‘I’ll take one of everything, apparently,’ I quip to my TOQUE Partner (and partner-in-crime) Chris with a chuckle – raising my heavy-laden shopping basket to eye level for emphasis. It’s overflowing with beautifully-designed and fantastically-colourful cans from Blood Brothers, Dominion City, Bellwoods, Left Field, and other Ontario craft breweries that you’d have a hard time locating at any common LCBO.
‘I wonder whether Byron’s going to mind my fanboying this time?,’ I ask my TOQUE partner Cai Sepulis as I take a bite of my sandwich, ‘because this is literally the best meal I’ve ever had.’ Cai just laughs at me. She’s heard this line before. Indeed, each time I frequent this place – Willibald Farm Distillery & Brewery – I say the same thing. Over and over.
Have you ever wanted to taste the hoppy goodness of your favourite craft brew without having to experience everything else (the calories, gluten, alcohol – and sometimes even hangover) that comes with it?
Next time you visit Uptown Waterloo, don’t hesitate to stray off the main thoroughfares. For while King Street has much to offer, it’s the side streets and back alleys of this terrific core that give the area its distinctive flavour. Hughes Lane is a perfect example. Created in partnership with the Uptown Waterloo BIA, the Hughes Lane Art Walk is a place-making pilot that serves to animate and transform an uptown alleyway into a vibrant corridor of public art crafted by local artists. So poke around corners. Explore side streets. Venture down alleys. Get curious.
As the speed of our pace car – a sweet Porsche Cayman in Pfaff livery – keeps increasing ahead of me, and the line of cars in my rear-view mirror inches impatiently closer, the writing on the wall becomes ever more clear: I need to get off this rollercoaster. My nerves are rattled. My knuckles, gripped tightly to the wheel, are white. And I’m beginning to realize that my dreams of becoming an F1 racer (driven, in no small part, by my recent fave Netflix doc, ‘Formula 1: Drive to Survive’) will never be realized.
‘I still can’t believe that all this food is available at the Market,’ I exclaim to my TOQUE Partner, Chris, as I stare down atthe spread laid out in front of us. Samosas. Dolmas. Hummus. Cubanos. Cannolis. And more. Chris and I are seated in the back of the Mercedes Sprinter that my wife, Sonia, and I acquired and converted into a veritable mobile home at the beginning of COVID.
The TOQUE team knows its craft beer – not so much its wine. What to do? We gathered three of our region’s wine personalities and asked them all about the stuff. Listen in.
Summertime is hot dog time. And while we might embrace the practice of bbqing a few wieners on the backyard grill as a seasonal rite of passage, there’s always the option of grabbing a dog while you’re on the go. Over the past weeks, the TOQUE team scoured the region for culinary destinations that are serving up some of the best – and most distinctive – hot dogs around. All in the name of research.
F45 is for everybody and every body. The gym's intense, full-body training sessions – each forty-five minutes long and designed for both beginners and the most experienced of gym goers – are all about efficient programming and phenomenal results.
When you get the chance to visit Willibald Farm Distillery & Brewery in Ayr sometime in the near future (because, really, you’ve gotta get there) and you’re sitting on the front patio or at the outdoor Biergarten, you're likely to see a herd of cattle grazing contentedly in the field that abuts the place.
‘This sure beats our regular morning ‘zoom’ meetings, eh?,’ I grunt to my TOQUE Partner, Cai Sepulis, as we cycle up the rail trail just past Ariss. She nods in agreement and then, with a determined smile on her face, drops the hammer to catch up with her wife, Sonia, and my fiancée, Liz, who are biking together about fifty yards ahead.
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.
