Toronto Manulife Centre Podium and Streetscape Renewal | 9.75m | 2s | Manulife Real Estate | MdeAS Architects

Thanks for googling that up @AlvinofDiaspar!

1) That's proof that it's ridiculous for advocatedaily.com not to include dates.
2) It's taken a while for Manulife Real Estate and Eatertainment Inc. to settle that dispute, assuming that's what held up the announcement. There are rumours of a buyout — but I wonder what form it took.

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I was fortunate enough to have taken a trip to New York in 2012 with a friend who worked in wine sales who knew the Eataly store manager through connections. The manager gave us a tour of Eataly and it was truly breathtaking.

According to the manager, through his channels, he heard that the biggest roadblock at the time to expanding to Toronto were the liquor laws - over half of the retail space at Eataly NYC was dedicated to wines and spirits.
 
Besides The Bloor Street Diner, Eatertainment Inc. also runs The One Eighty up top of the Manulife Centre; The Bottom Line, a hockey themed sportsbar down on Front Street near the Hockey Hall of Fame; and both a catering business and event planning business. If all of those other businesses are going to keep going, I wonder if they'll take the proceeds from the Bloor Street Diner settlement and reinvest in a new restaurant somewhere else in town, or whether they're just cashing out.

The Bloor Street Diner isn't great, but it's not bad either, and the name itself has a fair bit of goodwill attached to it. There will be enough change on these blocks of Bloor Street over the coming years that reopening down the line in a revamped Holt Renfrew Centre, for example, could be played as a return to its origins. (Anyone remember the gloss black walls and pink neon?)

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The Bloor Street Diner is/was a decent stand-by option in the Bloor-Yorkville area. Reasonably priced for the reasonable food that you got. The type of place that you would go to for a second or third date, with the cinemas right there, but nothing amazing.

Did Eatertainment own Mr. Greenjeans in Eaton Centre as well?
 
I wonder if they will spend any of this redevelopment money to fix the long standing issue of the parking lot ticket spitter dispensing painful electrical shocks to unsuspecting patrons. Management at Manulife Centre knows of this problem and blames static electricity buildup on the ramp.
 
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