Note - June 11, 2015: This material subject to legal complaint by Brian Graff.

I was determined to enjoy Sunday lunch at Paralia, the new version of the former Boardwalk Café in Toronto’s Beach neighbourhood, mainly because if I didn’t I’d be out of luck. This will be the only restaurant allowed on this part of the shoreline and in the area’s central park until Sept. 16, 2028. First opened in 1986, the place is an emblem of cosy uncontested deals and a failed council.

With the municipal election coming up fast — and Paralia’s main proponent and opponent running against each other — I wondered if at least the food might be good. Paralia is expensive, Ward 32 Councillor Mary-Margaret McMahonMary-Margaret McMahon warned me, but it writes the rules. She is fighting to get community bake ovens onto the beach beyond Paralia’s lockout zone which includes Kew Gardens. I’m thinking fresh hot pizza or blueberry pie as I watch the fireworks but in the meantime there is Paralia, only Paralia.

Thanks to a 20-year exclusive contract with Tuggs Inc. that former and would-be-again councillor Sandra Bussin urged on the city — staff had said it should be put out for tender — there are children not yet conceived who will be eating at Paralia if they want food, which they often loudly do but rarely the food they’re given, I notice.

Still, anything’s better than cooking Sunday lunch. As a test of what Beachers are stuck with, I put myself back into the mindset of when the kids were little, which was “I have a big Beaches mortgage.” There’s a huge free parking lot next door but a lot of people paid $10 to park right in the Paralia lot.

What’s puzzling is that they weren’t in the restaurant, which is wonderfully pretty in Greek blues and whites, and seats perhaps 200. Maybe the $10 parkers were staff. For at 11:45, when the beach was filling up with visitors and 800 people had just finished the area’s Terry Fox run, Paralia was almost empty, two tables filled plus one guy at the bar.

The wine list, Greek with almost no Canadian offerings, had bottles ranging from $145 to $595 and almost nothing by the glass. I think $12 for a glass of wine is crazy so I ordered one. We ordered the cheapest food that would be accepted by a discerning 11-year-old: pita bread with spreads ($19), chicken and rice ($22) and lamb pasta ($18).

So a wineless lunch plus tip would be $153 for four, which is faintworthy.

This partly explains why an attractive restaurant with friendly service and ample servings (the chicken was half a bird) of edible food next to a huge public swimming pool, one of the world’s largest lakes and one of Toronto’s exciting new self-cleaning public toilets (25 cents for 20 minutes) — what are they doing in there? — still can’t draw customers.

It shouldn’t be there in the first place. Woodbine Beach needs a dozen small restaurants and food trucks offering different tastes, settings and prices. If the Beach had had the representation on city council it needed in the past two decades, the Paralia debacle would never have happened.

Bussin was defeated by McMahon for many reasons —her four terms as councillor, her anonymous call to John Tory’s radio talk show calling him a “three-time loser” (startled listeners recognized her voice), her treatment of a house-building application by a disabled resident and odd things like expensing a $205 bunny costume to wear in a parade — but Paralia is her lasting legacy. Bussin is still bitter about her defeat, the most massive in post-amalgamation history, and blames sexism. McMahon is cheerful. If she wins, this will be her last term, as she opposes the eternal incumbency that plagues Toronto council.

Ward 32 (Beaches-East York) has attracted 12 candidates, many of them odd. There’s James Sears whose website is pornographic. There’s Eric de Boer who has a statement beard and whose website will not say what he does for a living. He may run Alcatel-Lucent’s North American operations or he may deliver food by skateboard, it is not clear. And there’s Brian Graff, whose antidevelopment website posts a photo of his late cat who needed “subcutaneous fluid injections” and expired of kidney disease. Graff bought a second car “from a grandmother in Kingston,” he writes, for trips to Buffalo “to buy some special cheese.”

Graff has no wife or children, which, he says, “explains the lack of such photos, if you were wondering” which I was not.

Anyway, the Beach has the same problems as the rest of the city. It’s the real estate, it’s the money.

It’s one of the most attractive neighbourhoods in the city —good schools, groomed parks, the lake, detached houses with trees and driveways — and house prices have exploded. Many cash-poor residents can’t maintain their homes, don’t shop locally and don’t eat out. Families with children can’t afford to buy in (or eat at Paralia). Queen St. is ailing and largely empty by 6 p.m. One resident complained at a local business meeting about the cost of cheese at the local Alex Farms outlet, McMahon told me. “I can get it cheaper at Costco,” he said. This is a continentwide, not just a Beaches, problem.

Low-rise condos along Queen are helping already. They’re inevitable but resisted by locals who don’t think of the area as urban, the same NIMBYism that afflicts the rest of Toronto. McMahon, recalling the busy retail Queen St. of her youth, is encouraging local business, publicizing the “shop locally” movement and trying to encourage boardwalk tourists to walk up to Queen. She wants firepits on the beach and adopt-a-tree programs.

But close to the restaurant at Queen and Woodbine, there’s a reminder of the past, a huge Sandra Bussin “Time for a fresh start” billboard allegedly advertising her real estate services — though her website appears to have only two house listings — but clearly serving as a campaign sign. I don’t know if it’s legal during a campaign but if it is it shouldn’t be.

Choice abounds. Sears is anti-Marxist. Bussin has name recognition. Graff’s deceased pet was named “Babycat.” As always but ever more urgently, please vote. The Beach cries out for it.

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hmallick@thestar.ca