Like The Junction circa 2008 and Dundas West circa 2006, Long Branch is a neighbourhood that's been coming up a long time.

"I moved here 11 years ago," says a friendly woman named Tracy in what sounds to me like a London accent. "It was just on the cusp then. And it's still not quite there."

We're talking in Fogarty's of Bourbon Street, a Cajun-Irish pub, just opened in January and one of two outrageous hybrids on this strip of Lakeshore that may, finally, have reached its tipping point. The other's a Greek Texan place, called The Greek Texan, where you can find gyros being prepared under a G.W. Bush campaign sign, placed alongside Obama and Hilary signs over the grill. It's been there since 1963. Odd place, but popular on the day I take a breeze through, looking for an electrical outlet for my laptop (which is how I decide these days whether I'll sit in a place or not. Geeky but true in the New Economy. The Greek Texans didn't have one for me).

But back to Fogarty's, which did. And in the hour that I sat in it at a table for one, four people came up to chat, including the owner, Robert Costelloe. He says he used to own the James Joyce on Bloor at Dalton in the Annex. Not recognizing me, he asked me within a minute or so of my sitting down whether I was new to the area. I said I was an easterner and was just passing through. Before I had a chance to order anything, he brought over a half pint of Guinness. "Consider it a welcome to the neighbourhood," he said. I asked him why the weird mix of Irish and Cajun. Turns out he was born in Baton Rouge, and loves the Irish. About 20 minutes later, Abe comes over. He teaches at Humber College, just down the street at the eastern end of the strip. He just felt like chatting. He loves Long Branch. Good people, he says, needlessly. When I tell him I might be writing something about the place, he says I should call him Fred, and not to quote him. I offer to meet him halfway.

After I talk with Tracy and a friend of hers for another 20 minutes or so, I get up to go. Everyone says bye. This is the friendliest bar I've ever been to. I've been to a lot.

Long Branch used to be cottage country back when it took a couple of hours to get there from downtown. Though there are only one or two of the original cottages left, the neighbhourhood south of Lake Shore still feels a little cottagey, like the Beach south of Queen. Except the houses are about half the price. Right on the water is the Lake Promenade, where house prices are measured exclusively in seven figures but then there's the part north of Lake Shore, a little strip of houses between the street and the railway corridor. The houses are a little smaller, a little less well kept and a lot less expensive. The farthest one is about a five-minute walk to the lake.



The strip itself is in a tumult just now. There are about double the number of vacant storefronts that there were when I first took a look around two years ago. To some, this might seem like a bad thing. Which it could be. It could also be a sign that the landlords are betting the strip's time has come and are raising the rents, and one generation of mostly motley shops is giving way to a new one. There are some new shops, like Bravebody Pilates, looking every bit as bourgeois as its name, and Vitess, a custom bike shop that's so high-end there are no bikes in it. Then there's the corner of Lake Shore and 40th Street, at the strip's westernmost end. Woody's Burgers Bar and Grill has been there for a while, but just in the last year or so, Burrito Boyz has opened up, The Empanada Company did a major renovation and re-focused its business to cater more to the public (owner Christian Heise tells me it's still a big empanada wholesaler), and, in what's become the ultimate sign of a neighbourhood in mid-arrival, an indie cafe has landed. Fair Grounds, it's called. Not especially well laid out, and the baked goods are pedestrian, but it carries coffee from the Birds and Beans cafe down Lake Shore in Mimico, but most importantly, on this particular Wednesday afternoon, it's packed.

Long Branch is also home to Al Lago, an Italian restaurant, owned and run by Abdul "Mike" Malik. He'll greet you when you come in, and takes great pleasure in telling you he doesn't have a menu. Just order something Italian, and he'll see what he can do. If he doesn't have the ingredients, he'll suggest an alternative. This is the kind of place that can make a neighbourhood. And when it's on the same strip as Fogarty's, The Empanada Company (with its extraordinarily good empanadas), the lake two minutes south and a 24-hour streetcar to take you straight downtown along Queen and back again, all this neighbourhood needs are the businesses that will be moving in to those vacant spots to cater to the millionaires to the south and the neighbourhood families to the north, not to mention the new residents of the soon-to-be-built St. Agnes Square condo project by Queenscorp just behind 3609 Lake Shore, or the thousand or so people who'll be moving into the proposed 550-unit Diamond Corp condo complex to be spread across 13 buildings of three to 12 storeys on the north side of the strip between 3560 and 3600 Lake Shore Blvd.

It's a strip in search of an identity to pull it all together at the moment, with remnants of various stages of its past visible in the Carpathian delicatessen, the faded and flaking murals on the sides of buildings whose businesses were once more central to the goings-on here, and the Telegraph logo on the sign above Thomas Variety at 3581, a fragment of the city's journalistic past. It's too far west to attract the sorts of people who have been moving onto and around Dundas Street, whether at Ossington or Keele, so it's doubtful it'll be the next hipster hive. Young families, I suspect, will be more the thing here, trailing pet shops and maybe a mommy-friendly cafe in their wake, and possibly a few of those all-important gentrifying gays willing to take a flyer on a neighbourhood no one's talking about yet.

Bert Archer is Yonge Street's Development News editor.