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Mr. Boué said the original idea was to have it cover a rather large chunk of downtown, from University Avenue to the Don Valley Parkway, from Carlton to the lake. Now, they envision anchoring it around Sacré Coeur Church, the city’s first French-speaking Roman Catholic parish, established in 1887 at the corner of Carlton and Sherbourne. College Francais is located a couple of blocks west, at Mutual Street, while the Centre francophone, Boreal College and TFO, the province’s only French-language educational public television network, are all at Yonge and Carlton.

But following in the footsteps of Little Italy or Greektown is no small feat. Ask the Ethiopian restaurant owners out on the Danforth who have been fighting for more than a year to designate four blocks of the Danforth Mosaic BIA as a Little Ethiopia. The difficulty is that it encompasses businesses with different ethnic roots, hence the name mosaic.

Usually, residents of one ethnicity congregate in an area, followed by the butchers and bakers, said Randy McLean, acting director of strategic growth and sector development at the city. And from there, a Business Improvement Area, with an easily identifiable name, is born. “The name follows the reality,” Mr. McLean said. He did not know if there was another process to go through that could designate an area based on its history.

Mr. Boué, who owns Lafayette Bistro on Queen Street, says part of the challenge is that francophones have not settled in a specific place in Toronto. “When an Italian family comes to Toronto, they ask where are the Italians and they go where they are,” he said. French people will go in the opposite direction of their own kind, he said, because they’re independent. “But I can tell you that after a while you are desperate for a confit de canard [duck confit] and you would be delighted if you could find an area where there is not one, but six, seven, 10 restaurants where you can choose.”