Toronto Laundromat Review #3 — The Lost Sock & Vesta Lunch
Hi, we’re Dave and Anne-Marie: two employed, full-time professionals living in downtown Toronto, so obviously we have 2 roommates and no onsite laundry! That’s why every Saturday we packed up all the fabric in our apartment and dragged it to the nearest Laundromat, then went to the café next door for coffee and breakfast. For over a year a healthy if boring routine settled in and then: disaster. The café closed.
Reeling from the loss and severely under-caffeinated, we hatched a scheme while waiting for the bath mats to dry: destination Laundromats. We would pick a breakfast, then pick a nearby laundromat and write up our experience for the benefit of… well having something to do while bath mats dry (we like them THICK).
This week we’re back home in Toronto and we’re gonna do laundry at The Lost Sock (1050 Bathurst St) and get breakfast down the road a bit at Vesta Lunch Restaurant (474 Dupont St).
Overall, our laundromat and breakfast experience had the tone of Doctor Who doing their laundry after some manner of terrible TARDIS time stream accident.
Feeling like it was not 2020 and that it was the laundromat’s fault permeated our adventure this week. As soon as we rolled up to the Sock, we went past it as the front of the place is recessed into the building a bit which limits the viewing angle, you can only see it from straight-on. Kinda like one of those old gargantuan rear-projection big-screen TVs where your dad could only see his MASH reruns if he was right down the barrel of the cathode ray tube.
After a spin around the block we found the place and were greeted by some, may we say, good-ass graphic design. The logo and signage are real nifty, especially after the many Times New Roman screeds up north at Barb’s last week. Upon entering the Lost Sock you are greeted with… a large empty space. The place only really starts about 20 feet back, leaving the front open for stretching, short wind-sprints, and whatever else you might be inclined to do while spinning your socks.
We checked over the machines and found many of them to be… well we called the larger ones the cold war dancers as soon as we saw the control panel and spied one in a spin cycle. They look like they were stolen from an Eisenhower-era nuclear sub. The knob on the sucker looks like it launches torpedoes. Do not get us wrong, they work great, we saw people pull clean clothes out of them and even witnessed the presumable owner doing some kind of baffling maintenance on them which involved climbing the machine with a crowbar and noticing the beardy man photographing him. We still went for the ones in the back which looked like they fell out of the time vortex a bit more recently.
We took up four of the six regular-sized moderns at the back with our stuff and took note of the lack of any truly giant machines. The cold war dancers seem to be the largest in the joint and they are just regular big, so avoid the Sock if you need to wash a king-sized duvet or 15 sleeping bags or whatever enormous cloth-y thing you might own, we don’t know you. We used the working change machine to feed money to our washers and took our leave to get some breakfast.
Vesta Lunch is a diner from a movie, and what kind of movie depends on the time of day. It has a counter with stools — yes, the ones you’re thinking of — and a menu board on the wall with that unmistakable “it used to be legal to smoke here” colouring. It is an anachronism, and the grill has presumably been lit since being sprayed with revolutionary asbestos in 1955. The frying pan Dave’s eggs were cooked in was likely originally used to fry eggs for our boys fighting in Europe in the Great War. The cook looks like he once made a BLT for a shitfaced John Diefenbaker. The place is venerable, we’re saying.
We ordered a breakfast special with sausage and a BLT with fries, and then watched the only other person in the diner make those things and bring them over. The coffee was fine, the BLT was a BLT, and the breakfast potatoes were indeed potatoes. The prices (8.95 for the breakfast and about the same for the BLT) do not really match the vibe which is — fitting our theme — unstuck in time. You really feel like Vesta Lunch is more a sentence imposed by an impish god than an operating diner. Buddy screwed up a witch’s chicken salad in ’58 and he and his family were cursed to never close again kinda thing. We settled up and headed out, only vaguely worried about dysentery (no problems yet!)
Getting back to the Sock, we transferred to the dryers avoiding the 2 odd ones nearest the front that seemed to have been designed to run on Polonium by a labcoated guy with really crazy hair. We also did not use the two which were actively being worked on while we were there. Seeing dryer guts out did not help to reduce our sense that this laundromat was in fact a crashed time machine masquerading as a laundromat.
With our clothes in the dryer/flux capacitor, we made the trek to the open pasture area up front to wait. The Sock does not have wifi, but it does have a TV. The TV is on, but silent and un-captioned, so we would recommend the magazines. While it seems like there should be LIFE magazines talking about the 1936 Berlin Olympics in there, we checked and they are all normal amounts of old for laundromat magazines. Should you wish to kill time with that age-old laundromat classic of buying ungodly processed foods with quarters, tough luck! There is a detergent machine, but stoic reflection on the puzzle of existence seems to be the order of the day at the Lost Sock.
We took the opportunity to slide further into a sense of timelessness, our breakfasts from 1958 settling in our stomachs, the Cold War dancers bouncing around somewhere in 1982 behind us. We spent between a minute and 10,000 years looking at the giant wall art over one of the three luxuriously-sized stainless-steel folding tables, then later but at the same time we were folding our shirts into flat circles and always the dryers are spinning.
Remembering ourselves somewhere around folding underpants, we finished up and bid farewell to the Lost Sock, which we might also still be in somehow for timey-wimey reasons. We recommend both it and Vesta lunch to your attention, should you want to wash your clothes while unstuck in time. We end as always with some immaturely comical signage.
Poo-tee-weet?
Washers- 2 sturdy olds, 2 medium cold war dancers, 6 small dancers, 6 modern regulars at the back.
Dryers — 14 wall mounts, 2 Nuclear specials
Vending — only detergent!
Wifi — Nope
ATM — Yup
Change Machine — Yes
Place to sit — 2 bistro tables w 5 chairs and 2 pretty chic yellow stools
Place to fold — 3 big steel tables
Special something — CLEAN and enough room up front to perform modern dance if so inclined.
