Greektown Toronto: The Danforth and Mediterranean Culture

Greektown on the Danforth is one of the most authentic ethnic neighbourhood experiences in Canada — a stretch of Danforth Avenue east of the Don Valley viaduct that has been the centre of Toronto's Greek-Canadian community since the 1950s when waves of Greek immigration transformed what had been a quiet residential street into one of the most vibrant commercial corridors in the city. The neighbourhood's character is set by the tavernas, souvlaki houses, pastry shops and Mediterranean grocery stores that line the Danforth from Chester to Donlands, their blue-and-white painted signs and terrace tables creating a visual vocabulary that has remained remarkably consistent through decades of demographic change and commercial pressure.

The Taste of the Danforth, held each August over a long weekend, is the largest outdoor food festival in Canada — a three-day event drawing over 1.6 million visitors to the closed-to-traffic Danforth for outdoor cooking, live music and the particular sociability of a neighbourhood at full festival capacity. The festival has been simultaneously celebrated as a great Toronto institution and criticised for its commercial scale relative to its actual connection to Greek food culture, but the neighbourhood's best restaurants — Mezes, Mövenpick and the family-run tavernas that serve the community rather than the festival crowd — sustain a standard of Greek cooking that is among the finest outside of Greece itself.

The Danforth neighbourhood beyond Greektown has expanded eastward to incorporate the former working-class community of East Danforth and the newer creative district around Pape and Donlands stations, bringing restaurants of Japanese, Middle Eastern, West African and contemporary Canadian cooking to a strip that was previously monocultural in its Greek identity. The Don Valley trail system, accessible via several ravine entry points along the Danforth, provides the neighbourhood with a natural green corridor that connects it to the waterfront and to the Evergreen Brick Works' Saturday farmers market — one of Toronto's finest — making Greektown a natural starting point for a day that combines urban dining culture with the city's extraordinary ravine landscape.