Dumplings, Kensington & The Great Upheaval: A Sunday in Toronto
If someone was to ask me what my perfect day would include, I’m sure I’d end up describing something like this past Sunday. I went for brunch with my parents, visited the Art Gallery of Ontario with my mum, and walked home with her through Kensington Market, making a couple of choice stops along the way.
1. Mother Dumplings at 421 Spadina Ave 2. Mum contemplates the menu. “The usual?” Yep. The Usual. 3. Inside you can watch them form the dumplings by hand.
The AGO is located on the southeast edge of Toronto’s downtown Chinatown, which means that most of my visits to the gallery are bookended at one end or another by meals in Chinatown. On this occasion, we went for brunch to Mother’s Dumplings, my absolute favourite dumpling restaurant in Toronto. This place started off as a below-street level hole-in-the-wall on Huron St just north of Dundas, but a number of years ago they moved into a bigger location right on Spadina Ave.
I tuck in (as usual).
There are a few items I always try to order when I go: I absolutely recommend their Shrimp, pork, egg & chive boiled dumplings, as well as the Pork and pickled cabbage steamed dumplings in whole wheat wrappers. Other perennial favourites include the steamed Juicy pork buns, plus the seaweed salad and smashed cucumber salad. Mother’s is well-loved in my family, so even though my dad wasn’t joining us for the gallery visit, he couldn’t resist a meal of plump and juicy dumplings and insisted on accompanying us to brunch.
Follow the signs…
From Mother’s it’s a 10 minute walk to the AGO. Our purpose on this Sunday was to see The Great Upheaval: Masterpieces from the Guggenheim Collection, 1910-1918, which is on until March 2nd (See the trailer here). The premise of the show is that this eight-year period was momentous for artists in Europe. Over these eight years they were reacting to the post-impressionist work of artists like Cézanne and Gauguin in the context of intense technological development; these two major influences facilitated the formation of avant-garde collectives and painting styles (including cubism, abstraction) in a very short, but productive, period of time. In addition to the huge number of technological-industrial advances, these years also encompassed World War I, proving another massive influence on the lives of artists in Europe, and their painting and sculpting styles.
Eiffle Tower with Trees / Robert Delaunay, 1910
Dune in Zeeland / Piet Mondrian, 1910
There is a lot of colour in this show, which, in the midst of a cold and grey Toronto winter, I found invigorating. Like a taking of whiff of some powerful smelling salts, I was reminded what a great jolt and visceral reaction a big dose of colour can provide. The artists include Brancusi, Chagall, Kandinsky, Marc, Mondrian, and other big names, as well as smaller, but apparently still influential, players. I appreciated that the artwork was set in its technological and cultural/political context, which was done on a year-by-year basis in each gallery room (save for the war years, which were lumped together). Interestingly, they were able to list what most of the featured artists were doing during the war – whether they had fled to foreign countries to continue to make art, or if they had been inadvertently exiled when the war began, or, of course, if they had enlisted and been killed in the fighting.
Yellow Cow / Franz Marc, 1911
Pastorale / Kandinsky, 1911
Paris Through the Window / Marc Chagall, 1913
Mountain Graveyard / Kurt Schwitter, 1919
While I particularly enjoyed the early years, especially as you can see the painting styles evolving so drastically, and as the curators draw palpable connections between the influence of the artists on each other, the war years (half of the entire 1910-1918 period) felt like more of an afterthought. For example, one Modigliani is included in the exhibit, a nude in somber tones from 1917, but with no explanatory text or mention in the audio guide to indicate its significance – at least it’s a beautiful painting! At any rate, there is a lot in the show to feast your eyes on, coupled with some pretty fascinating contextual insights. Thinking back on those amazingly colourful landscapes and abstracts will help to keep me going through another couple months of winter.
A whole pile of ponies on the Fika loyalty card.
It’s a about a half-hour walk home for me from the AGO, and even in chilly weather, I enjoy strolling through Kensington Market – Toronto’s amazing hodge-podge neighbourhood of vintage stores, independent green grocers, butchers, cheese and fish mongers, and little cafes and restaurants. Mum and I popped into Fika (Swedish for “coffee break”), a relatively new (at 9 months old) Scandinavian-inspired café inside a repurposed old brick house on Kensington Ave. I love their simple horse motif, and the inside is beautifully designed, very minimal and Scandinavian, indeed. My mum had the cardamom spiced latté, and though I was tempted by the lavender white hot chocolate, they had run out, and I went away with an earl grey tea latté instead.
Cute inside, cute outside.
Our final stop in Kensington on our way home was at Thomas Lavers Cannery and Delicatessen, on Baldwin St. My mom and I are both big fans of ginger beer, and I knew she would go nuts for the amazing, spicy homemade ginger beer at Thomas Lavers. She picked up some pickled fennel chutney as a hostess gift, and we sampled their homemade sodas; in addition to ginger beer they had cream soda on tap (coloured the prettiest shade of pink from beets alone – I drank it too quickly to take a picture!), though in the past I’ve also been blown away by their root beer. Sure enough, mum was in ginger beer heaven, and I foresee a lot of spicy Dark and Stormys in our future!
From there we tootled our way home along Major St, hands warmly wrapped around our Fika treats. It was a perfect way to spend a Sunday in Toronto.
