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DoorDash Canada

Wieden + Kennedy

DoorDash, Milkshakes & Heartaches

Santa Madre

1437 Gerrard St E, Toronto

The chef says that Santa Madre was “ten years in the making.” Despite having moved to Canada at 18 years old, Valenzuela found himself trying to fit into European style of cooking and dining. But, mentoring Latin American chefs helped him rediscover — and find pride in — Mexican cuisine.

“Fondas are restaurants in Mexico that are very affordable. They’re places where you go or they’re a home and someone opens the garage of their house and whatever leftover food or whatever food they’re making for the day, they serve it at cost to people that are walking by in the streets,” says Valenzuela. “I thought maybe this is perfect for the economy that we’re having, for the time that we’re living. I thought, how about if we were to bring something like that into Toronto, where we have an authentic fonda that instead of run by family, is run by cooks.”

When you step into Santa Madre, you’ll be immersed in vibrant colours and friendly hospitality. With metal framing akin to those family garages lining the walls among Valenzuela’s six-year-old daughter’s artwork, it’s clear this fonda is all about family.

Mapo Korean BBQ

Korean BBQ restaurant at 708 Bloor St W, right in Koreatown, a short walk from Christie station

Tabletop grilling with a pork-forward menu, staff-assisted cooking, and a loud, packed room most nights

Flagging this as a solid group-dinner or wrap-party option — reasonably priced for the portions, but book ahead or expect a wait

The Food

Samgyeopsal (pork belly) comes up repeatedly as the standout — consistently well-marinated and grilled

Gopchang (beef intestines) is on the menu for anyone wanting something more adventurous than the standard cuts

Beef ribeye, brisket, chicken, and shrimp round out the grill options

Kimchi pancakes are the recommended non-grilled add — crispy edge, good contrast to the smoky meats

Banchan refills are prompt and generous, which matters when you're feeding a table for two hours

Side dish extras like cheesy corn and steamed egg show up alongside the usual kimchi

Signature non-BBQ items include Mala Rose Tteokbokki, Galbi-Tang, Mul-Hoe, Sashimi Bibimbap, and Beef Tataki — plus vegetarian tofu/veg/rice options if someone on the crew doesn't eat meat

Service & Atmosphere

Staff actively manage the grills at your table rather than leaving you to it — useful if your group doesn't know Korean BBQ well, and they swap grill tops between rounds so flavours don't mix

Space is small and timber-framed, described as intimate but loud and overcrowded on busy nights

Reservations are accepted, but this is a popular spot — arriving early is the safer bet for a group booking

Bar Bus

Hosted by Cold Pod

A bar hopping social event

Baby there is no bus… Just your feet.

They have only hosted 2 but seem to be successful so I am sure there will be more.

April… July… September/October??

Vintage shopping. Bar hopping. Music & DJ.

See Toronto and meet Toronto.

Textile Museum of Canada

Located at University + Dundas, the Textile Museum of Canada is the only museum in Canada that delivers programs and exhibitions dedicated only to textile art. It is a internationally renowned educational institution that is recognized for its diversity of exhibitions, innovative approaches to educational programs, and prioritizing accessibility.

Current Exhibitions (1) Made By Many: 50 Years of the Textile Museum of Canada " Made by Many is an opportunity to reflect on the Museum’s curatorial direction throughout the past 50 years, showcasing the many approaches, values, and visions that brought these exhibitions to life."

(2) Always In Fashion "Always in Fashion is an immersive exploration of Indigenous design languages and their transformative impact on the fashion landscape of the lands we call Canada and the United States. This exhibition emerges from the urgent need to recognize and celebrate Indigenous designers who are reshaping the industry by reclaiming cultural narratives, innovating with ancestral techniques, and challenging colonial frameworks within fashion. "

HOWEVER! I bring this museum to your attention because they do lots of programs/workshops at a beginner level! Just in August, you can take classes to learn Armenian Embroidery , (Aug 1 and 8) Second Life: Embroidery and Applique (refreshing wardrobe and home textiles) (Aug 19, 20, 21), Flat Stitch Work Beading (Aug 29).

Shinji - Japanese Steakhouse

📍- 333 Bay Street

Wagyu is the word at this new steakhouse. The financial district is already rich with steakhouses, but Shinji is betting on a japanese steakhouse style, premium Wagyu and a robata grill that turns the steak into a greater experience.

Executive chef Jia Zou, with a history working with Auberge du Pommier, Miku Toronto, Grey Gardens, Kiu and, most recently, Kasa Moto.

I think this place seems absolutely delicious, and in a sea of similar steakhouses, this offers different cuisine choices, and turns the craftsmanship of cooking into a real performance for all involved.

Come with me...

BONUS: Kubla

This is a Toronto based musician making waves online for all jazz musician covers of popular songs. Their cover of Creep by Radiohead from last year in particular went viral.

Kubla and associates perform regularly in parks around Toronto, and can be booked for events. Their viral set was filmed in trinity Bellwoods, and apparently they plan to make more appearances in outdoor settings like this one.

Hostess (Bimbo) - Mystery out of Cossette dir. Didier Charette

https://lbbonline.com/work/175443

Prod Comp: Septieme

"The Worlds Highest Sky Dive by A Goat Puppet"

Campaign Details

Stunt Height: 14,000 feet

Performer: A goat puppet

Producer: Laurence Houle

Post: Post430

Bimbo Canada, following corporate acquisitions involving the Hostess brand portfolio and historic local airfield connections dating back to World War I.

Skydive Toronto – Cookstown Aerodrome

3065 4th Line, Cookstown, Ontario

Other Skydive locations:

Skydive Burnaby (Wainfleet / Port Colborne)

Skydive Ontario (Cayuga)

The Laundry Pile - Jacob Urban Cleaner

Agency: VML Canada

Dir. Gabriel Bergeron

Prod: Bien Joué

New VML Canada / Bien Joué campaign for Montreal laundry service Jacob Urban Cleaner, published July 2026

Turns laundry into oversized public installations dropped into the city's favourite summer spots

The whole idea rides on art direction — a build-and-dress job that has to work as a photo op first

The Campaign

Brand: Jacob Urban Cleaner — local Montreal laundry service

Agency: VML Canada

Concept: giant piles of clothes installed at Montreal's popular summer hangouts, functioning as unmissable branded "billboards"

Line: "Don't let laundry take over your summer"

Medium: Experiential + OOH Outdoor, three media assets, published July 2026 in Canada

The Art Direction

Marie-Florence Gagnon was Art Director on set, working under Director Gabriel Bergeron (Bien Joué)

She had two AD assistants — Béatrice Cuierrier-Legault and Marie-Pier Boudreau — a three-person department built specifically to construct and dress the laundry piles

Why it works: the whole idea hinges on scale and texture reading right in public space. A prop-mound pile of laundry doesn't read as a landmark — getting that right is an art direction call

Two dedicated assistants on a "pile of laundry" build is a real signal — this points to multiple locations and/or multiple installation days rather than a single set dressed once, which lines up with the copy's plural "favourite summer spots"

Who Is Marie-Florence Gagnon

Trained in set and costume design at the École de théâtre de Saint-Hyacinthe

Graduated straight into the pandemic — no window to work professionally in her field right out of school

Broke into audiovisual work instead, building credits in art direction and costume design on projects including the web series U-Hauling and Entrelacés

Worked as dresser on Le purgatoire des intimes, the previous feature from director Philippe Cormier

Reunites with Cormier as Art Director on his new short film, Berceuse du malheur

Narrative Credits (Webs Series)- La Terre Appelle Mathilde (2024), Pas d'chicane dans ma cabane! (2022)— a career built through the film/TV side before landing on a commercial like Jacob

Also Art Directed music videos — Hôte: Chimères

Other music video Art Direction credits: Thierry Larose — "Des noeuds dans les doigts", Patrice Michaud — "1977"

About Bien Joué

Montreal production house working across advertising, branded content, documentary, fiction, web series, music videos, and interactive installations — full reel here

Other clients on their board: Hydro-Québec, École Polytechnique de Montréal, Randstad, CSN, Musée Pointe-à-Callière, Tohu, Centre Phi, Students on Ice

Confirms a prior working relationship, not a one-off: Entrelacés, one of the web series Gagnon cut her teeth on, is a Bien Joué production — she and Bergeron's shop had already worked together before Jacob

Also produces music videos in-house (Kinkead, Five Roses, thaïs, Geneviève Leclerc, Mario Pelchat, Matt Lang) — consistent with the kind of small-crew, style-driven work Gagnon's music video credits come from

Production Crew

Director: Gabriel Bergeron

Art Director: Marie-Florence Gagnon

Art Director Assistants: Béatrice Cuierrier-Legault, Marie-Pier Boudreau

Director of Photography: Antoine Turcotte

Additional Camera: Jean-Michel Martin

Editor: Gabriel Babin

Producers: Sébastien Iannuzzi, François Robidoux

Production Company: Bien Joué

Why It's Relevant to Us

A three-person art team on this build reflects what an "unmissable" street installation actually costs in labour — not overkill for a pile of laundry

DoorDash

For All of Us & The Forbidden Order

Director: Steve Ayson (Radke)

Agnecy: Widen + Kennedy Toronto

The Campaign

National brand campaign to promote its membership programme, DashPass.

The work, titled ‘Not That Dramatic’, riffs on the split-second hesitation that comes before choosing to order delivery. Featuring two period drama-inspired spots directed by Radke’s Steve Ayson – ‘The Forbidden Order’ and ‘For All Of Us’ – each leverages themes of longing, tension, and a ‘will-they-won't-they’ plot, turning common back-and-forths into exaggerated tales.

DoP: Andres Arochi

Mexican Cinematographer

Feature Debut on Longlegs (shot on 35mm + Arri Alexa LF)

DP for Lady Gaga Dead Dance (dir by Tim Burton)

Repped by United in US

Production Designer: Marco Puig

London Based

Not his first collaboration with Door Dash (Your Door to More - Nick Ball) - which they shot in Prague

Repped by Lux Artists

Lots of set builds

Frequent collaborators: Megaforce & Nick Ball

"Censor of Dreams" was Oscar-shortlisted and won the Grand Prix at the Warsaw Film Festival

Line Producer: Gill Gardner

Toronto LP

No service compnay listed despite this having been shot in Portugal

Makes sense they chose to shoot there. Capture these real locations - which will also feel more real and deep if we go versus build..

Stylist: Isabel Carmona

Lisbon Based

Some vintage work in her recent portfolio

MUA: Monica Mota

Portugal Based

Casting: Powerhouse Casting (TO), Grande/Morris (NY), Kennedy Casting (UK)

Kraft Heinz – The Walt Disney Company - Together at Last out of Rethink dir. Matt Baron

Chapman's: Coast to Coast

Agency - Crew Marketing, head office in Fort Worth, Texas and Canadian outpost in Surrey, BC

Production Company - Judy Productions

Stills photographer - Christian Lalonde, repped by Judy Inc

OLG - Maxxing

Link: https://lbbonline.com/work/174965

Photographer / Director: O’Shane Howard

Repped by FUZE, he’s the lead collaborator on this project. Portfolio has a lot of celebrity work, he has been the Juno’s press photographer for 3 years now.

He did the stills for Britebound that we looked at, and has worked on other recognizable stills for Wegovy and Roots.

Set Design: Chiara Purdy

Repped by Cadre, most of her experience is in luxury and fashion design. Has very good experience in creating elaborate scenes, and item layouts.

She also runs her own prop rental page.

Wardrobe Stylist: Santanae Luzige

Lots of work in stills, especially heightened basics attainable luxury. She also does a lot of high fashion design. Looks like her work has a lot of stylized outfits you can expect normal people in.

HMU: Ashley Readings

Repped by Cadre, she runs the gamut of different styles and levels of formality. Went to OCAD (woo) and currently teaches workshops when not on set.

Skip, Skip Summer Value

Agency: Courage - ACD, Art Director - Sammy Lo  - ACD, Copywriter - Emma Lorenzi  - Sr. Producer - Sara Teasdale 

Director: Conor Byrne DOP: Bobby Shore Prod Co: ANIMALS  LP: Erica Parks  PM: Warren Milando PD: Claudia Dall’Orso | Instagram | Website – not on master crew Wardrobe: Kate Day  Hair and Makeup: Pippa Leavy  Casting: Powerhouse

We received this script at the end of May. The original idea was 6x15s, this is the script that is most similar to the final spot. 

From Suneeva we put forward Matt Dilmore and Asymetric we put forward Casey Storm. It was a 1 day shoot. From my research, we haven’t worked with the creatives before - but we have worked with Sara on H&R Block with The Salmon and Adam & Dave. 

I then started to think what reel ANIMALS might have put together in order to help get this job. Conor has relevant work with FanDuel, Reese’s and Twizzlers, NBA, Franks RedHot. 

Marnie Cannot Get Over Charlie - Season 3, Episode 1, "Females Only" (aired Jan 12, 2014), Girls.

Lena Dunham as Hannah

Adam Driver as Adam

Allison Williams as Marnie

Zosia Mamet as Shoshanna

Girls has one of the more remarkable "before they were famous" casts of the 2010s. A few standouts -

Adam Driver is the big one. He went on to become a franchise player across countless Star Wars films, playing Kylo Ren, while also leaving his mark in movies like Marriage Story, House of Gucci , and Megalopolis. Landing that Star Wars role happened while Girls was still airing, by the time HBO announced Girls' final season, the press was already referring to him as "Star Wars actor Adam Driver." He's since become a multiple Oscar nominee.

Allison Williams, pivoted into horror after the show ended. She shook audiences in 2017's Get Out opposite Daniel Kaluuya, then continued in Netflix's The Perfection (2018), and had one of her biggest genre hits with 2022's M3GAN.

Girls was cast very early in a lot of these people's careers, mostly through Apatow/Dunham's instinct for stage and indie-film talent rather than established TV names, which is a big part of why the ensemble reads as such a talent incubator in retrospect.

In this scene, Hannah and a reluctant Adam host dinner at their apartment with Marnie, who is living at home in New Jersey and still raw from her breakup with Charlie, and Shoshanna, who is alternating nights of sexual freedom with academia after her breakup with Ray.

Williams plays Marnie's post-breakup state less as devastation and more as brittle, performative togetherness, the kind of controlled misery where someone insists they're "fine" while radiating the opposite.

That abruptness shows up in her performance choices at the dinner table. Because the show never got to dramatize the actual dissolution of the relationship on screen, Williams has to play someone who's already mid-crisis when we meet her again, living back at home in New Jersey and still raw from the breakup, which forces a kind of compressed, over-explained grief. She tends to oversell her composure in these scenes (tight smiles, a slightly too-quick pivot to talking about herself), which reads as a woman narrating her own recovery in real time rather than actually being recovered.

Critics were split on whether that worked. Some found the shift genuinely funny and rich, one review called "melancholy Marnie" loads of fun, with Williams delivering big laughs out of the character's wallowing. Others thought it landed flatter.

Jamie Lee Curtis - The Bear (2024)

(Warning, LOTS of swearin)

Link: https://youtu.be/OFhu8lzx_aE?si=MgXF3X5yfdqq-vDB

Context:

This is the climax of a tense flashback to a terrible family Christmas for the main cast. We have never met Donna before this episode, but have heard about the main character’s mom. How she is self centred and can fly off the handle rather easily.

All episode, Donna has been saying how upset she is, and how much everyone hates her. This is the scene when it all boils over, like other family members were saying it would.

Jamie Lee, You Are All of Us!

Jamie Lee Curtis appears as a guest performer in this episode and the finale of season 2. In just two episodes she makes an amazing impression, and gives one of the most resonant performances of the season.

Ensemble for this scene

Supporting this performance is an incredibly stacked ensemble. Most of the shots stay with the rest of the Berzato family at dinner, so we can see the impact of her outburst.

Jeremy Allen White | Abby Elliott | Jon Berntal | Matty Matheson

Sarah Paulson | Bob Odenkirk | Oliver Platt | John Mulaney

Ricky Staffieri | Chris Witaske

Why This Works

Jamie Lee Curtis goes about as big as you can for a drama like the Bear. She is shouting and swearing the entire scene, but it never feels like you lose the real person under that. She still sells her emotional state, and she does a great job in the moments of silence forecasting what lies ahead. Like a train crash in slow motion.

She plays off the ensemble incredibly well, letting herself catch their reactions, and have it feed the fire of her rage.

This episode, and this scene have to serve as an explanation for why the main cast is like this. Be a peek into their personal lives. And this monologue does a fantastic job giving us a view into a dysfunctional household.

Unexpected bonus of this script to screen video: we get to see how much the cast got to play around with the text. It seems like Curtis was free to paraphrase and add swearing, as well as Paulson getting to add an interjection seemingly day of? It makes the scene come to life, and helps sell a monologue in a show designed for realistic dialogue

Adjectives: Furious, outburst, dysfunctional family

Why this works in our world:

This is an example of how big someone can go and not lose the drama and reality of the scene. This scene needs to communicate a lot of information to the audience in a short period of time, and Curtis does so with flying colours.

A good reminder on what you can get when there’s room for actors to play with the material. Also for directors to play with energy on the day, and make changes to best fit the room day of.

The Rehearsal (HBO)

Link // Link 2

Nathan Fielder portrays a fictionalized version of himself, helping ordinary people rehearse upcoming difficult conversations or life events through the use of sets and actors hired to recreate real situations.

The Moment

After constructing a meticulous simulation of motherhood for a woman named Angela, Nathan has found himself raising their pretend child alone. “Adam” is actually a stable of interchangeable child actors, who according to the show are limited to working four hours at a time and aged up by three years every week, but for one 6-year-old named actor Remy, those boundaries don’t seem to hold.

Thanks to alleged budget-cutting, the actors playing the parents of Adam’s friends aren’t allowed to speak, so he ends up singing “Happy Birthday” by himself as they silently mouth the words.

On his last day on set, Remy refuses to change out of his wardrobe, and won’t be consoled by the reminder that the whole thing was only pretend. Later, Nathan visits Remy and his mother at home, and the child rebuffs his attempts to end the game. “I don’t want you to be ’athan. I want you to be daddy.”

Nathan re-enacts his own simulation, casting the actor playing 9-year-old Adam as Remy and replaying their interactions to see if he could have better prepared the 6-year-old for their eventual separation.

Why it Works

Nathan portrays this stilted, social awkward, and almost at time uncanny version of himself. We never (or rarely) see him break

He in the show is obsessed with perfection and doing everything right.

In the moment we see him really try to connect with this kid to explain the situation and in this reality TV show this feels like the first moment we see Nathan be honest.

Despite this there are so many moment of the series that feel sincere even though they are heavily produced/rehearsed/or staged.

Relevance to us

Blurring the lines between real and fake

Authenticity