By Patrick Kriss | Photography by George Pimentel |wenty-twenty started off great. January is usually the toughest month in the restaurant business, with everyone hiding from the cold and saving money after Christmas. But every table was taken at Alo, my flagship restaurant at Queen and Spadina. Same story at my two Alo spinoffs: my diner-inspired spot, Aloette, and my Yorkville steak house, Alobar.
That Monday, we closed all our restaurants, which meant cancelling three months of reservations at Alo. That was complicated, since we take a deposit to hold a reservation. Some customers moved their reservations forward a few months. Even though I was a lacklustre student, I got into York and majored in history. Whenever I wasn’t on campus, I spent my time at the Rosedale Golf Club, where I’d landed a job as a waiter and bartender. I graduated from university but didn’t see myself doing anything with my degree. Instead, I asked Ken Boyd, the chef at Rosedale, if I could cook in his kitchen. He told me to go away. Eventually, he agreed to hire me if I took the six-month chef apprenticeship program at George Brown. So I did.
By the spring of 2007, Donna and I had been together for three years. I told her that I had a plan: I would get hired by Keller or by Daniel Boulud, the famous French chef who I’d learned ran an international group of restaurants. Daniel, in New York City, was his best. She told me to go for it.I wasn’t prepared for how much I’d be spending on Alo. Construction lasted eight months and cost me more than a million dollars.
When our visas expired in 2010, Donna and I returned to Toronto. I worked for a split second at Luma, the restaurant in the TIFF building, and then was happy to get hired by Victor Barry, then the chef and owner of Splendido. From there I went to Acadia on College West. At the time, it was a high-profile restaurant and packed every night. The menu was French, but through the lens of the American South. It was my first time being in charge of a kitchen. I was moving up.
By the mid-2010s, it seemed tasting menus had come and gone in Toronto. They’d been briefly trendy, but from what I could see, the focus had been only on the food, not on the comfort of the room and in delighting guests. Still, everything I’d cooked at Daniel and all my instincts were pushing me to do a tasting menu restaurant. My version would be relatively simple: only five courses, not some over-the-top 30-course meal.
I kept my nerves under control by distracting myself with meticulous planning. I hired Amanda Bradley, then the general manager at the restaurant George, to be my GM. She recruited pro servers through industry friends. I asked John Bunner, whom I’d met when he was at the Ossington restaurant Yours Truly, to run the bar. I filled my kitchen with talented men and women I’d met at Splendido, Acadia, O&B restaurants and around town.
The reservations gradually started coming in, but not enough to prove everyone wrong and let us live longer than six measly months. I went into my restaurant with a goal and wouldn’t let myself veer from it, even if we were bleeding money. I kept buying the best products to cook with. When the bar traffic was slow, we didn’t get rid of the serving staff. In a sense, we were always prepared to be extremely busy.
Years ago I had the privilege of dining at Alo. The experience was beautiful & unforgettable & definitely reflects the owner & chef! Thank you !
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