to Kultura, 169 King St. E., 416-363-9000. Follow @KulturaTO and Like Facebook.com/kulturatoronto.

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Tucked away on the first floor of 401 Richmond’s art-and-design factory, Swipe is equal parts niche bookshop and home outfitter, stocking all the items you’d find around the house. A really, really pretty house.

Click above for our gallery of Swipe’s finest finds.

UPDATE, May 16: Also sold at Swipe, String Theory’s “Off Grid” shawl ($240) was used as a backdrop in photos two to 11.

Swipe Design books + objects, 401 Richmond St. W., 416-363-1332, swipe.com.

There’s no shame in doctoring up a dish with good ol’ Heinz or Hellmann’s, but these restaurants take a decidedly more DIY approach to their condiments.

Click here for a close-up view of our favourite sauces in Toronto.

Michigan beer blogger Andrew McLean really likes his suds. In fact, he just quit his day job to launch a “mobile canning truck” that brings canning machinery to the Great Lakes State’s 100-plus microbreweries, making him among the foremost experts on our neighbours’ stellar brew scene. (In a nationwide poll last year, Grand Rapids tied with Asheville, N.C. as “Beer City USA.”)

We asked McLean to design the ultimate Michigan road trip for us: pubs and breweries in three cities, three hours apart, in three days. This long weekend, gets things started in Kalamazoo.

Kalamazoo

Bell’s Eccentric Café: 355 E. Kalamazoo Ave.

Serious beer nerds should tour this legendary brewery’s new facility on the city’s outskirts. Otherwise, the grassy beer garden at the original Kalamazoo Avenue downtown lcoation will do fine—and of course, there’s a retail store.

Kalamazoo Beer Exchange: 211 E. Water St.

This downtown bar stock-market pricing, says McLean, “where beers go up or down according to demand.” Every few hours there’s a “bucket crash,” when pint prices plummet.

Traverse City

Right Brain Brewery: 225 E. 16th St.

At the city’s biggest craft brewery, order a porter or try something different like a Pecan Pie Ale.

The Filling Station: 642 Railroad Pl.

Occupying an old train station, this place keeps things simple: a menu of nine wood-fired flatbreads and 13 rotating house ales. “It’s a very cool spot to just sit outside and relax,” says McLean.

Grand Rapids

Founders Brewing Co.: 235 Grandville Ave., SW.

In 2012, ratebeer.com ranked Founders the second-best brewery in the world, for the second year running. Taste 14 of its beers in the taproom or take a tour (Saturdays only).

Brewery Vivant: 925 Cherry St., SE.

Housed in an old funeral home, this is the most architecturally spectacular brewery in the state, says McLean. “They put out great food [from duck cassoulet to beer cheese], and make Belgian and French-style beers that you won’t find outside of Michigan.”

Can’t get out of town?

Founders Centennial IPA: $13.50/six

There are few Michigan brews at the LCBO, but this scotch-hued version of the American IPA is available locally. Boasting a big bouquet of pine, spicy nettles, and orange peel, it gives way to toasty malts and subdued bitterness building to a round,
lasting finish. It’s just lovely.

Just after the lunch rush on a humid spring day, three well-dressed twentysomethings from a nearby office wander into Forno Cultura, the recently opened, cavernous bakery. Like a lot of first-timers, they’re not certain what to make of it. Sure, it’s a bakery, but where are the croissants, cupcakes, baguettes, and tarts? From behind a well-organized display counter, a young worker plies the three with samples—chocolate and coffee biscotti, almond amaretti—that have been made with decades-old recipes. They may be unconventional treats for King West, but the goods at Andrea Mastrandrea’s new place right underneath WVRST are quick to win over skeptics.

In the works for the better part of a decade, Forno Cultura is Mastrandrea’s passion. In fact, it may be his birthright: Not only did he grow up in a bakery (the almost-50-year-old Aida’s Pine Valley, owned by his family in Woodbridge, Ontario), but as babies, he and his brother actually slept under the table in a crib fashioned from flour sacks while their parents worked nearby. And although Mastrandrea is an architect by trade, baking has been a constant in his life. “I’ve always treated architecture and food in similar ways—as part of the creative process,” the 39-year-old says. “The difference is that with baking, the development of an idea, from the conception to the end result, is a lot quicker.”

Given Mastrandrea’s background, it’s not surprising that aesthetics are an integral part of his new venture. Accenting the space’s polished concrete floors with an industrial-chic theme, he designed Forno Cultura to function as a working bakery. This means that when you come in for a midafternoon snack, you can catch a glimpse of someone de-seeding and roasting banana peppers for pizzas and sandwiches, or watch pastry chef (and Mastrandrea’s right-hand woman) Laura White manipulate a 10-kilo ball of cornetti dough. Buzzers and timers are always going off—reminders that something’s ready to be yanked out of the oven.

Much of the food has been designed to be portable: Pizza is served al taglio ($3.50), a rectangular Roman-style that’s all wrapped up (Mastrandrea refers to it as pizza a cammino, or walking pizza), while the cestini di uova ($2.75) is a crispy, handheld breadbasket filled with a baked egg, sautéed mushrooms or roasted peppers, and finished with an herb pesto. “A bakery should be a place where people come in for a quick espresso, pick up something to eat, and go. It’s a stand-up culture, and that’s what makes it different from a café,” says Mastrandrea.

Honouring time-tested recipes is something Mastrandrea takes seriously. “People in my generation were exposed to a fantastic landscape of food, because many of our parents were immigrants and we only learned to make things the old-school way,” he says. But even though the biscotti and pasta di mandorla are staunchly traditional in taste and shape, made to Mastrandrea’s father’s specifications, the bakers are constantly experimenting with new products. Take, for example, the tortini di olio di olive ($2.50), which has fast become one of the most popular items. It grew out of a simple idea: making a cake that captured the essence of really good olive oil. Once that was accomplished, however, Mastrandrea and White wanted to add a sweet component. Cacao and chunks of dark chocolate were folded in to provide richness, but something was still missing, and White, who comes from a French background, thought a salty component would round it out. Mastrandrea suggested black olives, and the moist, earthy result is curiously great.

In many ways, the concoction typifies Forno Cultura: It’s a mix of different techniques, with a nod to tradition as well as a playful spirit. And, most importantly, it’s delicious.

609 King St. W., 416-603-8305.

Technology is one of the great equalizers. This point was reinforced for me last week when I received word that my grandpa, a spirited 86-year-old, had joined Twitter. Many of us assume that it’s the twenty- and thirtysomethings, born and raised alongside the internet, who feel no trepidation about banking online or on their iPhones. No, we scoff: Tech-wariness is the domain of grandparents and the Amish. But according to a recent study by the Canadian Bankers Association, just 53 per cent of Canadians aged 18 to 34 do the majority of their banking online. (Consider that 45 per cent of the 55-and-older respondents banked mostly online, too, and the generational disparity isn’t as great as you might think.) That margin seems low considering that, when I asked most of my contemporaries whether they banked online, they looked at me incredulously, and said, “Well, yeah.”

As I tried to figure out how the elusive other 47 per cent of Gen Y banked, friends and co-workers began to divulge stories of their supposedly modern friends’ e-banking paranoia. One colleague told me about a travel buddy of hers who, at 28, has never sent an email money transfer. Similarly, a 25-year-old university friend conducts most of his banking online, but absolutely refuses to bank using an app. “I have concerns about security,” he said. “A mobile network could get hacked. When I explain to friends that I’d rather just do it online, people are like, ‘Really? Okay. Your choice.’” (I should mention that, as an accountant, he’s not usually prone to money-managing anxiety.) Could it be that, for all of our constant tweeting and fancy Tupac holograms, that the “Me Me Me generation,” as Time Magazine recently called us, is not as advanced as we think we are—particularly when it comes to e-handling our money?

For answers, I called Vince Maniago, a group product manager for California-based finance tracking software (and app) Mint. Since its Canadian launch in December 2010, the software—which aggregates all of your bank accounts, credit cards, loans, mortgage, and investment info to help you track and create budgets—has been downloaded by hundreds of thousands of Canucks. Yet despite the fact that two-thirds of Mint’s customers are under 35, Maniago says they aren’t exempt from e-banking anxiety, particularly with respect to mobile apps. “That perceived lack of security—it’s a giant mental wall for people to get over, and many of them haven’t yet,” he says.  “No one is 100 per cent safe from identity theft and fraud; it can happen to the most connected or the least connected of us.”

Maniago and his colleagues refer to this young demographic, particularly those just out of college, as the “Help me spend and keep me mobile” group: They don’t really care whether their smartphone is equipped to help them pay bills or loans—they just want to know that their balances are sufficient to keep them buying. (Sounds familiar.) This hands-off banking approach, coupled with quietly simmering anxieties about fraud, render a large chunk of Gen Y perfect candidates for e-banking reticence.

Minimizing this unlikely tech skepticism starts with a dose of reality. All online and mobile banking transactions are encrypted, meaning that any financial information you enter is scrambled to fend off hackers. Plus, if you notice a suspicious charge in your account after making a web transfer, most of the big financial institutions, like RBC and BMO, assume liability and offer full reimbursement for the defrauded amount. Comparatively, it’s a lot safer than e-commerce. “Something like a third of computers are infected with malware,” says Maniago. “If you’re using your credit card online, or storing confidential documents on your PC, that is several orders of magnitude more dangerous than banking securely.”

Ironically, Maniago suggests that the luddites among us may just need to grow up a bit to fully embrace modern banking options. “By the time you get to your early 30s, you split finances with a spouse, have a kid or a mortgage, and your cash-flow situation changes. Which paycheque goes to which bill becomes much more complex. These tools become necessary evils the older we get.”

Kids: It doesn’t appear this “mobile revolution” is going to slow down anytime soon. Bell just announced it has partnered with RBC to connect certain BlackBerry and Android models to customers’ bank accounts, enabling them to shop with their phones by the end of 2013. Even the Royal Canadian Mint is developing a “MintChip” prototype, which would allow transfers under $10 to be made to a friend by tapping your phones together. If you’re still worried, you could always tweet @mygrampa for reassurance.