Toronto's restaurant scene is readying for a revolution: get ready for ad hoc menus, makeshift kitchens, hole-in-the-wall spaces, chef collectives, and cheap, mind-blowing meals
Len Senater has a plan, or more appropriately, a scheme. Over a lunch of reheated homemade Indian food in his kitchen (“It’s leftovers,” he offers with a shrug, “it’s what you have for lunch”), the 40-year-old designer paints a picture of a food-focused community space that will exist outside the boundaries of the traditional restaurant. Sometime in June, in an old convenience store at the corner of College Street and Rusholme Park Crescent, Senater will open The Depanneur, a low-key coffee shop that, during the day, will serve basic coffee (no espresso), tea and toast.
Coffee shops are nothing radical, but his plans for The Depanneur at night make Senater somewhat of a maverick. He’ll close to the public, push together the tables and host the Rusholme Park Supper Club, a sort of permanent pop-up restaurant with an ongoing rotation of chefs, menus, concepts and diners.
“The idea of locking myself in the back of a restaurant, slaving away to cook the same thing for people I never meet, does not seem to be a fun way to spend my days,” says Senater. “I asked myself, ‘How could I get closer to food in a fun way, while avoiding the traditional pitfalls that plague the restaurant model?’”
It’s a question that many in the city are asking these days, especially since the disastrous A la Cart food-cart program was mercy-killed by city council last month. That doomed experiment—inspired by food lovers and enthusiastic chefs, micromanaged and strangled by the city’s bureaucracy—bankrupted owners and disappointed eaters, but its death will not be in vain.
Rather, it was a necessary sacrifice in the long fight to shed the conservative structure of eating in this city and open up the field beyond traditional restaurants. Torontonians still crave, demand, and are ready to invest in new and alternative ways to serve and eat food. We regularly mob Taste of the Danforth and Markham’s Night It Up (an Asian night market), and continue to love our vendor hot dogs. We have travelled and tasted Thai chicken wings at food trucks in Portland, goat-cheese tarts at Parisian farmers’ markets, knishes from street carts in New York, octopus fritters in Osaka and charcoal-grilled lamb kebabs in Istanbul, and we ask, “Why not us?”
We want food options that are quicker, more economical and open to more experimentation than those strictly confined to brick-and-mortar establishments. According to the Canadian Restaurant and Foodservices Association, quick-service food businesses (takeout places, fast food, vendors, markets) have recently overtaken full-service restaurants in Canada in market share and total sales, and continue to widen that gap.
The principal reason is that restaurants are expensive. Setting up a basic mom-and-pop restaurant most often begins as a six-figure investment and goes north from there. In an industry with a notoriously high failure rate and slim profit margins, it’s a tremendous gamble.
For chefs, the search for alternatives to restaurants goes beyond a question of economics. Ezra Title trained at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, then worked in the kitchen of Jardinière (one of the best restaurants in San Francisco), the Daniel Boulud–flagship Daniel (one of the best restaurants in New York) and Blue Hill at Stone Barns (one of the best restaurants in America). But when Title moved back to Toronto several years ago, he didn’t ascend to the helm of a fine-dining kitchen or open his own restaurant.
“I found that as much as I loved to cook and create food, the monotony of [the restaurant kitchen] got to me,” says Title. “It is also completely all-consuming. It requires that you give up all other responsibilities in your life. It doesn’t matter that it’s your spouse’s birthday the next day. It’s not that you can’t even go to her party—you probably can’t even go out and buy her flowers.”
Instead, Title became the head chef at The Healthy Butcher, making soups, stews, salads and other takeout fare before starting Chez Vous Dining, his own private chef and catering company. Many people know him best from Saturdays at the Brick Works Farmers’ Market, where he sets up a makeshift kitchen and cooks gourmet breakfasts of creamy scrambled-egg sandwiches and plates of deep-dish French toast—all made from the farmers’ own ingredients.
“What I really love about it is that it strips away all the pretense around food,” says Title. “The food I do is really beautiful, but it’s served on paper plates…. There are so many chefs doing such cool things in restaurants, but there are also so many ways to do beautiful things with food these days. You don’t have to be locked in a kitchen to make a life out of food.”
