THE CURATED EDITION.
Reportage / Toronto
From Sotto Sotto in Yorkville to the Joso's room on the cover of Take Care and the Raptors' courtside, a route through the Toronto that Drake wrote into his songs, neighbourhood by neighbourhood.
CITIES · TORONTO
No contemporary artist has done more for a city than Drake has done for Toronto. Before him, the capital of Ontario sat quietly on the edge of the global cultural map. After him, it became shorthand for a scene, a sound and a manner: the 6ix, the nickname he built from the old 416 and 647 area codes. His lyrics read like a directory of restaurants, streets and arenas. To walk through Toronto today is to read an unauthorised biography.
Sotto Sotto is the most important room in Drake’s life outside the studio. A Yorkville Italian with very low lighting and walls of celebrity photographs, it surfaces in “5AM in Toronto” and “Pound Cake/Paris Morton 2”. In 2022 he declared, on camera, “It’s the best restaurant in Toronto,” and later that year he was photographed in a bomber jacket bearing its name. Lobster ravioli, burrata, a long reservation list. The room is small; the reputation is not.
Joso’s, a few steps from Avenue Road and Davenport, is the address most tightly woven into the work. The cover of Take Care, Drake alone at a table with a goblet in theatrical light, was shot here. A Yorkville fixture for decades, it sends whole grilled fish to the table and has never needed to change the formula.
The Real Jerk belongs to another Toronto. The Caribbean institution spent twenty-two years on Queen Street East before settling at Gerrard and Carlaw, and it was there, at 842 Gerrard Street East, that Rihanna and Drake shot the video for “Work” in 2016. Jerk chicken, oxtail, Red Stripe: the flagship remains open.
Sofia, at 99 Yorkville Avenue, is where the neighbourhood dines when it wants to be comfortable rather than discovered. Studio Munge designed a sequence of rooms in red panelling, black and white marble and Barovier & Toso chandeliers; the Italian menu is generous and the bar runs late. Its absence from the lyrics is no obstacle: it is simply where the city goes. And for completists, Swish by Han, the Korean room name-checked in “5AM in Toronto” beside Sotto Sotto and Joso’s, has long closed. It survives only in the song, which in this city is a form of permanence.
The Four Seasons Hotel Toronto is Drake’s urban headquarters in legend, if not in fact. The story most often told places him there the night he recorded “Back to Back”, his answer to Meek Mill, supposedly a floor above his rival. It sits within a few minutes’ walk of Sotto Sotto and Joso’s.
The Hazelton Hotel needs no announcement. A Forbes Five-Star house in the heart of Yorkville, designed by Yabu Pushelberg, it pairs green marble bathrooms, velvet and brass with ONE, whose terrace wraps the corner of Yorkville Avenue and Hazelton Lane. The Spa by Valmont is reason enough to arrive a day early, and during the Toronto International Film Festival its private screening room barely rests.
The Drake Hotel, at 1150 Queen Street West, has no official link to the artist and, in spirit, every link. It reopened under that name in 2004, when Aubrey Graham was still a teenage actor. Fifty-one rooms, the Drake Underground music room, the Sky Yard rooftop and a programme of art make it the West End’s creative scene in a single address.
For October’s Very Own, the label Drake co-founded, the destination is the OVO store at the Toronto Eaton Centre, opened in 2019 with stone surfaces and pieces sold nowhere else. Collaborations with the Raptors, Jordan and Canada Goose are what the queues are for.
Forest Hill is where Drake was raised by his mother, Sandra, after his parents separated: a prosperous, largely Jewish neighbourhood of wide lawns. The video for “Started from the Bottom” returns to it, and the irony of the song’s rags-to-riches claim against those streets is part of the joke. He attended Forest Hill Collegiate before moving to Vaughan Road Academy.
Scarborough, and Kennedy Road in particular, is the opposite pole: the East End where he made many of his friends and much of the scene he later exported. Kennedy Road appears in “Energy”, and “Know Yourself” traces a drive east along the 401 that locals still recite.
De Grassi Street, in Riverside, gave its name to the television franchise in which Drake played Jimmy Brooks on Degrassi: The Next Generation from 2001 to 2009. In 2018 he reunited the original cast for the video of “I’m Upset”, a homecoming staged as a high-school reunion.
The open-air amphitheatre on the Lake Ontario waterfront, today the Budweiser Stage, hosted the first OVO Fest in 2010. The August festival grew into a fixture of hip-hop’s calendar, with surprise appearances over the years from Jay-Z, Eminem and Stevie Wonder. Watching the skyline light up from those seats explains why no other city would have done.
Scotiabank Arena, home of the Raptors, is where Drake keeps court. The team’s global ambassador since 2013, he is a courtside fixture, and when the franchise won its only NBA title in 2019 he was among its loudest witnesses. His bond with Toronto basketball is as central to his public identity as any album.
The CN Tower carries the cover of Views: Drake perched on the edge, the city at his feet. The image was composited, which hardly matters; it made visible the idea of a man who put Toronto on top of the world. The EdgeWalk, a harnessed circuit of the tower’s outer ledge, is the most Drake-like way to face the city.
Queen Street West is the Toronto that breathes art, independent shops and late nights. The Drake Hotel is here; Ossington Avenue, with the city’s most intimate cocktail bars, is next door; the Horseshoe Tavern, one of Canada’s most storied live music rooms, is a short streetcar ride east. It is the version of the city Drake inhabits quietly, without posting.
A city once considered polite and peripheral now hears itself described, line by line, in the most streamed voice of a generation. Walk from Yorkville to Queen West with the songs in your ears and the biography writes itself, unauthorised, on every corner.
Details: The Hazelton Hotel, 118 Yorkville Avenue; Sofia, 99 Yorkville Avenue; The Drake Hotel, 1150 Queen Street West; The Real Jerk, 842 Gerrard Street East. Reserve Sotto Sotto and Joso’s well ahead.
GABRIEL SILVEIRADO, FOR WAYFARER.
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