Adding 6ix to the 905
One man’s plan to bring Vegas-style opulence — Drake show included — to a Vaughan club
Chateau le Jardin is something of a fixture on this textbooksuburban strip of Hwy. 27 in Woodbridge, a massive event venue that for three decades has hosted countless weddings, showers, proms, bar mitzvahs, retirement parties, wakes and corporate functions.
Now, enterprising events guru Carlo Parentela is betting on big names — we’re looking at you, Drake — to help lure an “elite” clientele as he turns the venue into Vaughan’s own micro-version of the Vegas strip.
The hall will soon play host to an ultra-exclusive new members-only monthly supper club dubbed “Après Noir,” with flowing Champagne and rare wines, a designer catwalk, live visual artists and circus performers, a menu catered by celebrity chefs, and performances by top talent, from singer Jennifer Hudson to magician David Blaine. The event’s motto is “Embrace the opulence.”
We mentioned that he’s landed Drake for the event’s official launch on June 7, right? After a “pre-season” taste of things to come featuring entertainment and food provided by the likes of singer Robin Thicke and the duo of Shaggy & Arianna, comedian Bob Saget and A-list chef Bobby Flay scheduled for Thursday at the turreted Chateau Le Jardin space, Après Noir goes all in for its June edition.
That starts with bringing Toronto hip-hop superstar Aubrey Drake Graham himself — along with rising Canadian songstresses Mia Martina and Jessie Reyez, Saturday Night Live cast member Mikey Day and chef Giada De Laurentiis — for an intimate performance before 1,000 patrons who have paid at least $4,275 for quarterly memberships entitling them to three lavish Thursday evenings at the venue. Limited single tickets start at $1,250. Annual memberships getting you into all 12 Après Noir nights go for $15,300, $20,400 and $25,500 at the “platinum,” “executive” and “elite” levels, respectively.
“That was through the friends network,” says Parentela of the Drake coup, and he was well aware for a shaky month or so in final-contract limbo that “no one believed I really got Drake and I really paid him” until an officially ordained Instagram post confirmed the fact on April 2.
“When we started talking to the other talent, they were like, ‘You got Drake? Are you sure you’ve got Drake?’
“I was sweating. I borrowed $4 million to do this. I borrowed the kids’ inheritance! So when the post came out, that was so cool. That legitimized everything. ‘Oh, he’s not lying.’ I told my guys ‘The 6ix is coming to the 9.’ You like that? ‘The 6ix is coming to the 9.’ Make sure you say Carlo said that.”
Parentela, a charmer and a fast-talker, spent his childhood sleeping beneath the DJ booth and playing cards with the orchestra musicians’ kids on the weekends. “I became very social because they wouldn’t babysit me,” he says. “I’d just have to make new friends Friday, Saturday and Sunday.”
He graduated to president of Chateau Le Jardin and took over running the whole thing from his father in 1987, expanding it from an 8,000-squarefoot facility over the years to the 74,000-square-foot behemoth it is today. There are currently plans afoot to erect a Marriott hotel adjacent to the property in the next couple of years, which got him thinking about how he might lure travellers to the area in the future.
He’s always entertained fantasies of being a theatrical producer, he says — he has a nascent production house, Long Valley Productions, with a reality TV series, Last Bride Standing — and he’s been working in the food industry his entire life, so the mad scheme that would become Après Noir is merely “combining what I do and what I would like to do, combining the two and doing it here.
“I always say an alien virus hit me in the brain,” he laughs. “But there are people spending $10,000 or $20,000 or $30,000 to go away to Vegas or New York, you know? So why don’t we provide all of that here for a fraction of the cost?
“It’s like a mini-vacation. You go to Vegas for a show, you go to Broadway for a show. I got 10 people coming from New York City, three months in a row, coming every month. Broad- way is now coming to Toronto. Damn it, we did it. We got ’em right here. Ten people out of 30 million, but we got 10. That’s a start. It’s making water go uphill.”
Après Noir makes no bones about who its preferred customers are. “This event is exclusive to Toronto’s elite; a class in search of an unbridled experience, unparalleled to any in the world,” reads the promo material. “All guests are prescreened,” we’re told.
“Upon entering the ballroom, our guests’ minds will no longer be in Toronto” — or a stripmalled stretch of Vaughan, more precisely — “but an unknown virtual oasis mapped by virtual-reality projectors. As they walk further into the room, they will be served the finest wines and champagnes the world has to offer by strolling butlers, serenaded by international talents and complemented with a perfunctory fashion show from the world’s top designers.”
Each night, a different celebrity chef will walk the guests through each ingredient and how they come together in the dishes while a sommelier talks up the wines. There will be caviar and a bottle of Dom PeriDom Pérignonple “served by a personal butler” awaiting the “elite”-status patrons at their tables, a bottle of Moet & Chandon at the “executive” tables. As the gluttony and “live mannequins” and the marquee entertainment — which at present includes Jennifer Hudson on July 26, David Blaine on Aug. 23, ex-Matchbox 20 singer Rob Thomas and 2Cellos down the road, with a couple more fairly huge names not yet made public currently being wooed for the fall — wind down, a closing orchestra will strike up a cocktail vibe suitable for networking.
It’s basically a monument to conspicuous consumption, and Parentela takes a quip that he’s found an ingenious means of separating very wealthy people from their money with good humour.
“It’s for people who can afford it. They’re sitting on tens of millions. What’s two grand or three grand a person for the night?” he shrugs, pointing out that he’s nevertheless taking a loss through the first few months to get Après Noir off the ground.
“Obviously, I’m not getting the food for free and the singers aren’t coming for free. So you take a Drake — that’s $1.1million divided by 900 people, which is $1,300 a person, just for him. And then you get a Bobby Flay, that’s $175,000 U.S., $225,000 (Canadian). Divide that by 900 people, that’s $250 a person, just curating the meal. Then a bottle of champagne … It’s costing me about $2,000 a head to do this for1,000 people. I wish it was 20,000 people and I could do it for $200 a head, but it’s not cheap to do this.”
When we spoke, Parentela was just past the halfway mark on sales for the first three events, which come packaged in the quarterly Après Noir membership. He’s mostly selling quarterlies at the moment, he concedes, “because even people with big millions in the bank are not gonna just say, ‘We don’t know you yet, here’s 25 grand.’ ”
He’s got people coming in from Ottawa and Montreal, as well as New York, Los Angeles and Texas, Tennessee and Kentucky so far. He won’t publicly name names, but he’s already attracted the CEOs of wellknown companies, a reasonably well-placed sports figure and some high-powered business types. Several have indeed asked if they can use the space to network.
“We’ve just got to put on a great show,” Parentela says. “I see this as the genesis of how something like Cirque du Soleil started. They started as a little circus in Montreal, and we’re doing small events as well, but it’s higher-end, for people who’ve got the money and don’t have time to go away for a weekend. It’s just a Thursday night, right? We’re not taking away your Friday or your Saturday. Plus, I’m busy on Friday and Saturday. We’ve got five or six or more weddings a day in here. I can’t.”
“It’s higher-end, for people who’ve got the money and don’t have time to go away for a weekend.” CARLO PARENTELA PRESIDENT, CHATEAU LE JARDIN