Waterloo on Wellington
Le Sélect’s encounter with liquor-licence bureaucracy as it prepared to open on Wellington Street.
Read the story (PDF, 6 pages, 1.2 MB)Liberté, Égalité, Convivialité.
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170 richly illustrated pages.
Over 20 recipes.
A lifetime of stories.
This is the inside story of Toronto’s Parisian bistro, from its origins as a humble artists’ hangout on Queen West to its transformation into an unmissable dining experience on Wellington Street.
Le Sélect Bistro: Half a Century in a Changing City tells the unlikely story of how French bistro culture took root on grimy Queen Street West nearly half a century ago.
As the little bistro flourished, the neighbourhood transformed around it. Out went the second-hand bookstores and dusty antique shops. In came fast fashion and even faster bankruptcies. To stay the same, Le Sélect had to change. So it moved to Wellington Street… and nearly went belly-up in its opening week, when provincial bureaucrats accused its owners of bootlegging and threatened to seize and destroy its 12,000-bottle wine cellar.