Good Eats: Department Store Dining

Lady Eaton’s vision

From this spot, you can see the former Queen Street locations of two of Toronto’s most influential department stores: Eaton’s and Simpson’s. Both stores opened their Queen Street locations at the end of the nineteenth century and, as part of their wide range of offerings, featured tea rooms and informal dining areas for shoppers.

In the early 1920s, Lady Flora McCrea Eaton (1880–1970), wife and heir of Eaton President, John Craig Eaton, spearheaded an effort to open a luxurious dining room, the Georgian Room, on the ninth floor of the department store. Inspired by restaurants of other department stores around the world, notably the Georgian Restaurant of Harrod’s in London, England Lady Eaton designed the space as an elegant retreat from the city with cut crystal chandeliers and blue velvet chairs. The Georgian Room opened March 10, 1924, offering lunches, afternoon teas, and dinners. The space also hosted daily fashion shows, where attendees could see the latest trends from New York or Paris.

Lady Eaton’s vision

Lady Flora Eaton supervised many of the Eaton department store dining rooms and event spaces, including the Art Deco masterpiece the Round Room at Eaton’s College Street store as well as Le 9e, the luxurious ninth floor restaurant on top of Eaton’s Montreal store. Lady Eaton also ensured women had prominent roles in the management of the Eaton dining rooms. To design the menu for the Georgian Room, Lady Eaton hired dietician Violet Ryley, a graduate of Toronto’s Lillian Massey School of Household Science.

The Georgian Room was a popular destination for Toronto lunches and dinners for over fifty years. Its dessert offerings proved so popular, a ground-level Georgian Room cake counter was opened in the late 1920s to offer Eaton’s shoppers the ability to order pastries, particularly its famous red velvet cake, to take home. The Georgian Room closed on Christmas Eve 1976 as part of the demolition of the original Eaton’s store to make way for the construction of the Eaton Centre shopping mall.

Simpson’s Art Deco masterpiece

Formerly located just across the street from Eaton’s Queen Street store was Simpson’s department store, Eaton’s long-time competitor. Perhaps inspired by Eaton’s Georgian Room, Simpson’s opened its own elegant dining room in March 1929, known as the Arcadian Court. Spanning the eighth and ninth floors of its new building on the corner of Bay and Queen Streets, the Arcadian Court also offered an elegant surrounding for lunches, teas, and dinners. With its Art Deco flourishes, the Arcadian Court boasted of 40-foot ceilings, with magnificent city views through its double-floor windows.