If you routinely spend time in a car or with children, then my vacation was pretty boring. But as I am still new to both, and susceptible to the charms of driving to dinner or watching my friend’s 3-year-old climb inside a box with her dolls and books, Los Angeles was fascinating.

In L.A. you spend a lot of time in a car. As I cruised from East L.A., where a truck yielded breakfast of deep-fried tacos and a tostada weighed down by a half-pound (226 grams) of octopus ceviche, down to Compton to pick up barbecue ribs and brisket for lunch, to dinner in Fairfax District, where they sauced the sweetbreads with “black sriracha,” oven-charred chilies and onions blackened with squid ink, my mind kept drifting to how infrequently we leave our Toronto neighbourhoods for food. One reason is that it’s impossible to get anywhere in this jerk town. Our negligent transit planning has resulted in a city where all the popular restaurants are in one place.

You’d have to be a world-class idiot to compare Toronto to Los Angeles. It is on another coast, in another country and their mayor’s brother rarely, if ever, threatens to shut down libraries. These two cities are apples and oranges, or Korean taco trucks and homogenous hot dog carts.

This isn’t one of those “I just came back from vacation to tell you how everything is better somewhere else” screeds. No. Toronto is great. And L.A. is no Shangri-La. Driving 40 minutes to meet my friend Kathryn for dinner necessitated a pre-discussion of exactly how much we would drink and then a last-minute chase through traffic, as she accessed her “cheat-code” knowledge of side-streets to get us there before our 15-minute “grace period” elapsed.

But one of the virtues of travel is that it freshens your eyes for home.

The volume and variety of new Toronto restaurants in the last five years is staggering. But they are all downtown, mostly on the west side, few more than a 30-minute walk from one another.

“This geographic clustering is part and parcel of urban gentrification,” says University of Toronto sociology professor Josée Johnston, “a process which may please the ‘creative classes,’ but which is strongly connected to geographically based class stratification of cities.”

The suburbs are rich with what we call “cheap and cheerful” restaurants, which is code for non-Caucasian, because the Europeans came here first, so hundreds of years later you can justify charging $20 for handmade Italian linguini noodles but not for Chinese lamian noodles.

I’ve driven friends to Markham for superb Chinese at Dayali and been led to a little spot in Scarborough, New Hopper Hut, to eat Sri Lankan crab so spicy that I needed a stack of napkins to soak up my sweat. But these are trips in rented cars, planned ahead, never a casual dinner option.

There are the odd high-end outliers — Fabbrica, Auberge du Pommier — positioned to serve the wealthy clientele of established financial district restaurants, diners who want luxury while avoiding the aggravation of driving and parking downtown.

Young chefs, the ones who’ve worked their way up the ladders at Bymark or Canoe, the ones who you read about on those Top 10 lists, occupy an increasingly food-dense section of the city. They are running up against outrageous rents and moratoriums on liquor licenses. And yet they don’t consider opening 50-seat restaurants in Scarborough or Etobicoke. Their clientele is unlikely to follow.

“It is much riskier to be the progressive, possibly more expensive and potentially challenging dining spot in a neighbourhood where the ground has not been paved,” says Franco Stalteri, former chef recruiter for Lecours Wolfson and the head of Charlie’s Burgers supper club.

“In the 1970s to 1980s, most of the top restaurants in New York were concentrated uptown,” he counters. “Look at Daniel Boulud and his rise to fame at Le Cirque. When he left and opened Daniel, he opened one mile away. There is already so much at risk on your first venture that you will typically stay within your comfort zone geographically, close to your base clientele, a group of diners who is already familiar with your past work and accomplishments.”

I don’t want Toronto to be like any other city. I want us to be the best version of ourselves. But even 15 years ago, Manhattanites didn’t go to Brooklyn for dinner. These days Bushwick, in Brooklyn, is the latest hot area for restaurants in New York.

The difference is that New Yorkers can physically get to Brooklyn.

The 11 kilometres from Le Cirque in midtown to Roberta’s in Bushwick is about 30 minutes on the train. That’s like the distance from Canoe to St. Clair and O’Connor, or Royal York and Evans, which would take at least an hour. And that’s just to the doorstep of our suburbs, where our lack of transit becomes an impediment to intra-municipal travel.

I am still a new and infrequent enough driver that I find it fun. But Toronto was built for cars the way a shoe is designed to be eaten by a dog. The competition between parking, driving, cycling and walking is choked at every other intersection by out-of-control construction that the city is unable to coordinate.

And public transportation is even worse.

Transit is an election issue this year, just like four years ago, with nothing built in the interim. Mayoral candidates are debating the method and cost for tools that, if built, would make our city ready for the 1980s, because we stopped significantly building subways before I was born and the subject has only been political hot air since.

Yes, I understand that transportation matters in more ways that mere dining.

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But when I hear about the addition or subtraction of a “restaurant row” on Edward St. or King St., I don’t see much critical change. There’s no shortage of chain restaurants in those areas.

What we need in order to divert the calcification of our restaurant culture into a downtown luxury is transportation — a subway, a bus, a streetcar, a lightrail, heavyrail, monorail, cablecar, zeppelin, hydrofoil, dewback, lightcycle, teleporter, magic carpet or hyperloop — to get us from one end of the city to the other. Until then, you can expect the restaurant rich to get restaurant richer.