Summerlicious gives me a chance to see how the city eats without having to review each place I go to. I have a chance to housekeep, to return to restaurants I haven’t been to in a while, pick up new ideas floating around. One great new idea that I have to write about is Kyle Deming’s Mojito Pannacotta at Starfish.  

I’ve gone OTT over Patrick McMurray’s oysters in the past, but this week, I dropped in for the twenty buck lunch so I could sample Deming’s cooking. Deming has actually been in the kitchen for a year, and I regret that I haven’t taken the time before to notice just how good he is. I thought that Summerlicious would be a poor way to meet Deming gastronomically. It turns out to be the perfect showcase. Starfish is one of the restaurants that takes Summerlicious very seriously and offers its best in very healthy portions.

It’s hard to pick from the four starters, four entrees and two desserts. They all look good. But Calista Flockhart, as I call my skinny friend,  keeps saying she really can’t eat more than a nibble. She stops talking as she tries to choose among chilled gazpacho with matane shrimp (from Eastern Canada)  and crème fraiche - or should it crispy fried quail. Instead she goes with the grilled Portugese sardines with homemade sourdough panzanella, green olives and fennel oil. I settle for six of Patrick’s best oysters.

“ Can’t finish all three sardines” Calista says. Ok. But she’s eager to eat more – the Tunisian sea bream with fennel and radish salad sound a sensible choice, but then she bites into the crispy potato fondant with a tinge of tomato and saffron sauce and acts as if she can’t stop eating.

Meanwhile I’m eating a wild Irish mussel risotto with grilled baby leeks and a few weeds strewn on top. First good risotto I’ve eaten out for a long time.

Of course neither of us are going to eat dessert yet somehow a sticky toffee pudding and Mojito pannacotta sneak onto our table and sit there looking luscious. The toffee pudding is light as bubbles and distressingly easy to eat while Calista just keeps sneaking her spoon into the lime and rum cream which has a little meringue stick stirrer. This is a knockout, and it’s not too sweet.

Starfish Oyster Bed & Grill. 100 Adelaide St. E. 416- 366-7827 No Wheelchair access.  

Starfish is a high. I wasn’t so happy with my dinner at Noce which has for long been an outpost of Italian regional food on Queen St. W.

I haven’t eaten here for a couple of years, but my memories are good. Noce is a serious Italian restaurant which cooks regional food – and the only great food in Italy is regional – in a city overwhelmed by Americanized  pasta and pizza. Online I see several dishes I couldn’t find elsewhere, notably beef’s tongue in green sauce which I think means a sauce made of olive oil, lemon, capers, anchovie. I like and don’t like tongue. I grew up eating it usually with salad and I’ve never lost my ambivalence about it. Tongue is at once slippery and furry, only faintly beefy. No other food is so hard to define. It’s challenge.

Noce is all charm. You enter through a tunnel. First the sheltered sidewalk patio, dark and cool on this muggy evening and then a passageway – on one side, an open kitchen, on the other a screen hiding the airy dining room. By this time Elena Morelli, the co-owner (with chef Guido Saldini) has intercepted us with acceuil-plus. Everyone is smiling as we’re ushered to our table. Already I feel I’m going to have a delicious dinner.

Both the regular menu and the $35  Summerlicious menu are available. Tongue, alas, has been replaced on the summer menu. I can’t help noticing that the summer menu isn’t as interesting as the winter menu, and that some of the luxury touches of the past, truffles and foie gras, aren’t mentioned. I wonder whether this is a sign that the restaurant has had to cut back because of rising food prices -- something that is already common in high end U.S. restaurants.

We order simply.  Grilled calamari with spicy baby vegetables is good, the pear and asiago salad likewise, but I can’t believe my gnocchi with veal ragout.  The last time I ate gnocchi, it was ethereal and bathed in rosy sauce with a dusting of fresh parmesan. The plate before me has toughish dumplings and the sauce adds nothing more than a dash of colour to the dish.

Two of us go for the Moroccan shrimp with Israeli couscous – in lieu of anything more tempting. A bright red and heavily armoured crustacean  bristling with sharp points and whiskers takes up most of the plate. I get no more than a couple of mouthfuls of meat from it – chewy meat like that of the Caribbean lobster. My friend gets round that by eating the whole shell saying it’s where all the taste is. A rather expensive shell at $22.  The most popular dish is on the $35 Summerlicious menu: grilled certified angus beef flatiron steak, nicely rare,with roast potatoes and summer vegetables.

**Noce 875 Queen St. W. 416-504-3463 No wheelchair access. Quiet patio.

Some last thoughts on the ‘licious series: I take them as  adventures. It’s great more people are being drawn to some of our very good restaurants..

But  now’s the time for the city to expand the idea.

Now’s the time to cultivate the city’s foodies for whom the gilt has come off the gingerbread of Winter and Summerlicious. Eat, Pay and Go may be a great quickie promotion but  ---

Restaurants need not only MORE customers but they need MORE well-heeled customers, more foodies willing to pay more to eat better and better food.

Why doesn’t the city host a Chefs’ Festival  comparable to Montreal’s annual Chefs’ Festival? This year Montreal feted Toronto Chefs. Why can’t we fete Montreal chefs? Then Chicago chefs, Provencal chefs…..etc…