Lake Inez, and the charms of being seen trying.
Not a perfect restaurant, but something better.
At some point we started conflating craft with creativity, but only rewarding the former. It’s the hollow packaging of life under capitalism, perhaps. We want the results without the effort—to arrive at the aspirational destination without taking the painful journey there. Creativity in its brut form is less digestible, harder to market, and impossible to measure. Still, it charms in a way that the finessed and perfected cannot, the way a gap-toothed smile lingers in your memory but veneers get lost. Imperfection whispers to us in the language of humanity that our optimization-obsessed culture has all but forgotten. Compare the food at Alinea with what’s served by your favourite neighbourhood haunt, and tell me which stirs something in you.
Lake Inez, in Toronto’s Little India, is one of those for me—a neighbourhood jewel. Less of a hidden gem, and more of a diamond in the rough. Not a perfect restaurant, but something better: whimsical, quirky, weird, depending on who you ask. The decor is mismatched and homey. The service is friendly but inconsistent. There is always something to find fault with in the food, if you look hard enough. But if you don’t, you will find yourself, at the end of the night, stepping out onto Gerrard St. with a sigh: “What a lovely evening.” Wonderful, if you ask me.
The sum of a series of small wonders, really—the tiny meeting points between you and the world that reinforce your decision to participate in it. Maybe it’s the strange delight of being greeted by Kate Bush and Virginia Woolf in mosaic form. Maybe it’s the familiar warmth of the staff, even though it’s your first time meeting. Or maybe it’s the thoughtful, anticipatory way in which the kitchen provides, for every meat dish, a vegetarian counterpart.
On my first visit to Lake Inez, I was taken by the menu. It’s handwritten in a script reminiscent of Curlz, the font, and features dishes with names like Yes I deserve a spring - i owe nobody nothing and wines described as “romance language with a gutteral funk, archetypal beauties chain-smoking budget cigarettes.” I’ve observed, from subsequent evenings there, that it’s a rare instance in which the storytelling matches the product: playful, experimental, creativity caught mid-act.
As such, the offering changes frequently. Ingredients take on different roles—ramen noodles, from Oji Seichi, are bathed in mushrooms and kombu in the winter, and dressed in lobster and corn in the summer—and dishes get swapped out entirely. The proverbial river flows; I’ve never had the same dish twice.
It’s adherence to seasonality, of course, but also evidence of play. The last time I was there, on a late spring Saturday, the menu was particularly irreverent: French onion soup served up as toast; Mexico City’s most famous Instagram celebrity, Panaderia Rosetta’s Rol de Guayaba, reinterpreted as a salad; a stew with a cowboy name, a jambalaya shape, and Chinese flavours. Nothing has ever required the preciousness of tweezers or the formality of foam. Sometimes the vinegar is too enthusiastic, the salt too heavy-handed, but it’s okay. We’re trying things here.
If we can taste when something is made with love, we can feel when a restaurant has fun, too. Lake Inez is always having fun, and it’s contagious. It’s one of the best qualities, in people as in culinary projects: take the work seriously, but not yourself. It disarms. It relaxes. It prepares you to be the recipient of my favourite type of hospitality: sincere, unfussy, a reminder of the simple pleasures of being a human in the company of other humans, on a night you’ll later describe as wonderful.
Lake Inez
1471 Gerrard Street East
Toronto
*Adds Lake Inez to my Google Maps of restos to try*