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The best roast beef in town

Broadcast Date: March 3, 1970

"You can get awfully good roast beef in the suburbs," says Charles Oberdorf, the Toronto Star's dining critic. In 1970, Oberdorf identifies a distinct suburban taste as a preference for traditional Canadian fare like roast beef, fish and chips and hamburgers. Restaurants appealing to a broader palate — the ones specializing in one food item — do well in places like Don Mills where there are fewer customers than in downtown Toronto.

In this CBC Radio clip, Oberdorf explains why menus with copious offerings, and specialty cuisines like Asian, are out of the question in suburbia.

The best roast beef in town

• A 2004 Globe and Mail article reported that the availability of authentic ethnic food had become better in the suburbs than in the city. Writer John Allemang found that Toronto menus had become "ruled by homogenized fusion mentality."

• Attributing this to neighbourhood gentrification in the city, he said increased housing costs had caused new immigrants to seek out cheaper living situations in the suburbs.

• In turn, specialty cuisines like food from Sudan, Yemen or Taiwan had become more available in suburbia. On Lawrence Avenue East in Scarborough there were: Iranian, Afghan, Sri Lankan and Korean grocery stores, along with Piegus, a Polish bakery; Nasr Foods, a middle eastern food market; and Arz, an Armenian bakery-deli-café. In 2004 at Thornhill's T & T Taiwanese supermarket, customers could find rare specialty items, such as marinated baby squid, dried okra and fresh cheese with nigella seeds.

• In this 1970s CBC Radio clip, food critic Charles Oberdorf correlated high population density with an increased number of restaurants. Since the 1970s, the density of the suburbs has declined. A 1997 Maclean's article attributed the change to new environmental laws. The article reported that newer suburbs had fewer homes per hectare, which also meant people used cars more often than public transportation.

• In 2000, Statistics Canada reported that more people owned houses in the suburbs than in the city. The study compared Vancouver and Surrey. In Surrey, 70.3 per cent of homes were owned, compared to 41.9 per cent in Vancouver. Houses in Surrey tended on average to have two extra rooms. Family income and employment rates were also higher for the people of Surrey.

• A 2003 Sierra Club of Canada study calculated the projected outcome of 25 years of urban sprawl as: $12 billion extra spent on roads, sewers and water systems; one kilometre of farmland lost in Ontario each day; and billions extra in government services.

The best roast beef in town

Medium: Radio

Program: Matinee

Broadcast Date: March 3, 1970

Guest(s): Charles Oberdorf

Interviewer: Helen Hutchinson

Duration: 4:11

Photo: Hamachi. Used under Flickr Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License.

Last updated:
May 16, 2008