Toronto Laundromat Review #4 — Beach Solar Laundromat and Garden Gate Restaurant
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 is our first in the east end, and we’re going to the Beaches! We’re gonna do laundry at Beach Solar Laundromat (2240 Queen St E) and get breakfast a touch west and across the street at Garden Gate Restaurant (2379 Queen St E).
Beach Solar Laundromat is a real, actual, honest-to-goodness Destination Laundromat. We want to be clear here: we didn’t think we’d ever find one either, but turns out we’re dummies.
We pulled up in quite a haze, as Beach Solar is on a stretch of Queen St E joyfully low on chain stores and restaurants and very rich in indie places that have been open a long time, which are as you know vanishing fast since Toronto was bitten by a radioactive Condo in 2008. Not seeing the usual A&Ws, Starbucks and Hortons looping like a cheap Scooby-Doo background had us excitedly reading signage aloud at each other for several blocks.
We nabbed parking right out front and looked up to see that Beach Solar was not just a cute hippie name, as we had assumed. Giant solar panels sit atop the place and signage inside explains that, no shit, it runs on the sun. If that makes you picture the place as somehow cutting-edge, stop that. Turns out a solar laundromat was something you could hammer together out of spare parts in 2003, which makes you wonder why we still have the regular kind?
Like last week at the Lost Sock, Beach Solar has no gargantuan washers, so leave your wine-stained mainsail or whatever at home. They do have nine mismatched but mostly front-load regular-sized Maytags on the left, and then 5 ancient stalwarts on the right. These 5 machines give off the vibe they have always stood there, leading someone to build a laundromat around them. They are a brand called Wascomat, there are 4 juniors and 1 senior, so naturally we gave them first names. The 4 kids were Hildegarde Wascomat, Fritz Wascomat, Friedrich Wascomat and baby Ingrid Wascomat, and of course their proud Papa Manfred Von Wascomat.
We loaded our stuff into Manfred and three Maytags, which would be a sweet band name, and took turns staring pensively from the two banquettes in the front windows real quick before realizing Beach Solar does not have an ATM. This forced us to have a sunlit stroll past the coffee shop, bagel bakery and vintage place to the oddly large convenience store to use theirs, woe betide us. Once back, we used the change machine to break our twenties and took in the masterpiece passive-aggressive short story posted above it before popping across Queen St to breakfast.
Don’t worry about the how or the why of Garden Gate Restaurant, just go have a meal there. Garden Gate is a classic Diner and a classic Canadian-Chinese Restaurant. It isn’t more one than the other, it is extremely both, and has been since 1952. We sat down in one of the many booths and got to the menu, which is in fact an omnibus of several menus. You start with all-day breakfast and sandwiches and burgers and fries and then BOOM dim sum, how about egg rolls? Chow mein? Roast leg of pork? Some lovely chicken balls with that garishly pink-purple sauce? Struck down by choice paralysis we had a coffee and a half trying to decide before just pointing at the dinner for 2 option so the nice man serving us would just bring us some food.
We can report that 11 AM Canadian-Chinese Food and diner coffee works very well, and once the families and kids started coming in, we got to spy the diner stuff and were equally impressed. The club sandwich looks magnificent, they are hand-carving birds back there and of the five kids we saw, four had chocolate chip pancakes for which the server brought out a 1-litre jug of syrup, because at Golden Gate everything makes sense. Now, the kicker: somehow everything is fifteen-years-ago-cheap. A 2 egg breakfast special is $5.75, a Grilled cheese sandwich is $3.25. You should go.
Full and carrying takeout containers of leftovers, we headed back to Beach Solar and used the complimentary baskets to get our stuff into three of the 14 lovely big dryers with weird 70s sci-fi doors and took advantage of this laundromat’s best feature: the street it’s on. Immeasurably cute neighbourhood stuff just kept happening. We popped two doors down to the vintage store run by a lady named Mira who has a store dog called Lily who was delivered a hand-baked treat by a neighbour while we were browsing.
It was as though we had stumbled into a child’s drawing of a city neighbourhood: all dogs and bakeries and movie theatres showing Fleabag at 4:30 PM. We sat on the bench in front of the coffee place next door and pet the passing pups as wood smoke from the bagel shop’s oven wafted lazily by and kids in snowpants waddled past, holding hands with their siblings and parents on their way to the park. It was wonderfully idyllic, a real destination Laundromat.
We got back in and used the two large free-standing tables to fold our stuff, cursing the efficient dryers that only gave us 36 minutes or so to hang out in a colouring book image. We loaded up our clean clothes and leftover fried rice and waved goodbye to a truly lovely corner, we recommend everything at Queen St E and Beech to your attention. Since Beach Solar doesn’t have any signage that is immaturely comical, we end this week instead with this old picture of waiters at Golden Gate that’s really sweet:
Washers- 9 regular Maytags and die Wascomat Familie
Dryers — 14 wall dryers with weird doors.
Vending — Only detergent!
Wifi — Yes!
ATM — No, but only a short hop to one
Change Machine — Yes, unless you’re Jerry from next door in which case YOU SHOULDA GONE TO THE DAMN BANK, JERRY!
Place to sit — 2 window banquettes and a solitary folding chair, 2 outdoor benches at the coffee shop next door.
Place to fold — 2 big free standing folding tables, back counter
Special something —Powered by the sun, and free baskets!
