‘It’s five o’clock somewhere,’ I chuckle, raising a dram of amber liquid to my lips. The spirit — peaty, smoky, divine — slides down with ease. I glance at the label: Lagavulin Islay Single Malt Scotch Whisky, aged sixteen years.
Stratford has a way of seducing the senses. This small city on the Avon, best known, of course, for the internationally acclaimed celebration of Shakespearean theatre, is no stranger to performance. But the drama here extends well beyond the stage. It’s found in the details that animate Festival City: in the way spaces are curated, food is plated, cocktails composed, and shop windows styled.
Tucked inside a restored nineteenth-century landmark in Uptown Waterloo, Den 1880 is flipping the script on traditional workspaces. More than an assemblage of offices and meeting rooms, this regional destination is a thoughtfully envisioned blend of comfort, creativity, and community.
Our region is bursting at the seams with old factories — surviving monuments to a time when this area of Southwestern Ontario was a manufacturing powerhouse of the Commonwealth. And while many of these industrial icons have, predictably, been reborn as condos and tech offices, others have taken on new life as warm, welcoming, customer-facing spaces: restaurants, cafés, boutiques — and breweries.
Uptown Waterloo is home to a string of killer cocktail joints: White Rabbit, Solé Restaurant and Wine Bar, Babylon Sisters, Bodega Rose, and more. There are so many great options, you’d be hard pressed to hit them all in a weekend. So we did it for you — or at least we tried. Here are five Uptown cocktails we managed to capture for posterity.
In a world of fast imported fashion, stalwart Canadian clothing brand Muttonhead continues to serve as a guiding light for the modish set bent on quality duds and dedicated to supporting local. (Shop Canadian, eh?) In March, the TOQUE team spent a morning in Toronto at the Muttonhead store with company owners — and sisters — Meg and Mel Sinclair, fashion mavens who spent their formative childhood years in Kitchener.
When’s the last time you biked from one community to the next? Few feelings beat hitting our region’s open roads or groomed trails in search of whatever lies one town over. With that in mind, Wellington County has crafted seven signature cycling routes connecting communities across Guelph and Wellington — Elora to Fergus, Harriston to Clifford, Rockwood to Guelph, and more.
When I heard that Guelph-based Frontiers Design + Build had merged with Eric Small and his team at SL Builders Group under the Frontiers name earlier this year, I knew something special was taking shape. After all, Frontiers and SL Builders have long been go-to names in the world of high-performance construction across the region.
At the time of writing this, the future is uncertain, to say the least. Talk of tariffs is giving us whiplash with all its pausing and unpausing, while the flood of news headlines is, quite frankly, exhausting. In the last five minutes alone, I received another alert with tariff updates: this time they’re targeting our cows. (Moo! I mean…Boo!) Dairy jokes aside, it’s hard to predict where this will end and, as much as I hope things will have calmed down by the time you read this, it’s quite possible at least some of the chaos will remain.
St. Patrick’s Ward — known fondly as ‘the Ward’ to Royal City locals — has always been a stout-hearted place: plucky, dogged, enduring. This working-class neighbourhood on the edge of downtown Guelph was built on industry and immigration. Once a patchwork of corner stores and family-run shops in step with the steady rhythm of factory life, it still wears its past proudly. You can see it in the ghost signs, the worn brick, the streets that remember.
When Christine and John Veit (along with their two daughters) sold their family home in Fergus in 2020 to purchase a lovely twenty-five acre farm plot just outside Belwood, they had dreams of becoming homesteaders. They would engage in a bit of subsistence agriculture. A touch of husbandry. Some honey. Canning. All in the family.
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.
