It might be 'scary' if you're a vegetarian but so scary about food? You so rich kid who has all their food diced into small cubes & separated onto fine china for you? You've never seen a bone or bone before? You only eat boneless meat? Or worse, meat out of a can and vegetables out of cans also? If anything, this is what fresh food looks like - ready to eat - if anything, it makes me hungry. Sorry you don't enjoy anything other than processed meat but to most people, this is what fresh prepared food should look & taste like.

Enough to turn me vegeterian! We have similiar in London's little China town.

delicious

For some reason "Closer" pops into mind. Great shot!

nice pic, but i'm not sure what is scary about it? everything is clean and the food looks fresh.

If I look at this photograph for one second longer I'm sure I won;t be feeling like eating any dinner today... so I'm going..

Great shot, can just imagine the man out the back "cluck cluck chop! cluck cluck chop!"

Your photos of Toronto are awesome. I stumbled on your blog somehow recently...can't remember where, but I'm glad I did. They capture what Toronto is about so well.
Keep it up!
Cheers
Marc

I agree. Every china town has the same stores. I have never walked by and thought hmmm I'm hungry. Anyway it a a cool shot.

I get grossed out every time I walk by that place... fantastic picture though!

i'm hungry :(

Why is it scary?

schönes foto, sam! am meisten bewundere ich deine kontinuität - oder soll ich sagen: besessenheit? ;-) ich lerne viel von dir, sehr herzlichen dank für diesen blog! tina

it's not scary. it's actually delicious. In case anyone wondered, this is a Chinese style deli store! The hanging meats are ducks, chickens, and barbecued pork....very popular and usually eaten with rice and vegetables. Some of the deli are marinated with special types of soya sauces.

oh, and the bright orange circular meats in the almost-centre of the picture are squids.....they've been marinated with some sauce I forgot the name of, but are usually steamed and eaten as is. Very fattening though, but somewhat of a delicacy :)

very unattractive meet(s). nice shot nevertheless.

Scary? Im craving for some roasted chicken now!

mmmm roooassssttt chiiiickeeenn...

BoAgh!!! Nauseating!!! :(

If by "scary" you mean delicious!!!

wow! i've been a vegetarian for about six months now, but i was raised very much a meat eating flip-canuck. most "normal" meats don't turn me on anymore, but when i saw this shot MAN! DID MY MOUTH START TO WATER!!! gimme some charsui!!! *whimper". you can get charsiu hier in hamburg, but it's real expensive like it SHOULDN'T be.*sigh* maybe it's better this way. there IS a lot of suffering in that window. okay, someone probably already asked, but: where is your reflection? couldn't make out ANYTHING that looked like a crouching paparazzi or hidden blogger.

Unless you're a vegetarian, I'm unsure how anyone would find this scary. I suppose a lot of people are too used to their overly sanitized grocery stories ... without heads, without limbs, without feet, anything that identifies them as an animal that used to live and breathe. I'm Chinese, and we regularly have fish for dinner ... head, eyes, tail, and all -- same goes for ducks, etc.

Lots of Western restaurants, however, seem to find these appendages distasteful, and serve only slabs of meat. Hypocrites, I say. If you eat meat, you need to deal with the fact it was a living thing once.

Maybe we should start calling "meat" "animal." "Meat" is just too bland a term, and distances us from its reality.

I suppose roast pork & sea foods might be scary to a Moslem or Orthodox Jew, but others posted here are right that it is hardly scary.

The food laws have had sensible hygiene as the basis, but are hard to justify in an educated care taking society. But not all take care. And some shellfish may be deadly toxic and unidentifiably so, which for some is enough reason to never eat it.

Makes me wonder if you're a Moslem - which is fine by me. I've wondered the same of your friend Kam in Oxford recently, as he apparently found a post of mine offensive regarding the interpretation of the Koran which many use to justify Murderous Martyrdom - which I see as a false interpretation. After all, Jesus said that there is no marriage in Heaven. No marriage, no wives. It is not a place of possesion, which many men seem to think their wives are. Other than that problem I find Moslems to be good people with difficult nations to live in.

Fab photo....aren't people funny about meat?? Keep up the good work, of the highest standard as always!
Phil

It's not scary in the sense that the animals have suffered or anything, but the fact that those ducks have those hollow spots and the overal texture and factory-looking sense of the picture makes it scary. The meat itself should be appetizing. That huge slab of meat at the right, (a cow or something?) makes it scary because it looks like a monster.
So, it's not the food that is scary, it's just the atmosphere of it and the contrast and the fogginess of the windows that reminds you of a scary movie. The meat itself looks really nice and roastic.

quack.

Ha! I just came back from a bike ride a few minutes ago. Last stop was this exact restaurant for dinner. I had BBQ duck and wonton soup.

This picture made me hungry again...I might go dig into the leftovers.

It's scary because of the bird flu!

Ugh!
When I saw this I was like: AAAaaaAAAGH!!!
veggie V carnivores one of those things that gets old friends into a bitter little arguments just like with religion or politics.

go veggie!

eeeky n scary...

great shot! it is really catchy and good focusing. yum

Same...you have the eye.

I forget about silly things like Meet-eaters vs. Veggie-only lovers. Focusing on the photo...it's absolutely riveting. Colours, DoF, depth period.

Nice.

Nice.

Nice.

Now I'm really hungry!

Don't knock it till you tried it, yum. Unless your a vegetarian, or have some religious conviction... than try it, and feel guilty cause you thought it was delicous :)

mmm, that looks delicious. i love the photos, keep up the great work! also, congrats on the award ...

Looks fresh. I can see all the cars and the building across the street in the reflection, but no trace of you in this!!

It's not scary at all, like others have stated, it actually makes me hungry and reading these comments makes me want some roast duck and rice now. Mmm...

ha.. its scary for some but it is actually delicacy for us chinese.. it might look savage to display the ducks like tat, but it works wonder in attracting hordes of dinner goers.. ;p

I'm really miffed that you called a store 'scary' just because it's all steamed up and hanging with livid, sweaty slabs of meat! Wahh wahh wahh!

Plus the store owners aren't pink, and therefore in my feeble imagination you're virtually being a racist, so it's extra bad!

Let's Eat!

The animal on the left is a whole pig.

Ah, anyway. Vegetarians get no un-love from me; I'm totally cool with veggie lovers. But contradictory meat-lovers! Come on! Most of your meat comes from such "factories."

I'm Chinese; I'm not vegetarian and I live in Singapore and they have these stuff here too, but not just confined to Chinatown. And God I do LOVE these stuff... plenty of fats to clog up your arteries but yeah... Your photo makes everything look so succulent I'm really hungry now (even though it's barely a couple of hours after dinner).

Is that the Gold Stone? The Gold Stone rules.

I think it might be somewhere closer to the northwest corner of Spadina and Dundas ... looking at the reflection in the window.

I took almost the same picture about a week earlier, except the window wasn't steamed up then. My wife and I had lunch at this place. It was jammed full of people, mostly Chinese, which we took as a good sign. The food was REALLY good. We were only in Toronto for a week, so it's kind of funny to see our lunch place show up on this site. There was a busker playing a Chinese fiddle across the street who would have made a nice picture too, except I felt a bit funny about taking his photo.

I seen the same duck-window in New york, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle!!

I like the variety in this - it takes me back to NYC's Chinatown. When I come to TO I will have to visit this place. Nice shot.

this is my favorite picture out of all the ones from your site

keep up the great work

OOO, Interesting story))