‘I’m in heaven,’ I exclaim to my TOQUE mate, Cai, while I intercept a trail of grease dripping down my chin. I wipe my face clean and goin for another bite. And then another. This brisket’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced, I think to myself. The flavour’s familiar enough, mind you. After all, I’ve had great brisket before.
I open my eyes just wide enough to peer through the pitch blackness. There's barely a hint of light emanating through my hotel room window – covered by the curtain I’d swept across it before hopping into bed. I strain to scan the room. Slowly. With focused intention. Then I spot it, on what I take to be the bedside table. The vague outline of a tin foil package subtly illumined by a glint of light.
REALLY – WHEN IS IT NOT THE PERFECT TIME FOR A GREAT COFFEE? A COUPLE MONTHS BACK, TOQUE CORRESPONDENT CURTIS GRIMBA TOOK TO OUR REGION’S MAIN STREETS AND BACK ROADS TO VISIT THREE OF HIS FAVOURITE LOCAL COFFEE HAUNTS.
I’m sitting in the sprawling loft that is Charlotte McKeough’s Hespeler studio – an industrial backdrop to the minimalist fabrics and pastel-coloured equipment that fill the space – studying a photo in an old issue of House & Garden. It’s a scene of Marc Jacobs’ Paris apartment: his beloved Dalmatian sitting next to a mod red chaise longue, and Charlotte’s flagship Brave Brown Bag perched atop the chaise.
I think ‘Canteen’ would be a great name,’ I suggest to Fixed Gear Brewing Co’s owner, Michael Oosterveld, as we lounge in the midday heat on the rock beach in front of his cottage located in the archipelago off Georgian Bay. It’s early August, and I’mhere – with TOQUE’s Chris Tiessen and my wife, Sonia – as part of an excursion across Ontario’s cottage country (published in TOQUE 11 as ‘Outbacking Across Ontario: A Four-Day Success Story’).
Travel tends to sharpen taste. It introduces new ideas, uncovers unforeseen obsessions, and offers the occasional epiphany – nudging your sense of beauty and your grasp of craftsmanship in new directions. For Ryan LeClair, founder of Makoto Watch Company out of London, Ontario, it was travel – and specifically a trip to Japan – that transformed his infatuation with watch collecting into his initiation of a brand built on craft, restraint, and everyday practicality.
Almost nothing we carry defines us more clearly than the books in our bags: tactile objects filled with ideas and stories – testimonies to time well spent. They tag along with us, mark our days, and shape the rhythm of how we move through the world. In Uptown Waterloo, three long-standing independent bookstores – Carry-On Comics & Books (46 years young), Words Worth Books (42 years), and Old Goat Books (25 years) – offer distinct ways to build this bracket of everyday carry: a nostalgia-driven comic haven built for the thrill of discovery, a curated literary hub grounded in conversation, and a densely-packed used bookstore where the search is part of the reward. Together, these enduring fixtures map a reading life – charting not just what we read, but how we come to find it.
In my line of work – as writer, photographer, editor, regional explorer – EDC isn't a trend. It's infrastructure. Most days I'm in motion: tracing backroads toward a brewhouse, mapping my way to an artist's studio, or sliding into the corner of a coffee shop where I turn field notes into final copy and RAW files into photographs that will pop on paper. My office is wherever I set my bag down. My tools make it possible.
Stratford – and, by extension, Perth County – lends itself to takeaway. A coffee to carry, a sandwich in hand, something sweet tucked alongside – then out into the streets for window shopping, into the theatres for a performance, or down to the riverbank for a nosh.
