Toronto The Well | 174.03m | 46s | RioCan | Hariri Pontarini

the only 5 tenants that overlap with a typical strip mall are the three banks, Indigo, and Shoppers Drug Mart really..

A lot of these are smaller chains, yes, but they are smaller chains which are relatively unique in the Toronto market.

Small local mom and pop type places can't post the rents in brand new spaces like this, ultimately. This is pretty close to what I originally imagined the tenant list to be. It was never going to be a regional shopping centre, nor was it going to be filled with little mom and pop shops serving up cheap dim sum or the like.

To me the big disappointments are leasing out a lot of the upper level to office tenants and giving all the restaurants over to a single operator.
This caused much consternation on the inside as well.
 
True but what did you expect? I like the building (and walk past it quite often) but it is poorly connected to transit and if you want to open a 'specialised" or 'one-off' store I would think you would want to be near transit so it was easy to get to for everyone.
Thing is, even if this was well connected to transit I still bet the tenant mix would be almost similar, if not even more bland.
 
Nobody downtown goes that far for food
Especially when one is carless. Although I once fully intended to use transit to go all the way to Frilu in Thornhill, before the pandemic. But now they are among the many restaurants that no longer accommodate food restrictions. Just an aspect of the "post-pandemic" 🙄 callous zeitgeist... but I digress.
 
There's a set of downtown livers who do it (Suresh Doss is the most famous, but not the first to even write about it) but it's probably true that our numbers are dwarfed by people who live closer to the strip malls (actually, in many cases not that much closer, but people for whom a 20 minute drive across Scarborough or Etobicoke is not considered a major journey...).
 
What's this about downtown Toronto not having good restaurants??? One of the weirdest takes I've heard on this site. Downtown Toronto probably has some of the most consistently highly rated restaurants in the country. Saying you need to go to Brampton or Scarborough to get tasty food is one of the oddest statements I've heard. Is food more expensive in downtown? Yeah, probably. But is it better? I would say almost certainly.
 
The second rental building along Wellington looks set to open. Btw trees are supposed to go in at the end of April.
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What's this about downtown Toronto not having good restaurants??? One of the weirdest takes I've heard on this site. Downtown Toronto probably has some of the most consistently highly rated restaurants in the country. Saying you need to go to Brampton or Scarborough to get tasty food is one of the oddest statements I've heard. Is food more expensive in downtown? Yeah, probably. But is it better? I would say almost certainly.
In this case I don't think it's an apples to apples comparison. You'll find more polished, higher end restaurants downtown where you're paying for the quality and experience. Is it objectively better? Depends on how much you value the ambiance. Some of the best food I've had in the city is cheaper eats out in the boroughs, where you can pretty much travel the world through food. I think that's what people are getting at.

Of course you can find good cheap eats downtown too, and nicer dining experiences outside of the core. It's certainly not cut and dry.
 

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