Brandon Donnelly

Daily insights for city builders, delivered every morning at 6 AM ET. I’m Brandon Donnelly — a Toronto-based real estate developer and founder of Globizen. I’ve been writing here since 2013.

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Category: Food

  • That time Anthony Bourdain visited Toronto

    I’m a big fan of Anthony Bourdain and I have seen a lot of his shows. However, up until last night, I was under the impression that he had never done an episode about Toronto. Turns out I was wrong. Yesterday I discovered that, back in 2012, he did one as part of his two-season show, The Layover.

    As a born and raised Torontonian and as a fervent supporter of this city, I’m always a combination of excited and nervous before I watch a show like this. I’m excited because I love Toronto and I like seeing it showcased. But I’m nervous because, what if they don’t do a good job showing it off?

    Maybe it’s hometown insecurity, or maybe it’s just my inner desire to want to properly sell Toronto to the rest of the world. Either way, my mixed feelings were not unfounded.

    The episode opens with Bourdain coming into downtown from the airport and immediately saying, “It’s not a good looking town. They sort of got the worst of the architectural fads of the 20th century. It looks like every public school in America, every third-tier city library, Soviet chic, butt-ugly, glass box.”

    Things get generally more positive after this initial impression, and eventually Bourdain does admit that the city has great food, nightlife, diversity, etc. But there is this interesting moment in the middle of the episode where a bunch of Torontonians are asked: What one thing would you say best describes Toronto?

    Most didn’t know how to answer it.

    This got me thinking:

    What is our thing? There are, of course, the obvious answers. We are diverse. We have great ethnic foods. We have numerous sports teams. And people are generally nice. But these are a little too generic and boring for me. There are also truly unique features like our ravine network, but I wouldn’t call this our single most notable feature.

    The right answer, in my view, is that Toronto is the economic and cultural capital of Canada. It used to be Montréal (which you all know I love deeply), but that’s no longer the case today. Broadly speaking, there’s only one global city in this country and, like it or not, it’s Toronto.

    I think it’s important to recognize this ranking because economic opportunity is one of the principal reasons that people live in cities in the first place. And if we are to compete globally, we are going to need to be both confident about our place in the world and insanely ambitious about our goals.

    So that’s my answer: Toronto has global city status. But clearly we need to be much better at recognizing and building on it.

    Photo by Mvrkle on Unsplash

  • More food trucks, please

    There’s no real secret to having a vibrant food truck and street vendor ecosystem. You basically just need to allow it, and then get out of the way and let entrepreneurs do what they do best.

    When I went to grad school in Philly, I used to eat from food trucks all the time. I could get a breakfast sandwich and coffee in the morning. I could get a burrito for lunch. And I could get a vegetarian lasagna for dinner. There was no shortage of options.

    This same kind of ecosystem does not exist in Toronto, but it’s only because we’ve decided we don’t want it to.

    Images: New York City

  • We’re getting fatter

    I know I know this, but this is still an alarming chart:

    This is saying that, as of 2016, over 36% of Americans were considered to be obese. In Canada, the number was just under 30%. And in the UK, it was just under 28%, which is the highest rate in Europe.

    We often talk about the health benefits of living in a walkable community. And there’s lots of research to back up that this is in fact the case: obesity rates tend to be inversely correlated with higher prevalences of active transportation (walking, cycling, and so on).

    But we also can’t ignore diet. And here’s what has happened in the UK, as well as in other Western countries:

    An increased reliance on cheap, ultra-processed food, which accounts for 57 per cent of what Britons eat according to a 2019 study conducted by researchers at the University of São Paulo, suggests that the health crisis is unlikely to change anytime soon without intervention, argue campaigners.

    It can be hard to eat healthy, especially if you don’t have a lot of money and you live a busy life. But in my view, we need to change the course of this graph. And two very good places to start looking would be (1) our built environment and (2) the Japanese diet.

    Actually, now that I think of it, Japanese cities would be a good place to look as well.

    Chart: FT

  • People tend to prefer independent restaurants over chains

    I just came across the above chart from City Observatory showing the percentage of restaurants in each city that are part of a chain. (The data is taken from Yelp.) On the top is New York City, where only about 13% of restaurants in the city are a chain. And on the other end is Louisville, where more than 35% belong to a chain.

    The article also observes that there appears to be a correlation between restaurants per capita and the percentage of independents. In other words, the more restaurants you have, the higher the likelihood that more of them will be independents. New York City is once again at the top with 22 restaurants per 10,000 people.

    What is perhaps most interesting about this data is that Yelp ratings show a pretty clear preference for independent restaurants. Meaning that, on average, independent restaurants receive a higher rating compared to chain restaurants. At the same time, this spread seems to be widening. Here’s data from 2012 to 2017:

    This is maybe obvious; but it’s worth reiterating. As city builders, it’s good practice to encourage independent and small businesses. They are a competitive advantage. People, at least based on this Yelp data, seem to clearly like them more. So I guess Jane Jacobs was right: “The greatest asset a city can have is something that is different from every other place.”

    Charts: City Observatory

  • Cream-colored walls and light-oak tables

    I don’t normally write about food on this blog. But hear me out. Yesterday was Bianca’s birthday and we had an incredible experience at Osteria Giulia. We sat at the bar, as we like to do, and everything was perfect: the food, the service, and the interiors.

    First, let’s talk about the food.

    Anchovies, grilled sourdough, and a lot of delicious butter:

    Endive, pear, burnt honey vinaigrette, toasted almonds, and ricotta:

    Ricotta filled pasta, mushrooms, and artichokes:

    Sea bass, leeks, artichokes, fava beans, and charred tomatoes:

    Now, let’s talk about the interiors. They were designed by Guido Costantino Projects. And to get a good feel for their approach, I suggest you first check out their Instagram and then move onto their website. They do really beautiful and calming work.

    Design always matters.

    And I’m pretty sure that the cream-colored stones and light-oak details made everything taste that much better last night. If you haven’t been and you get a chance, I would highly recommend you try Osteria Giulia. It’s now one of our favorites in the city.

    Happy birthday, Bianca!

  • New web3 restaurant loyalty platform launches in NYC

    I just learned about Blackbird’s technology platform and the restaurant loyalty program that they are currently building. On the surface, the way it works is that you walk into a restaurant and then tap your phone on one of their NFC-enabled chips (see above).

    This then signals that you are/were there and so you earn loyalty points, kind of like a stamp on one of those cards in the food court. Except here, the idea is to create an endless and customizable array of wonderful customer experiences.

    Maybe after 15 fifteen visits you’re now considered “fam” (decided by the restaurant), and so you get a designated table at the restaurant and your favorite dessert automatically sent to your home on your birthday. This is just one example.

    At the same time, you also earn $FLY, which is the platform’s native crypto token (built on Base by Coinbase). And this to me is one of the most exciting aspects of the platform.

    Because here is a crypto or web3 product that is seemingly really easy to use. In fact, nobody needs to know that it is doing things on a blockchain. Just tap your phone on the thingy. Earn stuff. And move on.

    So I think it’s a really good example of where we’re headed in this space. The underlying technologies are going to recede into the background and all that we’ll see are useful products and services.

  • Uber announces micro-fulfillment robots in Miami

    These are autonomous sidewalk robots from Cartken:

    And last week, Uber announced that customers in Miami would start to see some of their food and grocery orders being delivered by them. The way it works is pretty simple. The app tells you when you need to meet your robot on the sidewalk (they apparently don’t do elevators). You open their secure compartment through your phone (or a code?). And then there’s your food! Next year, both companies intend to roll out this service across more of Miami-Dade and in other cities.

    This isn’t the first sidewalk robot in existence. I’ve seen a handful of ones here in Toronto. But if it works, this could be a pretty meaningful partnership. Uber used to do self-driving autonomy in-house, and it was always positioned as central to the company’s future. Uber ended up selling off that part of its business in 2020 in order to raise cash and because autonomy started feeling a lot more difficult than probably most people expected. But what seems clear is that automation remains an important objective for the company. And for good reason.

    I would imagine that, for some people, it’s going to feel weird seeing fleets of sidewalk robots roaming around our cities with shawarma wraps and burritos. But one of the things that services like Uber Eats have taught us is that a lot of people are willing to pay a premium for extreme convenience. So if these robots can add to that convenience and also make fulfillment a little cheaper, I suspect that people will quickly get over the weirdness.

    Supposedly on-demand shawarma is also good for communities:

    “We are excited about how this partnership with Uber will bring the advantages of robotics to food delivery—and ultimately create more connected communities,” said Christian Bersch, Co-founder and CEO at Cartken. “Together, we have the opportunity to reduce traffic congestion, help local merchants to increase delivery capacity, and bring consumers fast, convenient, and emission-free deliveries.”

  • People like TikTok and grocery stores

    Dan Frommer has just just released his latest Consumer Trends report (2023). If you’d like to download a free copy, you can do that over here. It is amazing to see how big of a deal Tik Tok has become. In Q3 2022, the average Android user spent 98 minutes per day in the app. That is a lot, and it’s roughly 2x what Facebook and Instagram each saw (though if you combine these two apps, I guess they’re pretty similar). Either way, this is where people’s attention is now being spent. For those of us in real estate, the report also has some interesting slides on grocery stores. The key message here is that physical stores remain hugely important.

    The year-over-year change in online grocery spending is now flat to a little negative:

    No matter which generation you ask, more people prefer shopping for groceries in-store, versus online:

    And even when people do shop for groceries “online”, they still tend to pick them up from their local store or have that local store deliver it to them (so the store matters):

    For the full report, click here.

  • Some Sicilian inspiration for #KioskTO

    I have written before about how Lisbon’s kiosks both anchor and beautify the city’s public spaces. I have also written about how Toronto should have something similar — #KioskTO anyone?

    Some of you might remember an expanded street food program that the city piloted many years ago. It was a complete and utter failure. In my opinion (and from what I can remember), it was too heavily regulated. The food ended up being far too expensive and, frankly, none of it was very good.

    That’s not how this should work. The entire point of things like food trucks and street kiosks is that they are cheaper alternatives to a conventional physical location. You can also more easily place them in locations where demand is being underserved.

    The one pictured here is in Catania, Sicily. I carried my beer over from a panini shop down the street and then we ordered three espressos for a total of 2€. I tried to sit on a crate they had lying on the ground but I ended up breaking it. Sorry, guys. So we stood instead. It was all rather civilized.

    Let entrepreneurs figure out what to sell and where. It will be a boon for both small business and for our public spaces.

    P.S. I tweeted this photo out earlier today and it elicited a good discussion on Twitter. Toronto wants this.

  • France clamps down on “dark stores”

    One way to shop for things is to make a list of all the things you want and/or need, and then go to a location that sells as many of those things as possible. As I understand, this is more or less what people do when they go to a place like Costco.

    Another way to shop is to just order things piecemeal, and have them delivered to you when you want them and in the least amount of time possible. And it turns out that this latter option is pretty popular.

    It is popular because it involves (1) not going anywhere and (2) not having to make a list and think proactively about the things you may want and/or need in the future. But it does mean that we need specific infrastructure to support this method of consumption. Generally speaking you need urban spaces close to where people live and work, and you need people to transport the goods.

    I mention all of this because it has translated into two areas of concern within our cities: (1) we now have “dark spaces” that are embedded into urban areas but don’t have any public-facing components and (2) we now have throngs of delivery vehicles starting to annoy local communities.

    In fact, France has already responded with a new federal policy that is expected to reclassify “dark stores and “ghost kitchens” as warehouses. This is intended to give local municipalities the power to shutter these sorts of spaces. Part of the thinking is that we all did just fine before delivery apps, so why not just go back to doing what we were doing?

    My own view is that this shift in consumption is here to stay. And so we would be better served by figuring out how to respond in a way that is both sensitive to communities and that maintains the vibrancy of our urban environments. We also managed without things like refrigerated food and mobile phones, but I’m pretty happy to have these tools available to me.