What we’re missing in Toronto! When diners head for Manhattan’s Lever House restaurant they must first swallow Brit shockjock artist Damien Hirst’s installation “School: The Archeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity, and the Search for Knowledge”. The lobby is lined with 15 medicine cabinets filled with thousands of empty boxes and bottles with labels for antidepressants, cough medicine and other drugs, 30 sheep in a series of formaldehyde filled tanks and a giant tank containing two sides of beef, a chair, 300 sausages, a shark, a dead dove and an umbrella.

Hirst describes it as his most mature work to date. Oh I don’t know. I thought he was more avant garde in his resto Pharmacy in Notting Hill where you scribbled on a prescription pad and hoped the burger had uppers in it.

Restaurateur John McDonald is understandably anxious to assure diners that his crispy lamb shoulder is formaldehyde-free, adding thankfully “An avid carnivore can’t be stopped.”   more »