Toronto 4

Wandering downtown Toronto, I am surrounded by bigocity. In search of reflections, I am endlessly rewarded. Camera in claw, I follow imagery around Yonge street, and finally in a sort of alley, I find a restaurant called BeerBistro with menu items as a kind of art on the windows. The lobster quesadilla sounds good. Entering the spacious place somewhat north of lunch hour, I have it mostly to myself, reflected in windows and ceiling mirrors, and enough different beers to start a museum. Then menu conveniently offers pairings but I'd rather be more adventuresome. To go with the probably tiny sums of lobster and however much smoked gouda, I order the grapefruit beer, a seemingly contradictory beverage they turn out not to have. The server warns me the Belgians are mostly not in, but I do find a fine raspberry beer and order that. I'd had a bowl of raspberries and blueberries for breakfast and this seems a segue my stomache would approve of. I'm thinking the raspberry would neatly complement the smoked gouda as well as garnishing whatever lobster taste possibility survives its quesadilla incarnation. The staff is remarkably helpful in this. To work in a restaurant specializing in tidbits to interact with its internet-sized beer list would be a challenging and rewarding thing to do, I imagine. Order the raspberry wonder Liefmans Frambozenbier, bypassing the suggested pairing of a beer from the Quenching list. It went as well with the quesadilla as any wine I've had paired and "beer" is something you don't normally think of having with lobster. The raspberries and the cheese did wonderful things to each other. It was a lot of food. I was initially reticent about ordering a bigger bottle of beer, the only size it came in, but was relieved to have enough of its liquid fruit to wash away the increasingly dry quesadilla skin and unleash the lobster in all its Impressionistic exuberance.
Instead of dining out, Deb cooks some wondrous stuffed vegetables that never stop applauding as they're being stuffed.
On the morrow, it's off to Ottawa.