Page 16 - Demo

ED.
THEY NEED OUR HELP
I’m a mess.
Before I go to bed at night, I take two different pills for my blood pressure. Once a week, I stick a needle in my gut to deal with blood sugar and weight.
A few weeks back, I took a stair wrong, and since then my right knee not only hurts, it makes weird clicking noises whenever I bend it. My left ankle swells up every now and then, the product of old soccer injuries.
When I go to bed, I slip a plastic guard over my bottom row of teeth. Then, if that wasn’t enough, I strap a CPAP machine to my head to keep me from snoring loud enough to attract bears. It’s got to the point where my wife needs to hear CPAP’s Darth Vader-ish hissing and whooshing sounds so she can go to sleep. Some people like to listen to the sounds of the ocean or rainfall in order to get some rest. They’ve got nothing on the soothing sounds of Steve and his breathing machine.
Why am I telling you this? In order to live a some- what normal life, I need help. Pills. Machines. A dental appliance. By confessing this, I think I might have blown my chance at People’s Sexiest Man Alive award. (You can thank me later, Ryan Gosling.) But, this is who I am.
I can’t get by on my own. Actually, no one can. No one is self-made. No matter the size of our successes, we’ve had help along the way.
How does this apply to our Best Restaurants issue?
We have seen some stunning numbers from Restaurants Canada. At the outset of 2024, it reported that 53 per cent of restaurants in this country “are operating at a loss or barely breaking even.”
The hard times restaurants endured early in COVID just never went away. Then came inflation. And, with inflation came the double-whammy of rising food costs and a dwindling customer base. Food cost restaurateurs more than ever, but their potential customers also made hard decisions on how to spend their money, as the value of their paycheques diminished.
But, we can’t simply shrug when we see a “for lease” sign in the windows of a restaurant we used to love. What is a key to downtown revitalization? A healthy restaurant scene. And, when we look at emerging neighbourhoods, we think of the mom-and-pop eateries that underpin the rise of a community. Restaurants and economic recovery go hand-in-hand. An unhealthy restaurant scene doesn’t just hurt the restaurateurs themselves; each eatery with a “closed” sign is like a bullet to a community’s heart.
So, while I know many of us are trying to stretch our dollars, I ask this: Do what you can to support our local restaurant scene. It doesn’t have to be a mad rush to any of the list-topping spots in our Best Restaurants issue; it can be as simple as stopping at the family-run spot in the strip mall down the block.
The Best Restaurants issue is a major effort for this magazine; our judges ago- nize over the lists. But don’t, for a second, think that we are recommending that you should visit only these restaurants. I hope you see this issue as a jumping off point; that it excites you about everything our city’s food scene has to offer.
While I have needles, pills and a hissing machine to keep me going, all the dining scene needs is for you to make a simple decision: Is it time for take-out, or dine-in?
Steven Sandor
Editor-in-Chief
Note: The Very Short Story in our January/February issue, by Stuart Adams, had an extra paragraph (that Stuart, obviously, didn’t write) tacked onto the bottom of the piece. If you read it and thought “that ending doesn’t seem right,” please check our website for the correct version.
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PHOTOGRAPHY BY RYAN PARKER