The windshield wipers of our car are trying to slap away the pouring rain that’s turned this part of Corso Italia into a spot full of gravel and dirt, as we make our way towards the Regal Heights Bistro on St. Clair, just east of Dufferin. The streetcar track/road improvement work on St. Clair Avenue West is still not finished, reducing the traffic to one lane. However, the traffic is not busy in this ugly weather, and we manage to park our car just across the street from the restaurant. First we have to cross the no-man’s-land of cracked pavement and orange cones, and then I can finally focus at the building where I believe the Regal Heights Bistro is housed. “There’s no sign, there used to be a big sign, and it looks like a pub inside,” I observe uneasily. “I hope this is still the right place.” “Yep – Regal Heights Bistro,” my partner confirms, pointing at a tiny hand-lettered sign inside the front window, and we notice the trademark Jazz Brunch sign as well.
No sooner do we cross the threshold than a hostess is waiting to seat us, offering a choice of any table we pick. At eight fifteen, the place is about a third full, with most patrons seated near the bar area. “Are you here for the fist time? The original sign blew down, and the new one we wrote out on a chalkboard was washed away by the rain.” “Tonight you are in for a treat, we have a birthday party and a jazz band, it will be fun!” She confirms we are indeed in the right place, though the interior is more pub than upscale bistro and I can smell French fries being prepared. We look at the menu and my partner is disappointed at the two-sided affair we’re presented with.
“I’m sure they’ve changed the menu,” he says in an unhappy voice. Maybe since he is an elitist jazz musician himself, he just doesn’t like the idea of a live band playing here tonight. The name of the restaurant is printed on the top of the menu. I check it again and again, just to make certain we are in the right place. I tried to look up the bistro’s website but I couldn’t find any, and the only online information available was a few bare-bones positive reviews. But I found some posted menus with dishes like caprese salad, provencale escargots, chicken liver pate, smoked salmon crepes and black squid ink linguine. There is no menu necessary to tell me that the chance of a homemade black squid ink linguine coming out of this very kitchen is zero. But now the menu consists of typical pub food, improved with some unusual ingredients and toppings, but still – pub food stays pub food.
Our hostess comes back to take our order so that I can ask – what happened? The current menu is completely different from what we found on the internet. Did the owner change? “Oh no, the owner is still the same,” she reassures us. “Well, we haven’t updated the website in a long time, our menu has stayed this way for the last few years. Just the chefs have been changing a lot here. But we strongly focus on fresh food: we shop daily, we cut the meat ourselves, we make our own burgers, we don’t use any microwaves… we just want the general atmosphere to be more informal.” Though the whole place is definitely casual, including the paper napkins, when I look at the wall signage from around the world, I would still expect a bit more sophisticated menu.
Our hostess laughs: “We shrink from that gastro-pub term,” and puts us at her ease with a charming, friendly behaviour.
Want to read the rest of the story? Here you can find the whole Regal Heights Bistro write-up.