About

Who writes this notebook

I am Priya Shah. I am a registered dietitian based in Toronto, and I have spent eight years in event catering — writing allergen matrices, setting portion sizes, and talking to very tired chefs on the hot line at midnight.

Where I was in the kitchen

Casa Loma banquets, the Carlu wedding floor, Enercare corporate dinners on the Exhibition grounds. Not the castle on Dufferin Street — I have never been on their payroll. I have been to the castle banquet many times as a paying guest, usually with family, usually on a Saturday I later regretted. These notes are from those visits.

My day job now is a small clinic in Toronto. The notebook is a side project. I keep it because enough patients and friends keep asking the same questions about dining-out formats they don’t encounter often — and the castle is one of those formats.

What this site is for

Operator pages describe the show. They are good at that. They are less good at describing the food — because the food is a constraint for them (deliver hundreds of covers through a tournament), not a selling point. Someone needs to describe the food plainly, so that a parent of a nut-allergic kid, a vegetarian in-law, or a guest who hates sweet drinks can set their expectations before they sit down.

That is the gap this notebook fills. There is no advertising on these pages. There is no affiliate link. There is no retargeting cookie set on this site. If a page somewhere else charges you while using my name, it is not me.

A note on the photographs

Photographs here are illustrative — from Wikimedia Commons, with photographer and licence named beside each figure. The castle operator has not provided imagery for this guide, and I have not asked. Format references only; none of the figures are inside the Dufferin Street dining hall.

Corrections

If a menu detail here is stale, write to me. The castle’s hot-line evolves season to season.

— P.S.