Taking a break from my Japan trip blogging so I can write down all my thoughts from my recent visit to The Pine in Creemore, Ontario – a one Michelin star restaurant serving contemporary Chinese cuisine using local ingredients. They broke the top 20 on a list of Canada's top 100 restaurants this year, too.

But I mostly wanted to visit because a) is close-ish to the farm, and b) a local food reviewer(?) (he's a guy who posts reviews of all the restaurants he visits and his palate is either super aligned to mine, or I've just been following his recs for so long that I tuned my palate to match his) posted a rave review of the place. And I guess I'm also a huge fan of local ingredients in Chinese cuisine!

I managed to get a reservation for August 1st, which means we went for our one year wedding(?) anniversary (is it a wedding anniversary if we didn't have a wedding and only got married?) and/or our 16th “being together” anniversary. It's always nice to have a reason to go to a nice restaurant!

This post is overdue by many many months, but a lot of things happened that made me delay writing about... mainly in that I wanted to blog about the convention that my friends and I went to, but then none of us really enjoyed the con so it kind of deflated any enthusiasm I had.

But one good thing we did was go out for an omakase dinner at one of the oldest Japanese restaurants in Toronto – Ginko Japanese Restaurant! It was all of our first omakase experience and it was really wonderful.