Ouch!

Okay,so we are tired of people asking when are you going to be open? Tired of people asking “whats taking so long?” Well here is the deal, yes it’s taking longer than we would have wanted  but it’s not like we are sitting around waiting for this thing to happen. If it wasnt for the fact that our catering company and original location never seem to slow down you would have been seeing completed pictures of King Street a long time ago. By my math since we acquired our King street location in August we have served about 4800 hundred people with our catering company and about 10 000 people in the restaurant, so we have been a little tied up.  

So here is where the main players at King street stack up. I have just about finished the hiring of my kitchen and I have what I feel are really great and young group of eager cooks. As much as I was concerned about actual cooking ability, to be honest I was also looking for something a little bit more. The cooking I can teach but I talked a lot in my interviewing process about the culture of kitchens and about the culture of food. I waxed poetically about the respect for the profession and what it all meant, the ones who nodded in agreement got a second interview.  

The casting couch.

I am deep into the menu development and I am excited about the dishes. This menu is nothing new to me, I have been cooking this style now for many years. We are going to serve Italian food but  “Modo Mio” , my way. I am not Italian but  the heart and soul of Italian cooking to me is  no different than the cooking I ate growing up in the prairies. Take the best of what you have and do as little as possible. Simple food, which as I always say is the hardest food to cook. “Inspired in Italy, made in Canada” is the motto we use to describe the food we cook. 

Says it all.

A balanced menu must have a bit of everything. Hot, cold, crunchy, soft, sweet, salty,a bit of meat,  a bit of fish, and a whole lot of vegetables. It’s easy to write ideas down on paper but a lot of things sound better in print than they do in 3D. There is a vegetarian dish that is taking me weeks to get right, yet others were a one take. Each preparation must be weighed measured,  calculated and put into recipe form. Chefs love the free form artistry of the kitchen but crash when it comes to the mathematics of cooking. To me it’s the difference between a flash in the pan or longevity.  

And where is Deirdre? well all she has to worry about trying to decide on our new company logo’s, our olive oil and tomato sauce branding ( you heard it here first ), the website and too many last-minute details, tooo long for me to type in this post, oh and running the catering department.  

Deirdre is in control of the way our place looks physically and also from a marketing/branding point of view. How do you make yourself look different in an age where branding is everything? Our old logos were great but it seemed as the design of the new place unfolded they just didn’t fit. Part of the process was hooking up with a great company called 52 Pick up Inc. They sat us down, therapy style and ask us who we really were. It was an interesting exercise, and forced us to look at our business as more than how many people are we serving this week to where we were headed 5 years from now. They nailed our what, who, and why and put it all in a neat little package. 

Somebody's chef jacket, I am not saying who!

And Tony? Well in between being our kitchen bitch, mountain bike training for his yearly strip to Sedona, over seeing the contractors at King street, dealing with the new designers at our new cafe location ( you heard it here first ) working most catering jobs we do, and holding all thing L EAT and Paese together , Tony finds time to make sure my new smoker gets built, our new the new walk in refrigeration gets installed at head office, the gardens get planted and everybody is taken care of and gets paid. 

This is the pay off for months of straight work. Tony and his friends in Sedona.

Here in picture form is just a few of the things we had going on over the past 8 months while  King Street was being built.  

Take a pot and a hose and an old fridge and what do you get? A smoker of course! Ah the Italian, hungarian ingenuity.

People laughed but it worked. So much so we decided to get professional.

George the original Paese chef, now our resident carpenter constructing our new smoker.

Tony transferring our first batch of red wine vinegar into a cask for aging. How did it taste? So good I will never buy red wine vinegar ever again.

And this?

Welcome to the L EAT farm.

We turned it into this, our first gardens. Located just around the corner from our head office. Close enough that I could disappear in the middle of the day and become a farmer.

This is where I would sit in the mornings and hang out with the ground hogs and racoons. We were able to compost all of kitchen scraps and ended up serving only our tomatoes all summer long.

And this is what happened to the garden, turned into preserves that will end up on our menu at King street.

Our guard cat "Meat balls" , waiting for her beef tenderloin and red wine jus. She eats better that the kitchen staff.

The "bus" as its become known. A 1973 Volkswagon that is currently being restored. Soon to be another of our catering vans.

Taking as long to complete as King Street.

The cafe. Soon to be called L EAT express. Many more blog post about this one I am sure.

Okay stay tuned, completed Paese King street photos coming this week!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Little reminders to keep everyone in line.

This process has taken months. A lot longer than any of us had expected. We have faced tremendous hurdles and as construction is now moving along and the finishing has begun, there is an actual end in sight. It’s comforting to know that if ever you want to go to a restaurant where every single square inch has been thought about, measured, changed, redesigned and redesigned again, all for your pleasure, than this is the place.  All the months of frustration, day dreaming and hard work are finally starting to take shape. There is a buzz amongst us and a feeling that all of the struggles are finally about to pay off.      

 Final decisions about logo’s, paint color’s, lights, tables, floor colors, tiles, toilet paper holders, tea pots, napkin folds, email addresses, salt shakers, and music have been made. Next are decisions about staff, uniforms, style of service, cocktails, the color of the cocktail napkins, websites, toilet paper, positioning statements, press releases, wine lists, cream and sugar holders, washroom signs, purse hooks, and place mats.     

The front entrance framed.

Hiding a big ugly bulkhead above the stairway to downstairs. Because space is such an issue this enclosed area will hide the stereo, light switches and also double as a closet.

The bar area with the brick exposed, being prepped for new tile.

The new bar made out of solid walnut butcher block.

 

Picking the finishes for the bar top.

 

Tony doing some research and development, oh and testing the finishes.

 

When we were done with the ceiling it ended up looking like this.

 

Good thing the drywallers were able to do this.

 

The holes for the infamous lights that moved many times.

 

The lights in their final home.

 

We found someone who took reclaimed yellow brick and cut it into thin strips and was able to match it up our existing walls. Here it is ready to go up on the walls.

 

And this is the end result.

 

The constant to do lists posted everywhere.

 

We love writing on walls.

 

Late night wall sketches of custom kitchen stainless shelves we dreamt up.

 

When inspiration strikes you have to write it down, doesn't matter where.

 

A cardboard drawing of a piece for behind the bar.

 

The new womans washroom stalls, tiled and with the trim installed.

 

Patching done on the old hardwood floor.

 

The wine cellar with the insulation blow in, drywalled and with the doors installed.

 

Laying down the new kitchen floor, all in grey but what you can't see are the fire engine red tiles just put on the walls.

 

Respect for the trades.

 

The finished kitchen, I might be biased but I will definitely have the coolest kitchen in the city!

 

It was a very happy day when this showed up. Our Moretti Forni pizza oven from Italy. I can almost taste it!

 

Out the kitchen window looking into the dining room.

 

Having the blown insulation put into the dining room ceilings.

 

The hoarding in place as the new front was being installed.

 

Another suprise occured when the wall came down for the new front door and this steel beam was right in the middle of the opening. Oops!

 

  

The end is near and will I ever be glad when this month is over!

 

We have given ourselves two weeks to open, enough talking about it, it’s time. Its good to finally see things we envisioned be designed and delivered. It nice to see the place starting to come together. It will be a relief to  finally wipe off all the dust and be polishing instead of scraping. Now it’s time to hire the people that we are going to intrust to carry forth our vision. To be honest it’s a bit frightening. I am confident in  our opening management team, we have worked together for months, discussing in front of the espresso machine every morning just how we are going to different and how we are going to put our stamp on this city. We have had inspiration at the weirdest moments, had heated conversations in walk in fridges, scribbled notes on almost anything and complied them into a manifesto that will be handed to our new employees. It will talk about a culture of food, consistency, passion, common sense, communication, organization , sharp knives, and pressed shirts. It’s now our job to get them to understand all the things we as management have been debating and discussing over the past months. The way a place looks only goes so far and once construction is over the real job begins.  

We began with this.

This post is about the transformation of this century old building into a casual, neighbourhood restaurant in downtown Toronto. These first sets of photographs were taken in the first few weeks of us acquiring the building. We had hoped to come in, clean up the garbage, buy new tables, chairs and serving pieces, put in the menu from our Bathurst location and open for business with in two to three months. After spending a few days inside the building we realized that it needed much more than just a quick clean up, what the building  needed was a fresh start. The decision was made, the plans drawn up and preparations began. To say the project took on a life of its own would be an understatement. When it’s all said and done it will be a place that serves great food with a really cool look and amazing atmosphere but to the people who have been involved every step of the way its like  giving birth to a child, and will have probably hurt just as much!  

Ok, here we go........

This was some bad 70's design, except it was 2009! This was as you walked in the front door and were looking towards the back of the restaurant.

Fake, dusty plants, a metaphor for the inspiration in this place.

The original bar, If it could tell stories I am sure they would be good. I would know, I found an envelope of pictures behind it, none of which will ever be posted here.

Not to make too much fun of the place, it's too easy but this was a very successful bistro for many years and for what ever reason just fell on hard times.

Everywhere there was filth and disorganization. It wasnt like this place was abandoned for months it was operational weeks before we acquired it.

This was a private dining area which was cleared later in the evening for a private dance stage.

Not sure what this was supposed to be other than a fire hazard.

There was some odd Moroccan, Mardi Gras, Court jester design to the whole place. These were windows cut into a stairwell.

The basement was a scary, disgusting place.

Actual basement floors as we found them.

Beer fridges, found with empty kegs. Major disappointment.

Another disappointment was spending a thousand dollars to have someone drill the safe to find absolutely nothing inside.

The downstairs kitchen, never used and containing the only equipment that didn't have to be refurbished.

The original managers office. Soon to become a wine cellar.

The original kitchen tiles. No amount of mopping was going to fix these floors.

Want to see the kitchen? It had a yellow card in the front window which indicates that they had been flagged for a health violation. Too many to count, actually.

Once again just cluttered and disorganized.

This equipment was so greasy we couldn't even wash it. Most of it was thrown out.

From the furthest point of the back of the restaurant looking towards the front.

Not as bad as you would think but it was inside the drawers, fridges and underneath that was unspeakable.

Do you want to see what two-week old food looks like? Lets just say that the smell hits you first!

Yes, actual food was stored here!

Okay enough ugliness, parties over, last call, end of the line.

Okay you get the point, the place was ugly. This was no restaurant makeover crap. Nothing here was going to be transformed in seven days, we needed seven months dammit! Once the decision was made we started demolition. The old fixtures were sold, what wasnt wanted was reduced to sawdust and the rebirth was started.  

Original City street map 1890

This story has its seeds planted some two years earlier when Tony asked me outright if I was interested in opening another restaurant. Without any apprehension I answered ” Yes! “. Everyone who works in this business at some point and time comes to the realization that what they want is to be the person calling the shots. My whole career I have kept a mental list in my head of all the things I have seen done right, and all the things that I have seen done wrong. Unfortunately for most, the done wrong list tends to be much longer that the done right. Once it was decided upon, we set ourselves on a course of righting the wrongs and spent many mornings in the months leading up to finding a place, sipping espresso and collecting our thoughts and ideas that would eventually form the framework for the next chapter of Paese.

After months of scouring Toronto for a suitable location to take our brand of Canadian inspired Italian food to a new audience, Tony’s friend D.C.  stumbled upon a building smack dab in the middle of one of Toronto’s oldest districts. We viewed it, took stock of the neighbourhood and made an almost unanimous decision, and within 72 hours we had won the location lottery. We beat out a lot of  other people crazy enough to take a chance and we secured a new home for Paese at 333 King Street West.

The before.............

King Street and Avenue Road looking east 1880's

Buildings were being built along this street as early as the 1860′s but it wasn’t until the late 1890′s when the Academy of Music theater opened and a few years later the Royal Alexander theater opened on King and University, becoming the first buildings in Toronto to be completely electric.  King Street was on its way to becoming the entertainment center  of Toronto.

The Royal Alexander Theater, 1908

A postcard from the 1890's depicting The Royal Alexander Theater.

In the early 1900′s King Street was a beautiful tree lined boulevard; alongside the theaters were the Lieutenant Governors private residence, St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church and the original Upper Canada College. During the 1920′s the areas around the theaters began to change, the Governors residence was torn down and the property was sold and turned in rail yards. This brought with it factories and to all sides warehouses, heavy machinery and loading docks sprung up. Overtime these areas became a dark and industrial place. Smog hung heavy in the air and once a place of music and dance became an industrial center. By the 1950′s this street was a rundown derelict part of town. Rents were cheap and the buildings in decay. By 1960 the theaters were slated for demolition until Ed Mirvish stepped in and bought the Royal Alexander theater.  A year of restoration brought it back to its former glory. The people returned and the rebirth of King Street was on its way. This street now boats the Roy Thompson Hall, National film board, CBC headquarters, restaurants , night clubs, condominiums and soon, Paese King Street West.

The Lieutenant Governor of Ontario's private residence, 1908.

King Street West looking east 1890's

Our building, built sometime around the early 1900′s was never so glamorous. Another in a block of multi- use office buildings, its two story plain brick existence was home to such businesses as Spiegel Max and Son’s cigarette papers and Fosters Printers and Stationers.

For the last 12 years it had been home to a bistro and night club. The previous owners had long since cared about the well being of the building and the yellow card in the front window showed that they cared even less about the customers. When we entered, the previous owners had been (censored)  for failure (censored) everybody and the building had been shuttered for weeks. Swarms of fruit flies and the stench of rotting food greeted us upon entering. It’s like they just got up and left. Tables set with cutlery and plates, drinks still on the bar, food still in the refrigerators.

Here we go! our first walk through.

From the front door looking towards the back.

Upon entering the kitchen this was the first present left for us, disgusting!

Three week old risotto anyone?

The kitchen in it's original state before being heavily degreased.

It was hard in looking at the place to envision what it could be. It felt like a bad movie from the late 70′s. Some bizarre sort of Moroccan meets Mardi gras theme, red and gold silk was strung from the ceilings, black cast iron chandeliers, crushed red velvet upholstry and the unmistakable feeling of faded glory. We had hoped for a quick paint job, some new plates and chairs and a quick turnaround of a month or two but what we got was four brick walls, a roof and six 40 yard dumpsters of garbage.

Our boys, taking care of business.

Day one of demolition

Just like a fairytale.....

Next!

The decision was made to make what was old, new again and if we were going to do it, let’s do it right. Let’s be the first in a very long time to give this block something new, like animals that had been caged too long at Bathurst and Wilson we torn into the old building with abandon.  We threw out everything; whatever we touched was covered with a layer of grease so thick it was cheaper to get rid of it than spend the time cleaning. We left only the floors and the bare brick walls. It felt liberating, like giving the old building a new lease on life. Standing proud and weathering a depression, war, fires and gentrification, 333 King Street West was going to be reborn.

masking tape marking the things that were never to return.

The Paese wrecking crew, refueling before getting back to destroying.

Where to begin, it seemed overwhelming.

In coming up for a design of the new Paese we decided to brighten the place up, introduce clean contemporary lines, and create a relaxed and casual feel.  We were recommended a highly regarded design company and luckily for us they agreed to fit us in. Our timelines were strict, we had been given 2 months of free rent and there was a lot to do. We should have ran the other way when the first set of drawings came back; we were given nothing that we had asked for. The century old yellow brick adorning the walls was to be painted, the beautiful hardwood floors were gone, the vaulted ceilings lowered and the walls where there was no brick was to be covered in dark walnut.  What? Where did the soul of the building go? Where was the Italy meets Canada guideline we had asked for?

The first very expensive set of poorly designed drawings.

What the hell?

The process had been started, and we were chomping at the bit. It was August when got the building and we had a window of time in order to open and hopefully catch some of the Christmas crowd but that window was closing fast, without sets of finalized plans nothing could be started.  The electricians couldn’t start because they didn’t have any walls to put their wires in; the plumbers couldn’t start running lines because they didn’t know where the walls would be and the carpenters couldn’t put up the walls because we couldn’t get the designers to decide what the hell they were doing.

What we hoped would be hiding some more yellow brick turned out to look like this when we opened up the walls.

The managers office, before being remodeled.

And after remodeling.

And so everyone sat at home, for two months the building sat empty, a huge divide separated us and the designer’s vision. Threatening phone calls were made where unpleasantries where exchanged and tensions mounted with every passing month of writing rent checks on an empty building. If it wasn’t for the intestinal fortitude of Tony and his unfaltering belief in Deirdre and myself,  it might have been easy to pack it in. No amounts of misguided architects trying to turn the place into an uber modern Chinese restaurant, or shifty unpaid club promoters brandishing copper pipes were going stop us from opening.

Things were taking so long Tony managed two vactions. Here he is in Sedona multi tasking trying to figure out whats going on back in T.O.

Anyone can open a restaurant, but to have it be functional is a different thing. Only with experience can you properly design a functional space. There are a million things that the customer never sees and for a reason. We are the people who look at every little detail of everyone elses restaurant and take that information home with us.  We are those people, that when sitting in another restaurant will ask the busboy for a tape measure so we can calculate the width of the table. We analyze everything, like the number of tables in the room, how many people we can comfortably sit, how much space between tables we need for the servers to walk, how high the lights must hang, and how many different combinations of stemware, plates and cutlery are needed and can fit at your table. We are the people that weigh cutlery in order to know if it’s going to be too heavy to hold over the duration of the meal or if it’s going to slide off the plate as your server carries it away and come crashing to the floor. We pour water into soup bowls measuring the capacity; hold the edges of plates to see how easy they are to carry, lift bowls off tables at other establishments to see where they got them from , and steal menus and wine lists wherever we go.

We have moved every conceivable wall in our space, blown through countless measuring tapes, made the ceiling look like Swiss cheese trying to perfect the position of the lights, designed and redesigned everything about a hundred times, made carpenters crazy, have had to answer on more than one occasion “What difference does moving it 4 inches make?”  drank a hundred cups of Starbucks over early morning bitching sessions, and have finally started to see the seeds of our plan hatched so many years back, start to come to fruition.

It is now the beginning of February and the wine cellar has been sprayed with insulation, the kitchen has been tiled, the stoves rebuilt, the hardwood floors patched, the brick refurbished, the sound system wired, the dishwashers refurbished, the electrical finished, and the walls are in place.

Taken late last night, progress!

The plates have been decided on, the wine glasses bought, cutlery weighed and ordered. The kitchen small wares picked out and all the custom stainless steel has been built. The end is near and the finish line in sight but there is yet so much to do. Months of dreaming and planning, days spent blurry eyed in front of computer typing employee hand books and checklists, scraps of menu ideas, piles of cook books, and a never ending to do list are just the start of a mad rush to opening day. Watch it all unfold, highlights coming daily!

First draft of the new menus!

Me, and the beginning of my fascination with fire and possibly cooking

And some thirty years later at the L EAT farms

 By three degrees of separation I was introduced to Tony a few years ago through former employees who had jumped ship at a sinking catering company we were trying to rescue. My first interview was in the early morning at the bar in Paese which involved numerous shot of espresso and my second interview was in the late evening up in Tony’s office which involved numerous shots of bourbon. That’s how most chefs’ days go, if the truth be spoken.  

In the morning

And in the evening

Toronto is full of great chefs; a melting pot of food cultures and people. Almost any food stuff is available and our size provides us with an amazing network of wineries and farmers, but it’s Achilles heel is in its mediocrity. It seems like a fickle city always wanting to be New York but forgetting also that its real roots lie in the people who immigrated here and brought with them their packets of vegetable seeds and their family recipes.  Want the best Italian, Greek or Indian food?  It’s hard to find in most restaurants in this city but its here, on tables in kitchens being made by mothers who are a last generation of people who raised families, planted gardens, who bought the cheapest cuts of meat and had the ability to turn it into something that any chef in this city would be proud to serve.  

I come from one of those families and I arrived in this city 7 years ago, leaving the west coast attitude and cooking style of Vancouver for the bright lights of Toronto.  Vancouver is a small city and it shows in the even smaller amount of high end restaurants. As a cook working your way through the system you reach a point where there are only so many good restaurants left that you can work at to pad your resume. There comes a time when you have to settle into a place and wait for your turn, work hard and hopefully when the sous chef moves on you will have impressed management enough that you can move up. I didn’t want to wait my turn, my family had moved east to Toronto and inevitably I had started to read about the culinary scene, familiarizing myself with the movers and shakers, all the while knowing I would eventually make the move to the big smoke myself.  

My first fish caught at my grandfathers cottage on Jeanette Lake, Saskatchewan

Before we get ahead of ourselves, let’s go back a ways.  If you could draw a line through all my culinary influences, it wouldn’t start with any three-star Michelin French chef; those influences would come years later. As a young boy my siblings and I would spend time at our father’s parent’s farm in rural Saskatchewan watching my Hungarian grandmother cook. I remember her as only ever being in the kitchen and that was probably my earliest food memory. With her apron tied tightly around and towering over a stove full of cast iron pans, she spent years being the engine for a family of ten kids. 

The Palik farm, Kipling Saskatchewan

Some of my fondest memories of food and other wise took place at this farm. Chicken coops, crab apple trees, and endless fields of wheat gave me a reference point for cooking that could never ever come from the Food Network. There must have been something in that Saskatchewan water or perhaps it was the influences of growing up outdoors because both my brother and I with the passion of food and cooking deeply ingrained in us would both go on to become chefs. Little did we know the impact that those summers had on us as kids, stopped along the side of a dirt road picking as many Saskatoon blue berries as possible or spending the afternoons in the sun shelling peas. Canning in the late fall was essential, buying a whole cow and having the thing butchered so that you could have a freezer full of meat all winter was tradition;  and turning that prize winning buck into sausages was a rite of passage.  

Country Kitchen in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan was the first restaurant that let me cook professionally. It was a truck stop style, family restaurant and once I proved adept at washing dishes, I was quickly moved up to the next important position of  ”Belgium waffle boy”. Every morning I was sent out the kitchen door with two, 16 liter buckets of waffle mix and a case of non stick spray to anchor the end of the buffet line. Two waffle makers, whipped cream and strawberry sauce were all that separated me from hungry packs of screaming kids, the elderly and hungry families. Something about the crazy characters that inhabited the kitchen and the magic of making people happy with food sparked an interest in me.  It was the late 80′s and I was about to graduate from high school. Fortunately for me, my family was moving out west and the economic boom of Vancouver meant actual opportunities for our family. I had applied, and was accepted, to one of Canada’s best cooking schools. A few months later I found myself on the doorstep of Vancouver Community College’s, Culinary Arts Foundations program.  

With my brother Greg, unleashing one of my creations on my family

I quickly became immersed in the cultures of Escoffier, Carême, and Bocusse. It was a complete shock on so many different levels. I had left small town Saskatchewan, school was in the seediest part of Vancouver and was working with foods I had never heard of. My palate exploded, anchored by Vancouver’s vibrant multi-cultural scene. The huge Asian population meant there was sushi on every corner; the Indian culture brought shawarma stands everywhere and on our doorstep the Pacific Ocean gave us an abundance of wild seafood.  

Vancouver Community College, 1990

Ten months later with a basic diploma in my hand and armed with the ability to cook potatoes 89 different ways, what did I do?  I became the “deli boy” at the Real Canadian Superstore. Why? I wanted to socialize, work part time, traipse around in the old growth forest and figure things out. Looking back now I recognize that this was a smart move. Truth is I realized in culinary school that being a chef amounted to an incredible amount of pressure, and there was no way that, at twenty, I was mature enough to handle the extremes of working in a professional kitchen. I followed my short deli career with attempts at construction and as a diesel mechanic before realizing that what I wanted was a combination of working with my hands and the creativity that cooking provided. When I made the decision that being a chef was what I wanted my brain became a sponge and opportunities came easy. I worked my way through Vancouver’s best restaurants; I spent a year cooking in France  where I witnessed  a level of food culture never to be seen by myself since, and made an eventual move to Toronto that brought my career to the next level. 

Megeve, the French town in the Alps where I cooked and lived for a year

What is my philosophy on food? Well I don’t care for food foams, cooking in plastic bags under pressure or kitchens as laboratories.  I am not a scientist or a scholar but I love to wax poetic to anyone who will listen. We are all seduced by networks full of sexy chefs with long exaggerated shots of expensive kitchens, making food that’s now coined by the term “foodporn”. I admit I have been guilty of trying to be as sexy with my food and forgetting that it was a matter of sustenance first. I am not trying to change the world with my cooking or reinvent the wheel. How can you when everything has already been done before? When I first started out I naively thought that most of my culinary creations were pretty good, if not ground breaking, but after years of careful research I have been disappointed to find out that every single one of them was mastered long ago. It’s once you reach that point that you understand that to cook in the manner that I get to do is a privilege, not a right, and by that token it has to be respected. Ever since I came to that realization, my food has taken on a soulful quality it never had before.  

My first Chef position. The Strand, 2004

Chefs have been quickly changing their philosophies about where their food comes from. Terms like “nose to tail eating”, “locally sourced”, and “organic” now appear on menus everywhere.  Growing up in Saskatchewan my family’s farmers market was our garden; our “Healthy butcher” was our neighbour down the road, and “locavore” was what we were, long before we knew it was a food revolution. Today television and the internet have broken down food boundaries our grandparent’s could have never imagined. Our access to recipes and products has blown our culinary tapestry wide open. Now days styrofoam boxes packed with other countries bounty arrive on every flight from where ever you have just been, and and arrive at your grocery store and at my restaurants back door.  

My brother Nathan and myself, Toronto Taste 2006

The internet age has made it hard for people my age to think of a time when everything wasn’t at our finger tips. I have  seen this generation gap in terms of food and have seen it come full circle through my own family. On the one hand, I was surprised that we had just introduced my 97 year old grandfather to his first steamed mussel and that he had never heard of, let alone eaten, a pomegranate.  I was both amazed and inspired that, at his age, my grandfather, completely unaware of the “Food Network” world, is still open-minded enough to be discovering and trying new foods. I was equally amazed and inspired by my 12 year old niece who with my assistance recreated a scene from the movie “No reservations”, in which the both of us together cooked a traditional Italian meal for our families. What inspired me was the day after, when she was replicating and teaching others the recipes and tips I had shown her. I was proud to have been given the chance to pass down these things that were passed down to me. Finally I was given a tattered old cookbook by my mother, once used by her mother and upon flipping through the recipes, I was struck at how my grandmother, years ago was cooking with the same simple sets of ingredients I always keep in my fridges at work that form the basis of my cooking.  It’s been interesting to look at the role that food has in my life, not only as nourishment but as something connective that ties my family together.

My grandfather Fritz, my mother June and myself November 2009

Cooking with my niece Chantal, christmas 2009

Through a series of adventures and misadventures and through the kitchens of some of the best and worst of Toronto’s culinary scene, I can say that I have “almost” seen it all. From alcoholic chefs to mafia connected restaurant owners, I have worked my way from the dish pit of a truck stop diner in a little Saskatchewan town to being behind the stoves cooking for Toronto’s rich and famous. It takes more than hard work, it also takes catching some lucky breaks along the way, and one of mine came a couple of years ago sitting in Tony’s office.  

Myself and Tony, enough said.

Great restaurants are not about just one person, it is about a collection of people doing a lot of little things right. And by doing a lot of little things right, is how we came to have the chance to be standing in front a neglected space in a strip of restaurants that seem to have been from a time long forgotten. Garish neon signs, dated menus, old waiters in stuffy uniforms putting down plates of food that had long lost their love. Now it’s our turn, time to take all that knowledge accumulated over the years and to really put our money where our mouth is. This is the story of Paese on King Street.

Chef Tony early 80's

Okay, so here are the players behind L EAT Catering we have Tony Loschiavo, immigrating to Canada in the fifties with his family and quickly using his streetwise Italian style to hustle jars of pesto made in his parent’s garage to running the food operations at the Jolly Miller Tavern. 

The Miller Tavern years ago

At only seventeen he self financed what is now known as L EAT Catering, all before most people his age had figured out what university they were going to drop out of. From there, his catering and restaurant savvy led him to owning his first restaurant on Isabella Street in Toronto in early 1983. The restaurant was called L EAT and featured no sign, and no menu, just a deli case full of ingredients. 

L EAT on Isabella Street, note the '68 delivery beetle

When operations outgrew that location, Tony looked north for a new home and found one in the cheaper rent district and ever burgeoning North York area of Bathurst and Wilson. A nondescript strip mall was the choice for the home of L EAT Catering. Tony went about building a catering company and business that is still growing and breaking ground. 

L EAT and Paese on Bathurst Street

A  self-made restaurateur, avid mountain biker, fisherman, sommelier, carpenter ,engineer and hardest working man in the catering business, and for anybody who has ever worked a catered event in this city in the past 30 years knows, his reputation supersedes him. 

In whites

Priming the glasses, Grand Cru 2009

Salmon fishing during caterings busy season

Deirdre Anderson, LEAT Catering’s visionary guiding light for the past 7  years, took what was an already complete package and put her spin on everything from the companies logo’s, menu styles, restaurant renovations, décor,  and always seems to be able to tie all the loose ends of every single event together to make it a cohesive package. Nobody could understand the painful patience it takes to listen to a customer who calls thirty times to ensure their event runs smoothly, or the feeling of staying up all night going over things in your head hoping you didn’t forget something in a 22 piece place setting for 600 hundred people. Deirdre has rental list programmed in her blackberry with links to catering software so that while she’s on the go she  can cut and paste menus and create complete events. In our business, that’s called hard core. 

Deirdre, Mmm fries ...

Chef Deirdre, Grand Cru 2009

 Because of Deirdre, L EAT catering and Paese can boast the most money spent on customized serving pieces, cutlery, china, Plexiglas French fry trays, cotton candy machines, light fixtures, and oh yes, a thousand dollar ice cream bucket holder. But you can bet that when we show up for your event you will realize that a finger on the pulse of what’s current and an eye for attention and detail are what set      L EAT Catering apart from everybody else. 

Packing lists for each individual catering function

Shelves downstairs at L EAT full of custom serving pieces

More custom pieces

Carts packed for an event and ready to be shipped

It starts by unloading van after van

Then its unpacking all the plates, cutlery, cups, and wine glasses

Then we build kitchens, anywhere!

unloading the carts of food

Service backstage at One X One 2008, Maple Leaf Gardens.A tomato salad filled with a herbs, seedlings, edible flowers and B.C. spot prawns with a yellow tomato viniagrette. Oh yes for 700 people!

 In catering, nothing scares us. A cocktail party for 400. We ask “when?”, you reply “Tomorrow?”  No problem.  An Indian meets Mexican themed wedding? No problem.  A sit down dinner for 12 people in your home with linens, flowers, two chefs’ , three wait staff, locally sourced produce, allergies to dark meat and rare meat and all on a budget? No problem. 

A tented wedding at a winery, in the fields

Dinner inside the tents

Dinner on Lake Simcoe

At night, Lake Simcoe

South Beach theme, no problem!

Inside South Beach

Morocco in Ontario

The bar, Morocco

Prepping the animals

A childrens tea party

Dinner poolside, another example like the others above of Deirdre's attention to detail

 We turn empty rooms into lounges, warehouses into ballrooms, cottages into African safaris, we build kitchens in garages, unload truck loads of customized equipment, change in closets like supermen into chef whites or black ties,  make some of the smallest food imaginable in some of the biggest quantities possible, work the longest hours humanly thinkable, forgo sleep, proper nutrition, hydration, cram ourselves with the leftovers of whatever we are serving that night only to get up and do it again the next day.

Paese at night late 80's

For those reading who don’t know about Paese Ristorante, it started from humble beginnings in 1987 out of the extra room acquired for L EAT Catering and has gone on to become a North York institution.  Housed in the same complex as the catering kitchens along Bathurst St. and Wilson Ave., we have been happily serving customers for over 22 years.

The original signage

Back in the day

Hearts of palm salad

Al ferro pizza

Original decor early 90's

Before the transformation

Before the restaurant became known as a wine and food destination it went through several transformations. Starting out as a little store front sandwiched between a hair salon and a kosher wine store, it has expanded taking over the spaces bordering both sides of the restaurant. A major renovation of Paese inside as well as the front of the entire building took place three years ago. Paese transformed itself from an unlikely little pizzeria to a comfortable, yet sophisticated, eatery where families, people in the neighborhood, foodies, wine connoisseurs, and the rest of us have come to consider as their “kitchen away from home”.

Tony, making it happen during the Paese remodeling

Paese now

Want a great bottle of wine to go with dinner?  No problem. Paese sports a wine cellar with over 500 different labels from the diverse lists of major producing wine regions and has been given the “Award of Excellence” by Wine Spectator magazine for the past 18 years.  In a move completely bucking the trend, Tony decided that it was time to let the customers taste the wines he had been collecting all these years.  With the assistance of General Manager and Sommelier Sharon Correia and Wine Director and Sommelier Derek Danilewski, they put in place a wine philosophy that simply stated:  “We like to cellar fine wines and not collect them”.  In an unprecedented move, they took the current LCBO prices for the wines on the Paese wine list and added only a $25.00 dollar per bottle mark up.

The lower cellar at Paese

The wall of memories

One of the cork walls down by the cellar, more memories

As a chef, I was entrusted with putting my spin on the no-nonsense approach of Italian home cooking.  “Inspired in Italy, made in Canada” is the way I describe my thought process when it comes to the food we serve.  We are not trying to be authentic, traditional or regional; we understand our influences and our roots but we also understand that we live in Canada. We work with local produce and Canadian meats and seafood, but we also import Italian specialties like Mozzarella di Buffalo and Parma Prosciutto and find that our menu has a place for both.

The original Paese menu

An early 1990 menu

The mid 90's

The late 90's

Roasted golden beets with pistachio's, pomegranate and arugula

Rare tuna, fennel and string bean salad, puttanesca dressing

The Paese and L EAT Catering ideologies and philosophies about food, wine and customer service that have made us successful and have made our clientele so loyal will continue at both this original and our new King St. location for many years to come.  Here is to a great 22 years and continuing at our Bathurst St. location.

Paese after dark, 2009