Food: Jamie Kennedy Wine Bar

Toronto is a festival city -- film, jazz, comedy, and lots of attractions on the Lake Ontario waterfront. If you find yourself in town with a small group, you will not come across a more perfect and more fun pre-theatre dining option than Jamie Kennedy Wine Bar at Church and Front, near the eye-popping wonders of St. Lawrence Market. At with many contemporary wine bars, Jamie Kennedy serves small plates paired with complementary pours. Recently, I hosted a group of six for a Friday dinner. While Jamie Kennedy doesn't take reservations, we arrived at 5:30 and copped a table in the rear surrounded by wine racks and separated from the restaurant by a low wall. We ordered all 17 small plates in order to share (skipping the soup), and we let the waiter choose three accompanying wines from their huge and fairly priced library -- a refreshing sparkling rose from Beaujoulais, a pleasant New Zealand white, and a really remarkable zinfandel from the Barossa Valley... the winemaker is Damien Tscharke, and while his produce is new to me, the waiter at Jamie Kennedy said that Australians visiting the wine bar go crazy over the stuff... I can understand why. Back to the small plates -- I tasted everything, and the kitchen batted 1.000. While I'm not a big fish eater, I have to say that preparations of pickerel and lake trout were rich and satisfying, and his take on poutine (the Quebecois melange of fried potatoes, cheese and gravy) with short ribs was pretty spectacular. Put this one on your list.