KITSCHEN reclaims kitsch — long dismissed as sentimental or unserious — as a genuine art form built on colour, abundance, and unapologetic joy, and applies that lens to restaurants and cafés that treat design as central to the experience. The series isn't food criticism: it deliberately sidesteps the plate to focus on everything around it — the room, the music, the menu as object, the walls — the atmosphere that holds the meal rather than the meal itself. There are no stars or rankings, just a spotlight on spaces where someone cared enough to make the whole experience beautiful and meant it. Learn more about KITSCHEN.

Harbord Street is, without exaggeration, as much of a miracle as a Toronto streetscape can muster. It is a fairly short street, running at just about 2.5 kilometres; bordered on the east by the architecturally elaborate Queen’s Park Crescent, and on the west by Ossington Ave., which was voted the 14th “coolest street” in the world by Time Out magazine. Directly to its north, you’ll find Bloor Street, one of the city’s main cultural and commercial aortas. And just below Harbord lies College Street, the academic nucleus of the country. Despite being surrounded on all sides by its high-achieving Type A siblings, Harbord is often sombre enough that you can hear a casual conversation from across the street, still smell the early morning yeast rising from Harbord Bakery, or enjoy a patio hang at Harbord Fish & Chips. 

For those, like myself, who’ve lived around this street for the last decade, we might be reluctant to admit an increasingly apparent development: Harbord is finally reaching its glory days. We’re reluctant because hindsight is often 20/20, and Harbord circa 2015 was pretty close to a 10/10 respite from the bustle of Bloor and College streets. The last ten years of this street have been mired in construction projects and closures or commercial disruptions resulting from the pandemic. As such, the street has been stuck in a limbo between a quiet residential strip and a low-profile shopping district with serious potential for cool. Over the last two years, that limbo has resolved itself as major road repairs concluded and new small business ventures moved in. One of those ventures is Canary Counter. 

Canary Counter (322 Harbord Street) is a wine bar and bottle shop created in September 2025 by Celia Mendez, who hails from a family of winemakers and growers in the Canary Islands. As a teenager, she travelled across Europe with her father—a fifth-generation wine producer who owns Viñátigo Vineyards—meeting distributors and attending wine fairs. Her next stops included a business degree in Barcelona, a harvest in Burgundy, and a wine marketing MBA in Bordeaux, before landing in Toronto in late 2019. Amid the chaos and disruptions of 2020, the Ontario government relaxed the LCBO’s draconian hold on the ability of independent and small businesses to sell bottles to go, which opened up a path for Mendez to turn a long-vacant retail space into the cosy nook that is now Canary Counter.

Canary’s niche is a focus on small, independent, family-owned winemakers and growers from lesser-known regions, including the Canary Islands, Hungary, and parts of Germany. Offering a dine-in experience that seats just about ten, its ethos leans more towards a social butterfly’s kitchen than a commercial outlet. The space is co-run with guide Nate Cross, a certified wine expert, and Ayo Tsalithaba, a veritable "content wizard." It offers a tight rotating list of three- and five-ounce pours, with the usual date-night-friendly light snacks like almonds, pretzels, and (in the past) mussels in escabeche. 

L-R: Celia Mendez, Nate Cross, Ayo Tsalithaba

Context matters, and a store front’s context is how it fits into its neighbourhood. In that sense does Canary fit into the collective vision of what Harbord is and, more importantly, what it's trying to be. 

Design, typography, materiality, and what the menu tells about the place before you've ordered anything

When designing a menu, you’re at risk of either paying too much or too little attention to details. Just right is hard to get right. For the ones paying too much attention, it's often to compensate for what’s likely missing in the kitchen. So too little attention might actually be a good thing: perhaps there’s sufficient confidence in everything happening on and off the table that the menu serves only the most perfunctory role. When it's done just right, a menu is—to borrow from Nina Simone’s best bit of stage banter—a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written for it yet. That’s not the same thing as compensating for what's missing, but indicating where a restaurant is heading and the ways that its aesthetic reach exceeds its material grasp. 

After publishing ten print issues of this magazine, I’m, of course, partial to the printed word. Not only when it is itself the product but also when it is adjacent to a completely different experience. My time as Managing Editor of the Toronto Symphony, which included publishing 13 program books for concerts throughout a season, gave me a close-up view of how what's on paper—and how it's presented—can have an outsized effect on our experience of what’s happening on stage. Or, in this case, in a bar. It's a real-time Rorschach Test: two different program notes can create two distinct experiences of the exact same concert. Two different menus—diverse in font, kerning, weight, paper, texture, etc—can create distinct encounters with the dine-in experience. 

Canary definitely falls in the category of too little attention to the menu, verging on unimaginative; opting for convenience and ease of reproducibility. The menu has to change every Tuesday to keep pace with the variety of wines they present. “It's printed at my place. I do it in PowerPoint,” Mendez says, with a hint of delight in the software’s user-friendliness, “I think PowerPoint beats InDesign, and it beats Canva too.” The menu is mounted in a pop vintage burgundy-framed display case, with gold-toned floral corners, a dark inner border, and a protective acrylic layer. Mendez’s font of choice is “something very close to Futura,” against a simple cream sheet organized into sparkling, white, orange, rosé, and red categories, each wine listed with grape and origin beneath it, priced in parallel 3oz and 5oz columns. The restraint of the printed sheet against the relatively elaborate frame underscores both the practicality of Mendez’s approach and the decidedly non-minimalist ethos of Canary Counter. 

From the first impression made on the sidewalk to the last thing you notice on your way out the door

From the outside, Canary makes a statement that’s hard to refute: an aggressive but inviting splash of yellow deepened by hints of nutmeg. While the hue certainly stands out against the more subdued residential elements in this stretch of Harbord, the rest of the façade communicates an intuitive understanding of the neighbourhood: twee but not too twee—chic but not the nepo baby variety. At a glance, Canary comes across as a quaint date night spot. But the casual drapery in the window, the slightly serif all-caps of CANARY COUNTER installed on the right face, and the fact that they spell out in plain English what this place is (WINE BAR / BOTTLE SHOP) feel inviting enough to be an after-dinner digestif for the neighbourhood’s families. Canary is fairly in aesthetic agreement with the stores before and after it—Full Stop Coffee, Curiosa (a gift shop), and a trendy laundromat—with that agreement being: something is happening here, and attention must be paid (excuse the blatant borrowing of lines from Death of a Salesman). And indeed something is happening here: this quartet of storefronts at the corner of Harbord and Grace is music to the eyes, visual proof of a post-pandemic economic revival along this stretch. 

Things are more subdued on the inside. The high-octane yellow of the exterior gives way to the more pastel egg-yolk of the interior. At first impression, it looks and feels like the well-curated cottage wine cellar of your favourite well-to-do good-humoured socialite uncle. But its details bring it back down to earth, to something more relatable to the broader Annex neighbourhood. Open and unvarnished industrial metal shelving units for wine storage and display underscore the bottle shop element of this wine bar. Choice floral placements, along with a jute rug for the centre island, deliver a homey feeling with a casual gesture that isn’t too self-conscious. Mid-century modern wood furniture and hanging lamps, with a dash of a Scandinavian lightness of touch, open up the space and prevent it from being too homey. 

The back flank of the bar, on the right side of the entrance, reveals its true identity as a kitchen space, with simple open shelves for glassware, a well-used sink and dishwasher in open view. It's an interesting gamble in terms of layout, as it challenges the two things most people tend to do when they enter a space: turn right, and also look out for the off-limits section of a space—which in this case seems to be on the right. So there’s likely a moment of hesitation upon entry as to where to go, one that’s resolved by where either Mendez or Cross is standing. Figuring all of this out in the fraction of a second it takes for someone to decide if they feel comfortable in a space is a tall order, but the warm details above do much of the heavy lifting to ease this friction.

Art, objects, ephemera, and what the walls reveal about the sensibility of the people behind it

Canary went for a more subdued minimalist approach with its wall space. The washed yellow palette avoids the aesthetic bankruptcy that completely white matte walls would have declared. But it achieves the same goal of not being too imposing on what is a public experience. It also allows the space to have personality without competing with that of its patrons. The art on the walls is likewise minimalist, just two similarly themed works by the same artist. At first look, the choice of art looks like a cop-out, leaning too much on that open-for-interpretation depersonalized air of most abstract art (which is the exact opposite of the ten-toes-down spirit of kitsch art). But in actuality, this isn’t abstract art at all; but a sort of ingenious photograph of nature, and Mendez’s personal stamp on the space:“I didn't want to add a lot of art to the space because I really want the bottles of wine to catch all the attention. The art that we have hanging on the walls is by my friend Natalie Letourc. She's based in the Canary Islands. She is my first boyfriend's mother, and we were together when I was 15, so that was 15 years ago. But I still talk to her weekly.

She's an artist, and she does natural dyes. She went to my parents' vineyard, and she foraged plants and flowers, and using this natural dye eco-print technique, she did these two beautiful pieces. If you look into them, you can actually see the flowers and the shapes of the leaves. She sent it with a friend who was visiting Toronto, and when I unpacked the fabric, it still had leaves in it. So it feels like it's something that takes me home, from a material point of view.”

The music playing, its volume, its fit, and what it adds or subtracts from the room

Too many Toronto bars and restaurants have never heard of background music and insist on playing their music loud enough that you end up in a screaming match with the person across from you. While the genre of music a place is playing is the most pertinent question here, volume itself should be considered as a kind of genre—any song can become unbearable if played loud enough. At Canary, the volume is controlled by the size of the crowd. “If it's packed,” Mendez clarifies, “of course the music is going to be louder, because you don't want people overhearing or eavesdropping on other people's conversations. But when it's just a couple sitting at the window, we play with the volume.” 

In terms of taste, it's as eclectically varied as the wines Canary carries: “We have a playlist that Nate found, called International Funk. It has everything from Italo disco to very good Nigerian music, or Amadou and Mariam—big on the African vibes, because I think that brings so much joy. Italo disco is also fun and sassy in a way, very cocky, and I really like that. But then I also love playing Spanish music, especially Spanish-language music. I love Argentinian rock, I love the Uruguayan songwriter Jorge Drexler, and sometimes when I play his music, everybody's like, ‘What is this beautiful song?’ and I get to talk about it. Or I love Brazilian music as well, Caetano is always in the background.”

Taking a cue from Canary's own eclectic approach to sound, we've put together a listen-along playlist to accompany this profile. Press play below.

Borrowed from the Sanskrit word (रस) for "juice, essence, or taste,” Rasa captures the overall essence of the place: how welcome and you feel walking in

This criterion is the most important one in understanding how a place sees itself in relation to the people coming through the door. And it’s hard to judge a bar’s character within the context of an editorial visit like this. Which is why in future iterations of this KITSCHEN series, we will be sending writers out first as secret shoppers/mystery diners to scope out the “natural habitat” before we organize a more official visit. If you’re particularly passionate about the culinary arts and would like to be one of our mystery diners, please reach out to team(at)cannopy.ca with a writing sample─we’ll be paying a small writing fee along with a stipend to cover your dining experience for two. 

I had visited Canary twice, and on a more lowkey basis, before this sit-down interview. Each time I walked away impressed by the genuine and simple gesture this place is making in the face of an entrepreneurial ecosystem that rewards gimmicks and aloof trendiness. There were children bumbling about while their parents caught up on friendly gossip, dogs grumbling for attention along the sidewalk, and the occasional rattle of cars and bike bells providing a second soundtrack for the scenery. More wine bars of this sort just might be what the Toronto workaday pace needs. In this respect, Canary’s “Mediterranean” influences shine through. Though the Canary Islands are technically in the Atlantic Ocean, the influences from Africa, Latin America, and the Southern European arc do lend its culture a warmth and vibrancy that we may lazily label as Mediterranean. That enthusiastic comfortability with warmth seems to have followed Mendez all the way to Harbord Street in the shape of Canary Counter. 

On the question of accessibility, and how comfortable anyone in this diverse city can feel walking in, it's best to follow the money. The price point of $30-50 for most to-go bottles at Canary reveals its attitude towards accessibility. A high price point can sometimes allow you to get lazy when it comes to the experience you’re offering. That might seem counterintuitive, but nothing communicates exclusivity better than price point, and once you can pay your way into exclusivity then that exclusivity itself becomes the focus of the experience. Then there’s the thorny issue of tipping, it’s an inherently frictional part of every transaction in the service and hospitality industry. Though Europeans have greased the wheels of this transaction by ditching tipping altogether, Mendez insists her choice not to include a tipping option Canary has little to do with her heritage: “I'm European, but I'm also a socialist. I think it's important that you try to work out a business where your employees' salary doesn't depend on tips but depends on your responsibility as a business owner.” 

Beyond the price point, Canary has also pinpointed a sweet spot in its overall atmosphere that is both open and specific. It's a place where the highfalutin Ossington folks can find their scene, and where the low-grazing Harbord Villagers can feel seen. Making that combo work is an achievement. The wines are quite nice, also.