LCBO’s celebrated magazine, Food & Drink, is pleased to announce four additions to the editorial team. Alongside Editor-in-Chief Jody Dunn, Charlene Rooke, Eric Vellend, Suresh Doss and Victoria Walsh are already hard at work on the Summer 2020 issue, available in-store and online beginning Wednesday, June 26. The new editorial team is a continuation of a multi-phased refresh that began with the magazine’s makeover last summer.
Photo by Christopher DeWolf
Explore Toronto: the surprising food, nature and art of Canada’s largest city
“Things get even more fun in the suburbs. These sprawling, aesthetically unremarkable neighbourhoods are where most of Toronto’s immigrants end up. Though you can hire a car to explore them on your own, it helps to have a guide like Suresh Doss.”
TEDxToronto Reveals Final List of Speakers for 2018 Conference
TORONTO, Sept. 5, 2018 /CNW/ - Today, TEDxToronto – which will be held on Friday, October 26, 2018 – announced the second and final set of speakers for the 10th year of the conference, exploring IDENTITY as its theme.
Suresh Doss, Food Writer
Suresh Doss is changing the way we think about dining out in Toronto. Where there are tiny family-run restaurants nestled within a strip mall or convenience stores that sell the essentials and then some, there is good food to be had, says Suresh. With over a decade of food writing and hosting regular food tours in the Greater Toronto Area, Suresh is an influential contributor to Toronto Life, The Globe and Mail, and CBC Metro Morning. He is also the print editor of Foodism Toronto and Escapism Toronto magazines.
Introducing the Final Round of Speakers for TEDxToronto 2018 on TedXToronto
Commemorating Canada's 150th Anniversary in Scarborough
Crowned by the Toronto Star as “Scarborough’s unofficial food ambassador,” Sri Lankan-born, Agincourt-raised Suresh Doss is an influential food and travel writer, editor and photographer who leads the world’s food experts, discerning downtown-dwellers and the culinary-curious on van-packed, all-day, organized Food Tours throughout our many diverse neighbourhoods. A veritable passport-issuer and gate agent for Scarborough.
Acknowledging that Scarborough is “ground zero for a wide range of international food”—from Afghani to Zanzibari and all spots in between—and “the best place to eat in the province,” Suresh brings respect and pride to our cooks, chefs, and restaurant entrepreneurs. Suresh’s family triggered his lifelong passion for food.
Read more.
Escapism Toronto to launch this spring
A new travel magazine for millennials will launch this year from the team that successfully brought the Foodism brand to Canada.
The similarly titled Escapism will launch its first print issue in March. The travel-focused publication, which started posting content online on Tuesday, will target the same older millennial audience as Foodism. However, publisher Krista Faist said it also wants to capture readers in their later thirties as well.
Take a shawarma crawl through Scarborough
(Photo by Rene Johnston)
There is a strip of Lawrence Ave. E. in Scarborough lined with shawarma shops that reflect the various culinary regions of the Middle East, food writer Suresh Doss told me the other day.
“(It’s) is a unicorn of sorts,” he said. “Nowhere else can you find so many different cuisines of the Levant represented on one walkable strip.”
His words made my mouth water. Shawarma, the thinly shaved meat slow-cooked on a spit, topped with garlic and hot sauce and served with bread or rice, is one of my favourite foods. I knew I had to ask him to take me on a shawarma crawl.
An influx of immigrants from Middle Eastern nations in the late ’80s and early ’90s, and more recently, Syria, has turned the Wexford Maryvale area of Scarborough into a prime destination for Middle Eastern dining.
2018 Terroir Symposium 'World Food Court' curated by Suresh Doss
This year’s lunch is about highlighting the global flavours found in Toronto's suburbs. From Brampton to Scarborough, food writer Suresh Doss has curated a selection of mom and pop shops that serve up authentic food from all corners of the world.
Toronto’s multicultural food prowess is best experienced when you leave the downtown core and visit the various micro neighbourhoods. Nearly every corner of the globe is represented in strip malls and tucked away shops, where mom n’ pop shops double as portals to cuisine from a specific time and place. The goal of the lunch program is to bring this uptown culture to the city.
How Metro Morning's new food guide Suresh Doss will capture the intricate taste of the GTA
Where there are tiny takeout joints nestled within a strip mall or convenience stores that sell the essentials and then some, there is good food to be had, says longtime Toronto food writer Suresh Doss.
Between over a decade of food writing and regular food tours in the Greater Toronto Area, Doss knows the ins and outs of good eats in the 'burbs and beyond.
- Watch for video of his jaunts across the city on CBC Toronto's Facebook page
This week, Doss debuts a weekly segment on CBC Radio's Metro Morning. Every Thursday, he will introduce a restaurant, takeout counter or convenience store with great food and a backstory to dish up.
Where to go for a taste of curry around the GTA
Images above were taken by Vince Talotta of the Toronto Star.
Considering the diverse makeup of the GTA, it’s not surprising that when it comes to curry there are dozens to choose from. Curry, typically characterized by a thick sauce simmered with chilies and warm spices like cumin, ginger, turmeric and cardamom, evolved from India and has been adapted in dishes around the globe. There are lemongrass-scented curries in Thailand, scorching scotch-bonnet curries of the Caribbean nations and the sweet coconut curry soups of Singapore, to name a few.
Suresh Doss, suburban foodie and editor of Foodism magazine’s Toronto edition, took me on a two-day tour of the many restaurants that serve curries across the Greater Toronto Area. Here’s a taste of what we found.
Source: Toronto Star.
The finest dining in the city
The panel was unanimous on this year’s best addition to the city. The thing is, you probably missed it.
For two weeks in June, during Toronto’s Luminato festival, the control centre of the decommissioned Hearn Generating Station transformed into Le Pavillon, a 1950s-style French bistro. Conceived by Frédéric Morin of Joe Beef and Honest Weight’s John Bil, the pop-up hosted an array of impressive guest chefs, including Daniel Boulud. It was the hottest reservation in town while it lasted, and the only debate for the panel was whether they preferred the atmosphere or the menu (a highlight: poulet en vessie, chicken poached with truffles inside a pig bladder).
Source: Globe and Mail.
Keep your forks, Toronto: There’s a new international food festival in town
“As a global event organizer, you look at the heat map of where foodies are congregating in North America,” and that’s Toronto, says Suresh Doss, Toronto food truck advocate and event organizer in his own right (Doss, who also brought the Zagat guide to Toronto, has mounted festivals dedicated to ramen and, most recently, pinxtos in Toronto, aside from his regular food truck rallies.) “When everyone’s talking about Toronto right now, what they’re thinking is that Toronto has evolved into an amazing culinary city in the past three to four years.”
It’s an evolution, Doss notes, that already has a boldfaced tinge to it — Toronto’s celebrity chef quotient is rising, as Jamie Oliver has recently announced plans for a restaurant in the city, with Ivan Reitman building a 280-seater downtown and David Chang’s Momofuku empire already entrenched in the city’s culinary identity.
“There’s a lot of interesting things going on in here … it’s not just sheer number of restaurants,” he says. “There isn’t a city that is showing a growth spurt quite like Toronto’s.”
So for a city with a culinary identity that has, until recently, been obscure at best, Taste of Toronto is at the very least a serious vote of confidence.
Source: National Post. July 2015
Passport & Plate Sri Lanka 2015: The Winners
"Judges' Comments: Suresh's crab curry represents not only his family's physical and emotional journey, but manages to whisk its cooks to another place ruled by sun and spice. This is a dish that truly transports you. With a passion for food that began at the markets of Colombo, Suresh, now a Torontonian, relies on heirloom recipes and family to connect him to his Sri Lankan roots. This is his pilgrimage to revisit his home and discover its food all over again.
Suresh is headed to southern Sri Lanka where he will taste his way through the array of citrus and cinnamon laced curries, as well as the country's best sweets."
Source: World Nomads
Tourism Toronto 2015: Insider Style
Featured on Tourism Toronto's annual magazine.
FOODFive things we learned about Toronto’s street food scene from the Globe’s profile of Suresh Doss
On Saturday, the Globe and Mail ran a profile of Suresh Doss, the 34-year-old computer systems engineer and publisher of Spotlight Toronto who’s behind Food Truck Eats. Doss’s tireless energy for the cause has some vendors suggesting he may be some kind of god, or at least, in a memorable phrase, “part elephant.” Below, five things we learned about the front lines of Toronto’s street food scene.
(Image: Renee Suen)
Source: Toronto Life. April 30th, 2012.
Zagat launches a Toronto-centric online restaurant guide
Earlier this year, American mega-blog Eater stretched its cyber-tentacles northward to take on the Toronto dining scene. NowU.S. resto-rating site Zagat, which was acquired by Google in 2011, has followed suit. Zagat Toronto kicked off its inaugural week with a batch of foodie roundups penned by Spotlight Toronto publisher and Toronto food truck champion Suresh Doss, who has signed on as the site’s house food writer and general culinary expert. The content is so far limited to brick-and-mortar restaurants; however, given Doss’s resume, it’s probably safe to assume the city’s roaming restaurants will get their share of attention.
Source: Toronto Life. November 21, 2013.
When Toronto is famous for its street food, you can thank this man
Last spring, on an Easter weekend trip to Miami to research the area’s thriving food truck scene, Suresh Doss had a revelation. Mr. Doss, a 34-year-old computer systems engineer who runs a popular food and drink website called Spotlight Toronto, is the de facto face of street food in Toronto. He’s a born organizer. When somebody wants to start a food truck, or work through the city’s all-but-impossible street-food regulations, or even just to find a street-food seller at lunchtime, they turn to Mr. Doss, typically. He grew up surrounded by the stuff.
As a child in Colombo, Sri Lanka, he’d often buy a bowl of poori slathered with curry, or a paper cone filled with mango, pineapple and hot sauce from a street-side hawker on the way to school in the morning. He even worked as a chutney boy on the days when his mother, Bernadette, made her fermented rice and lentil dosas at fundraisers held outside one of Columbo’s Catholic cathedrals.