Brit restaurant critic Giles Coren graces Toronto with his taste buds

Earlier this year, London Times restaurant critic Giles Coren came to Toronto to film an episode of his new television series, Million Dollar Critic, which finally aired this week. The conceit of the show is that a single online review from Coren, the self-proclaimed “most powerful critic in Europe,” would be sufficient to bump any restaurant’s profits by a million bucks. During the course of his visit, Coren hung out with Rob Ford, went on an awkward date with Robyn Doolittle and sampled the food at a curiously random assortment of Toronto eateries, most of which probably wouldn’t top many residents’ best-of-the-city lists. But if Coren’s crew didn’t really seem to get what Toronto is about, food-wise (for instance, this from his assistant: “Torontonians always have hot dogs, late at night especially”), he at least had some nice things to say about a few of the city’s less attention-grabby establishments. Opus, the culinary dinosaur in Yorkville, was deemed “outstanding,” while Parkdale’s Small Town Food Co. got props as a scrappy up-and-comer. (Pakistani takeout shop King’s Place didn’t earn raves, but it did win a Coren-judged taste test against rival shop King’s Palace.) The lucky recipient of Coren’s official rubber stamp was Nathan Isberg’s Dundas West restaurant The Atlantic, which can presumably look forward to $1152.07 in future profits for every word of this review on The Huffington Post Canada.