What You'll Get
Hot potato, the earliest dish designed to be passed, is nearly extinct due to the constant ravages of grade-school appetites. Revive shifting sustenance with today's Groupon: for $29, you get a customized tasting plate of charcuterie and cheese and a small canvas and painting supplies from Raw Canvas on Hamilton Street (a $60 total value).
Raw Canvas brings together creative thinkers, oenophiles, and gourmands with its hybrid studio/wine bar/tapas lounge. Step into Raw Canvas, slip on a painting smock, and enter its painting pit for unreined painterly bronco-bucking atop a half-inch-thick small blank canvas (a $45 value). Raw Canvas supplies the paints and brushes; customers need only hatch the artistic platypus egg within. After painting mind-movies onto the canvas, order a tasting plate, outfitted with a customized trio of meats and cheeses and three flavourful accompaniments to construct the ideal edible muse. The carnivorous options come in various forms such as the quail and pear terrine, duck liver and pink-pepper mousse, and cured meats such as hot sopressata or Czech beer salami. Canadian and European cheeses run the taste and texture gamut with culinary categories such as soft, semi-soft, goat, blue, hard, and seaworthy. These palate-pleasing platters are constructed using organic and biodynamic ingredients from local farmers and suppliers whenever possible.
Though your Groupon is only good for the tasting plate and painting session, Raw Canvas also serves up wine flights ($13–$22) to celebrate your public display of genius. All featured wines are crafted through organic and sustainable agriculture practices.
Reviews
Yelpers give Raw Canvas a 4.5-star average. It has also been featured in the Digital Journal and SweetLife:
- …fledgling artists get a decent size canvas and all-access to an army of acrylic paints -- your only job is just to sit down to brushstroke, blockwash, glaze and grain away any stress. – May Globus, SweetLife
- It's a nice place for everyone who can also come to meet other people, discuss many topics and get immersion in art as a performer or just an attender. Fresh and home-made organic food and served drinks can stop everyone at that place at least for a short moment. Then you fall in love with the place and its atmosphere - and come back again, for sure! – Joseph Boltrukiewicz, Digital Journal
The Fine Print
Promotional value expires May 26, 2011. Amount paid never expires. Limit 2 per person, may buy 1 additional as gift. Limit 1 per visit. Reservation required. No cash back. Tax and gratuity not included. Merchant is solely responsible to purchasers for the care and quality of the advertised goods and services.
About Raw Canvas
The hospitable staff at Raw Canvas challenges the concept of the starving artist with a menu of tapas and desserts that recharge brainpower for creative endeavours. Like a bust of Andy Warhol carved out of butter, Raw Canvas merges the worlds of art and cuisine with a painting pit where colourful brushstrokes flow freely and a dining area for munching on fine sausages and alpine cheeses. The restaurant-studio prides itself on its eco-friendly approach to both visual expression and bodily nourishment, stocking up on paints made on Granville Island and culinary ingredients culled from local family farms. Guests sip craft beers and complex wines as they marvel at Raw Canvas's gallery of original paintings by local artists, or admire the patron-conceived masterpieces that adorn the walls of the painting pit.