Four days in Toronto: half the city came from somewhere else, and it eats accordingly

Three nights in the biggest city in Canada: the tower and the old distillery on the first evening, the museums and the castle on the second day, the market and the islands on the third, and the gallery on the way out.

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Length
4 days, 3 nights
Where you stay
Toronto
Places
10 across 4 days
OpenFreeMap © OpenMapTiles Data from OpenStreetMap

Toronto has a reputation problem with visitors, and it is mostly its own fault: the thing it puts on the postcard is a concrete tower and a bank district, which are the two least interesting things here. The city is worth four days for a completely different reason, which is that about half the people living in it were born somewhere else, and the result is the most genuinely various city in North America.

That shows up as neighbourhoods rather than monuments. Little Italy and Little Portugal on College, Greektown along the Danforth, the Caribbean along Eglinton, a Chinatown at Spadina and Dundas and four more out in the suburbs, South Asian Gerrard Street, the Ethiopian and Eritrean stretch on Danforth. None of them is a heritage exhibit. They are where people shop.

Four days is right for the city itself: a handful of things that genuinely are worth seeing, kept to about half of each day, with the rest given over to walking and eating. If you want Niagara Falls, and most people do, add a fifth.

Highlights

  • A 553 metre tower with a glass floor, and a lift that gets there in under a minute
  • A Victorian whisky distillery, at one point the largest in the world, now a district of brick lanes with no cars in them
  • A Frank Gehry gallery grafted onto the house the architect grew up next door to
  • A castle with ninety-eight rooms and a tunnel under the street, built by a man who then went broke
  • A car-free island fifteen minutes off the waterfront, with the entire skyline in front of it

Where to stay

Toronto, three nights

The city is laid out on a grid running back from the lake, with Yonge Street as the spine and numbered avenues crossing it every couple of kilometres. Downtown is the strip between the lake and Bloor Street, about three kilometres deep, and everything in this trip except the castle is inside it or a ferry ride from it.

Stay somewhere on the Line 1 subway between Union and Bloor. The Entertainment District and the area around King West are central and loud, the Annex and Yorkville are calmer, and both put you fifteen minutes from the rest.

Day by day

Day 1 in Toronto

The old distillery, then the tower after dark

Start east of downtown in the Distillery District, five hectares of Victorian industrial brick that used to be Gooderham and Worts and was, in the 1860s, the largest whisky distillery in the world. It closed in 1990, sat empty long enough to be used as a film set several hundred times, and reopened as a pedestrian precinct of galleries, cafes and a theatre. There are no cars in it. Come late afternoon, when the light is on the brick and the day trippers have gone.

Eat around there, or walk twenty minutes towards Front Street for dinner, then finish on the tower after dark.

The CN Tower was the tallest free-standing structure in the world from 1975 until Dubai took the title in 2007, and is still the tallest in the Americas at 553 metres. The lift takes under a minute. Go at night, when the grid of the city below turns into the only view here that is genuinely spectacular, and book the timed ticket in advance because the queue on a summer evening is over an hour.

  1. 15:30

    Distillery District

    Landmark

    Brick lanes, no traffic, and a Christmas market from late November that is the busiest thing in the city. Streetcar 504 or a twenty minute walk from Union.

  2. 18:00

    Dinner in the Distillery or on Front Street

    Eat

    The restaurants inside the district are decent and priced for the setting; walking west into the St Lawrence blocks gets you better value.

  3. 20:30

    CN Tower

    Architecture

    Book a timed slot. The glass floor is on the way down and the queue for it is separate from the one for the lift.

With more time: The Hockey Hall of Fame is in an old bank hall at Yonge and Front, ten minutes from the tower, and holds the Stanley Cup when the cup is not away being paraded around somebody's home town.

Day 2 in Toronto

The museum, the shoes and the castle

North to Bloor Street this morning. The Royal Ontario Museum is the largest in Canada, and the point of it is the range rather than any one collection: dinosaurs, Chinese temple art, a Ming tomb, First Nations material, ancient Egypt and a bat cave, in a Victorian building with a fractured crystal of aluminium and glass rammed through the front of it. Daniel Libeskind added that in 2007 and Toronto has been arguing about it ever since. Three hours goes quickly.

Directly across the road is one of the strangest small museums anywhere, devoted entirely to footwear: four and a half thousand years of it, Egyptian sandals and Chinese bound-foot shoes and Napoleon's socks, in a building designed to look like a shoebox with the lid ajar. Forty-five minutes, and much better than it sounds.

Then twenty minutes north to Casa Loma, which is a genuine folly. Sir Henry Pellatt made a fortune bringing electricity to Ontario, spent it between 1911 and 1914 on a ninety-eight room castle with stables reached by a tunnel under the street, lived in it for under a decade, and lost the lot. It is preposterous and knows it, and the view south from the towers takes in the whole city and the lake.

Come back down for dinner somewhere with a neighbourhood attached: College Street west of Bathurst, or the Danforth on the other side of the valley.

  1. 10:00

    Royal Ontario Museum

    Culture

    Open at ten, busiest at noon. Start upstairs with the Chinese galleries and work down to the dinosaurs, which is the reverse of what everybody else does.

  2. 13:30

    Bata Shoe Museum

    Culture

    Across the road from the museum, and a rare thing: a single-subject museum that is genuinely about the whole world.

  3. 14:30

    Lunch in Yorkville

    Eat

    The blocks north of the museum are expensive and pleasant. Cut west into the Annex for the same food at student prices.

  4. 15:30

    Casa Loma

    Historic

    Subway to Dupont and a steep five minute walk, or a taxi if the hill is not appealing. Two hours covers the house, the tunnel and the stables.

With more time: Spadina House sits next door to the castle in the same grounds and is the more interesting building of the two: a real Victorian family house, kept as it was, with none of the pretending.

Day 3 in Toronto

The market, then out to the islands

Breakfast at St Lawrence Market, which has been feeding the city from this corner since 1803 and from these buildings since 1845. The south hall is the one to go to, and the thing to order is a peameal bacon sandwich, which is a Toronto invention and is not what anybody outside Canada means by bacon. Saturday brings the farmers into the north building from five in the morning.

Then walk ten minutes to the ferry docks at the foot of Bay Street. The Toronto Islands are a chain of sandbars fifteen minutes offshore with about seven hundred residents, no cars, and the best view of the city there is, which is the whole skyline seen across a kilometre of water rather than from inside it.

Ferries go to three points. Centre Island has the beach, the pier and a small amusement park, and is where families go. Ward's Island at the eastern end is the quiet one, with a village of two hundred and fifty cottages and a boardwalk running back west along the lake. The sensible plan is to take the ferry to one end and walk to the other, which is about an hour, and catch the boat back from there.

Eat on the mainland afterwards. There is one restaurant on the islands and a great many west of downtown.

  1. 09:15

    St. Lawrence Market

    Architecture

    Closed Mondays. Go hungry, start in the south building basement, and do not eat before you get there.

  2. 11:30

    Centre Island Beach

    Nature

    Ferry from Jack Layton terminal at the foot of Bay Street, about fifteen minutes. Buy the return ticket online in summer or queue for forty minutes.

  3. 14:00

    Ward's Island

    Nature

    Walk east along the lakeshore boardwalk to the cottage village and take the ferry back from there. Roughly an hour of flat path with the skyline on your right.

  4. 18:30

    Dinner in Kensington or Chinatown

    Eat

    Streetcar west along Dundas. Spadina at Dundas for noodles and dumplings, or the lanes north of it for everything else.

With more time: If it is raining, drop the islands and take the 501 streetcar west along Queen Street instead, which is an hour of the city changing character every ten blocks for the price of one fare.

Day 4 in Toronto

The gallery and an alley full of paint

The Art Gallery of Ontario is the last stop and deserves a proper two hours. Frank Gehry rebuilt it between 2004 and 2008, which he took on partly because he grew up in the street behind it, and the long glass and Douglas fir gallery he ran along the Dundas Street front is the best room in the building. The collection's real strength is Canadian: the Group of Seven and Tom Thomson painting the northern lakes in the 1910s and 1920s, and a large holding of Inuit sculpture.

Ten minutes south and west is Rush Lane, universally called Graffiti Alley, a kilometre of back lanes behind Queen Street where the painting is officially tolerated and constantly overwritten. It takes twenty minutes and it is free.

Union Station and the UP Express to the airport are a fifteen minute walk or two stops on the subway from there.

  1. 10:30

    Art Gallery of Ontario

    Culture

    Open at half past ten most days. Head for the Canadian rooms and the Thomson collection first, before the school groups arrive.

  2. 13:00

    Graffiti Alley

    Culture

    Runs behind Queen Street between Spadina and Portland. Best light in the morning and nothing is the same twice.

With more time: With more time before the flight, Fort York is twenty minutes west and is where the town was burned by an American army in 1813, on ground that was the lakeshore before the railways filled it in.

Before you go

Getting in

Pearson is the main airport, out west in Mississauga, and the UP Express train runs from Terminal 1 to Union Station in twenty-five flat minutes for a fixed fare. It is quicker than a taxi at almost any hour and much cheaper. Note that flights to the United States clear American immigration in Toronto, so allow an extra hour on the way out.

Billy Bishop sits on an island off the foot of Bathurst Street and handles short-haul flights from Montreal, Ottawa, New York and Boston. From the terminal you walk under the harbour and you are downtown in fifteen minutes, which makes it worth a fare premium.

Trains from Montreal, Ottawa and New York arrive at Union Station, which is under the financial district and connected to the subway.

Getting around

The TTC runs two useful subway lines, a large number of streetcars and everything else. Tap a credit card at the gate or on the streetcar and the fare caps itself over a day. The Line 1 subway is a horseshoe under Yonge and University, which covers most of what you want downtown.

Streetcars are slower than they look and share the road with traffic, but the 501 along Queen Street and the 504 along King are worth taking as sightseeing in their own right.

Do not hire a car. Downtown parking is expensive, the expressways seize up twice a day, and everything below is on transit.

Eating

This is the reason to come and it needs a plan, because the best of it is not downtown. Pick a neighbourhood a night and go: dumplings and hand-pulled noodles at Spadina and Dundas, Sri Lankan out in Scarborough, Persian up Yonge in North York, Jamaican patties and roti on Eglinton West, Portuguese on Dundas West.

Downtown, the two exceptions worth planning around are the market on Front Street and the Kensington streets west of Chinatown, where a former Jewish market turned Portuguese then Caribbean then everything else and never tidied itself up.

When to come

May, June, September and early October are the good months. July and August are hot and humid in a way that surprises people who think Canada is cold, and the city responds by moving onto patios and into the lake.

Winter is cold but not Montreal cold, and it is grey rather than pretty. The compensation is that the museums are empty and hotel rooms are half price.

Toronto is not a city that announces itself, and visitors who spend three days downtown often leave wondering what the fuss was. The fuss is thirty minutes out in any direction, on a streetcar, in a neighbourhood nobody has put on a postcard.

Book the tower and the castle if you want them, then give the rest of the time to a street you have never heard of. That is the trip people come back for.

Or make it a longer trip

These trips pass through here on the way somewhere else.

Make it your trip

Every stop, day and place here lands in your account as an editable trip. Move the days around, swap a city, add your own bookings and costs, and share it with whoever is coming.

Copy to my trips

Common questions

Is Niagara Falls worth a day?
The falls themselves, yes, and they are genuinely enormous. The town attached to them is a strip of casinos and wax museums. Go by train or bus, spend two hours at the water, and get out.
Is four days too long for Toronto?
Not if you spend the free half of each day in a neighbourhood rather than a queue. It is a bad city for monument-ticking and a very good one for wandering.
Do I need to book the CN Tower?
In summer and at weekends, yes, and pick a timed slot after dark. In February you can walk up and buy a ticket.
Which neighbourhood should I stay in?
Anywhere between Union and Bloor on the Yonge or University subway. The Annex is the best value of the central options and has somewhere to eat on every corner.
How cold does it get?
January averages a few degrees below freezing and drops well under that with the wind off the lake. It is milder than Montreal or Ottawa and considerably damper.