INSIDE THE REOPENING OF A STORIED HAUNT
Owner of Canoe hopes pigeon pies will take off with restaurant’s high-flying regulars
TORONTO An hour before lunch started on Tuesday, the managers at Canoe — the storied Toronto restaurant that was reopening after two months — gathered the servers and started testing them at random.
“Adam, give me three things on the Quebec fois gras parfait.”
“Kevin, what’s in the farm-fresh egg frittata?”
“Where’s our pinot gris from?” Canoe’s relaunch was somewhat of a gamble, given that its parent company, Oliver & Bonacini Hospitality Inc., spent more than $2 million on a major renovation: overhauling the kitchen, sprucing up the dining room and changing the menu.
O&B was tinkering with a restaurant that worked, one that was regularly busy and making money. For 25 years, it has been a haunt for the traders and lawyers on Bay Street, to the point where some guests will stop five or six times to shake hands on the way to their table, according to a veteran waiter.
O&B said Canoe’s revenues had been increasing year over year, hitting more than $10 million last year, and O&B president Andrew Oliver acknowledged that closing it, even to make it better, was a risk.
“Those are the things that keep guys like me up at night,” he said.
But staying the same would be taking a bigger risk, and putting money in now made sense, since Canoe just signed a 25-year extension of its lease on the 54th floor of a financial district skyscraper in Toronto. The space was last renovated nearly a decade ago.
“As much as it hurts a business financially to close when you’re still at the top of your game, we think it’s a helluva lot better to do it that way than to allow yourself to limp along, limp along, and then try to get it back,” Oliver said.
Oliver’s father, Peter Oliver, started the restaurant with chef Michael Bonacini in 1995. There are some things from that era that could not change. The lobster clubhouse — once declared “Bay Street’s favourite sandwich” by one business magazine — is still on the menu. The regulars wouldn’t stand for its removal, and the regulars are important at Canoe. The staff call them NBS, short for nota bene in Italian, or “note well.”
Canoe general manager Jane Suh started Tuesday’s lunch briefing by asking for the name and table number of each NB booked for lunch. There was a partner from a law firm, a vice-president of a bank, to name a few.
One woman had specifically requested a view of Lake Ontario. A floor manager suggested seating her at the refurbished window bar, made of a rock slab from the Canadian Shield.
“Or, anywhere,” a waiter said, waving his arms at the floor-toceiling windows that wrap around the restaurant, giving views of the CN Tower, the lake and the planes taking off from Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport.
“Okay. Buono,” Suh said at the end of the meeting. “First service. Let’s make it good.”
One of the main reasons behind the renovation was to make the dining room quieter. NBS had complained of the noise.
The design team installed a sixby-14-metre felt rectangle above the dining room to absorb sound. The strips of felt were woven together by hand to look like a canoe seat. It took two men six days to finish.
“That was a big one,” Oliver said. Even on Tuesday, Oliver and his team remained focused on small things.
Walking past a table, he leaned in to whisper to a waiter: “Wash the back of this,” he said, rubbing a black leather chain spattered with light brown stain.
Later, sitting at one of the biggest and most coveted tables in the dining room, he could see a line of blue cables running up the wall near the open kitchen. He mentioned it to O&B’S director of projects, who was sitting beside him.
“I know,” she said. It was already being fixed.
There was also a problem with the newly installed circular mirrors hanging above the window-side tables that allow diners to look down at the city below. They were slightly warped, making the reflection look “a little bit like a funhouse.”
Said Oliver: “The mirrors are all being replaced.”
Across the dining room, chef de cuisine Ron Mckinlay was at the front of his open kitchen, tending to a tray of pigeon pithiviers at the chef’s rail, a bar with a line of kitchen-facing seats. O&B executives are banking on the intricate meat pies — a classic French dish — becoming a new Canoe signature, as impossible to remove as the lobster clubhouse is today.
The pigeon pie takes two days to make and is priced at $70 each. Mckinlay is currently the only person in the kitchen who knows how to make them.
There were 47 people for lunch on reopening day, which was a deliberately lighter load than the usual flow of 130 or more — the dining room and bar can handle up to 188 people.
Mckinlay’s day, though, seemed to revolve around the pithiviers, though they aren’t even served at lunch, only dinner. First, he wrapped collard greens around a pigeon breast, fois gras and a mousse made of chicken and matsutake mushrooms. He covered the green domes in puff pastry and scored delicate, swirling lines into the top. (The durable collard greens seal in the juices from the meat, so the pastry isn’t soggy.)
Mckinlay returned to his spot at the chef’s rail at least three times to administer a deep yellow egg wash to the outside of the pies.
A young cook approached him at one point with a pan of ox tongue that had been braising for 14 hours. Mckinlay squeezed it.
“It’s not cooked yet,” he said. The young cook seemed perplexed. Mckinlay looked at him.
“Trust me,” he said. The cook took it back to the stove. One server called Mckinlay over, to ask about a dish for a customer who was celebrating a birthday. The kitchen had written “Happy Birthday” in chocolate sauce on a wooden plank with some petit fours (a bite-sized pastry). A candle was going to be added, but there was concern about having an open flame on the wood.
“Do you want to put candles on the wood?” the server asked.
“Yeah,” Mckinlay said, “people like that.”
During service, Mckinlay called over John Horne, the executive chef who oversees seven of O&B’S 26 restaurants including Canoe, to choreograph the timing for the pithiviers. There was a test pithivier, cooked and cut for inspection on the counter.
“You basically want it to come out of the oven, get cut and onto the plate,” Horne said.
The pies take 21 minutes to cook, but they can’t sit around while diners finish their first courses. The pie dough traps heat like a little oven. If it sits, it overcooks. As a result, servers have to estimate when their diners are 10 minutes away from finishing their first course and give the kitchen warning to start cooking the pithiviers. That gives servers 11 minutes to clear the first course, reset the table and allow for some between-course interruptions: say, bathroom breaks or photos in front of the windows.
As lunch service wound down, Mckinlay was sitting at the bar, watching his kitchen team. They were wearing grey baseball caps, part of the revamp. They used to wear tall, white chef’s hats, but they were deemed clunky and clumsy.
The service went smoothly. The new flat-top griddle stopped working temporarily, but the kitchen staff managed without it. They made a few tweaks to the flow of the kitchen, moved the metal rail where they clip the orders, thereby cutting down the number of footsteps cooks have to take. It was an improvement on the two test runs for friends and family.
“I’m very confident in what we can do,” Mckinlay said. “The company has put multi-million dollars to refurb it and it’s the crown jewel of the company, so no pressure, right?”