BACK IN BUSINESS
Seven years after selling Dooney’s Café, Graziano Marchese has reopened the Bloor St. institution in a new location,
It’s around 9:30 a.m. at Dooney’s new Ossington and Bloor location. The place doesn’t open for another half-hour, but the locals won’t wait. They’re coming in through the front and side patio doors that owner Graziano Marchese left open for the Star.
After a roughly seven-year absence from Bloor St. W., this former Annex spot — which was almost an institution — is back, and customers are keen to get in, sit down, have coffee or a drink and just soak in the history.
One of the patrons is author Brian Fawcett, a longtime Dooney’s regular who wrote a book about the café’s battle against Starbucks in the 1990s. He shuffles into the new/old café and takes a seat as casually as he would in his own living room.
Marchese is aware that the new west-end scene demands amazing coffee served nice and early, but he has no intention of opening before 10.
He sold Dooney’s in 2008, exhausted from the 24/7 life of owning a restaurant that was as lively during the day as it was at night. He bought the name back (“I don’t know why, I just didn’t want it to get lost”) and gave it a brief cameo as part of his Annex Live restaurant/club on Brunswick Ave., but then sold that business, too, in 2011. He has spent the last few years “taking out the garbage” as property manager of the family-owned building that once housed Annex Live.
But Marchese began craving the sociability of his old life as master of the popular café, and had his eye on this location at the corner of Carling Ave. and Bloor St., a fruit and veggie outfit owned by the Longo family, who supplied Dooney’s with produce. (They’ve owned the building since they immigrated to Canada in 1926.)
Marchese, who lives around the corner on Shaw St., ran into Joe Longo about two years ago and told him he’d love to rent the space. Longo said he’d keep him in mind.
Silence. Then Marchese and Longo happened to be on the same flight to Italy in February 2014, and talked again about the storefront. Turned out Longo’s tenant was leaving but Longo had lost Marchese’s phone number. “You’ve got a new tenant,” Marchese told him.
Since then, Marchese and his new partner, former Dooney’s chef Michael Coehlo, have been renovating.
Outside, there’s a new neon Dooney’s sign that looks quite a lot like the old one. Inside, it’s classic bar/café with gleaming wood everywhere and an ample bar. In the back, Coehlo is cooking up a menu that’s almost identical to the old: brunch and lunch are exactly the same, but there’s a newly designed, seafood-rich dinner.
With former regulars already on scene and new ones showing up daily, the question is not whether the new Dooney’s will capture the magic of the old, but rather how long Dooney’s will be able to keep those early birds out.