OLIVER & BONACINI: deleted scenes

As part of this story about the Oliver & Bonacini corporation, I spent a day with Michael Bonacini. Partly he was showing off for me. But mostly he had meetings with staff at the baking facility in the Board of Trade (tasting bannock for the eponymous restaurant), Canoe (discussing the $28,000 it will take to fix the bar), iQ (checking on the first week of operation), Malaparte (looking at the bumps from nails in the ceiling), Luma and Canteen (going over menus with Jason Bangerter) and back to the Board of Trade for a to hammer out menus for a resort in Muskoka, with five of his chefs.

It was the first time for me, following around a subject all day. Bonacini, while given to hard-edged enunciation and carefully chosen words, wasn’t a particularly guarded man. He answered all my questions, even about which of his restaurants aren’t doing well. The only time he left my site was when I went to the gentleman’s room.

Here are some outtakes. Some are in the shape of dialogue or monologue, with a few loose quote nuggets thrown in.

CANOE

BONACINI
When we took over this restaurant, it was an old restaurant dying on the vine. It was open three days a week. You’re lucky if they did 10 people for lunch, five people for dinner. The landlord approached us two or three times. We turned them down, said no. The landlord kept sweetening the pot. It got to a point where we couldn’t say no. So we took the deal and it was one of the bloody smartest thing we’ve ever done.

Behind Canoe is a private dining space for TD Bank executives, plus a boardroom replete with a thirty-foot long desk.

We took over here in 1996. That was the year they installed ladies washrooms in this area.

With this location, when we first took over here, we would lock horns with these guys like crazy. They’re very traditional (whispers), very old school. Takis (one of several TD food staff dressed in tuxedos with green bowties) has been here since day one. (rolls eyes) Canned peach, cottage cheese, sliced melon. That sort of thing was part of the dining. Now they’re more than happy to choose things off of our menu and we work with them in ways that I don’t think they had done in the past. Our relationship has grown immensely. In fact, they are probably our best allies in the building.

It was astonishing the kind of basic foods that they would serve.

JUMP

BONACINI
Downtown Toronto has changed in the last decade. When Peter and I opened Jump 17 years ago, we were one of very very very few places to dine downtown. It was pretty barren. Our competition in 93 was Marche, which was quite revolutionary at that time.  I think the hotels were a big part of servicing the downtown core. And they went out of fashion, I would say, in the late 90s. I think it’s slowly changing.

MINTZ
Every year there’s a hotel that hopes to change the trend of Torontonians not dining in hotels.

BONACINI
And they never will, in my opinion.

FIRST TORONTO JOB: EXECUTIVE CHEF OF WINDSOR ARMS

BONACINI
I think it was typical of that early 1980s era. I think, from my eyes, that Toronto was just starting to take food more seriously.

They used to do a mushroom soup, which George (Mindon) said, ‘Never take that off the menu. We could make a mushroom soup registry. People love it.’ But it was made in a very old style. Which was your classic roux, mushrooms, there was virtually no cream to it.  So I ended up lightening it. I added some wild mushrooms, making it feel that much more rich and decadent, with a modicum of cream. We’ve now developed that into our own soup that we serve at Oliver & Bonacini restaurants, where we put no cream, no butter. And it’s a very popular soup that we could never take off the menu.

LUMA vs CANTEEN

BONACINI

I think that this place was one of our toughest openings because construction bit into our training time. Typically we’ll do two weeks of training before opening. And then we’ll have a controlled, slow opening. But because this was backed up into Film Festival, we had no choice.

I think it’s taken its toll with Jason. There were times shortly after the film festival, when I thought he was going to crumble.

It took its toll on a lot of the staff.  Just long hours. Canteen took off like a bullet and is exceeding any of our budget numbers. I’ll be honest with you and tell you that Luma is  the opposite. It is trending below our expected budgeted numbers. So that’s a bit of a concern and a disappointment.

I think we did not hit the nail on the head as well as we did with Canteen.

We’re starting to separate the wheat from the chaff and feeling like we’re getting on top of things at both Malaparte and Canteen.

CHEF vs RESTAURATEUR

BONACINI

In this business, you cannot take your eye off the ball for a moment. You’ve got to constantly be driving the details. It’s lighting. It’s menus, food, uniforms, cleaning, music, the way the phones are answered.

I think being a chef is a young buck’s business. Because it takes its toll on you. And I knew early on that, sometime around 45, I had to get out of the kitchen. Because I probably wouldn’t want to be there 10-14 hours a day, the physical pounding, the stress on married life, the late nights. And there are always new guys coming up from the ranks that are nipping at your heels.

When you’re younger, you don’t mind getting in and being in at 9 o’clock in the morning and staying until 2 o’clock at night, even though the restaurant was only open at dinner. Because we were full of piss and vinegar.

I think there was something about my first marriage that wasn’t meant to be. Whilst I do blame a good part of it on the restaurant business. But there was also something not quite right about the chemistry.

BONACINI

I love the restaurant business. I could not see myself doing anything else.

Delegation is a privilege of those who have come up through the ranks. Seniority has its privileges at times.

On my passport it says occupation; chef.

MINTZ
When was the last time you renewed your passport?

BONACINI
People ask what I do now. I say I’m a restaurateur. But I’m a chef by profession.

MINTZ
Well you’ll always be a chef in the same way that you’ll always be your mother’s son. But that’s not what you do every day.

BONACINI
Correct. Now, I am drawn back to saying I’m a chef because I do enjoy that part of it. I often refer to myself as a restaurateur. I refer to myself as an entrepreneur. I refer to myself as an opportunistic entrepreneur. And yes, I do think that we’ve stepped past that point. Look, we are going to grow this business into a larger company than we may have at first thought. And I think that we are trying to do that in a multi-faceted way. And a lot of that inertia, that momentum, is coming from the young guys within our company, who, like Jason, is saying, is there an opportunity for me to have some equity within a concept. David Castellan, who was my pastry chef that I hired at Centro, who joined me when we opened up Jump, and Canoe and Biff’s, who became our corporate pastry chef, who we sent off to California to study chocolate, then came back to us and said, ‘I know what I want to do with  myself for the rest of my life. And that’s become a chocolate maker. Will you be partners in it? He came to us saying, you guys own fifty-two percent and I’ll own forty-eight. And we said, no David, that’s not the way it’s going to work. We’ll own forty-eight and you own fifty-two. Because you are going to be driving this concept. We will help you financially. We’ll help put the deals together. We’ll support it. And we’ll probably end up being your biggest clients.

David Wilson, has the same dream in mind, with a bakery.

BONACINI

So some of this is driven by these individuals. Either we lose them or we help them get to where they want to go. And along the way, we grow.

MINTZ
Concentric circles. They grow under you as you grow above them. But that still doesn’t answer the question. Is the O&B corporation unchecked capitalism, that will constantly grow, as long as it can?

BONACINI
There was a time when the word corporate was bandied around within our company. And we would shy away from it because it was a vulgar word to use. Now I say, to hell with it. People think we are more corporate, then to hell with it. We are going to be the best corporately run food service business in Toronto, in Southern Ontario, in Canada. And that’s part of our goal.  We are not prepared to whore ourselves out to do just about anything anywhere. But we are definitely prepared to look at opportunities that make sense.

And the restaurant business displays the six degrees of separation where a restaurant could be connected to a chocolate shop, to a bakery, a cheese store, a butcher shop, a gourmet food store, a catering business. And there is no limit to that.

We are a company that is eager to grow. We want to grow as cautiously as we can. There are times in business when you have to stick your neck out in order to move forward. But we will only grow as long as we feel we have the support from our people beneath.  There’s got to be this constant percolation of spirited, youthful, new blood coming through. And I can’t see that slowing down. Because in this location alone, between general managers, senior managers, junior managers, key employees, supervisors, who all want the opportunity to grow, we’ll be looking for the next opportunity. And we either work towards keeping them within our camp, or we’ve got to be prepared that at some point, they’re going to move on because another opportunity comes along.

STRING THEORY

BONACINI

The string thing I brought with me from Centro. I learned that from Prevedello. So what we do is we’ll take a row of tables like this here. We’ll have a piece of string held by one individual on one end, one on the other. So the tables are all aligned. Then you bring it in so that the chairs are all aligned. Then you bring it in so the salt and pepper, and so on. And it only works where you have long runs. Everything is in military fashion. Now we do that for a number of reasons. One is you do it because you want to express the attitude towards being fanatical.

MINTZ
To your employees?

BONACINI
Correct. To the point where, we want them saying we are insanely fanatical. Plus it looks good. And a lot of people don’t notice it. But there are some that do. Prevedello used to get the hostesses to spritz the plants just before the restaurant opened. So that the branches would look as if they’ve got bloody dew dripping off them. and that makes a huge statement.  Peter would wash the front of his store up on Yonge street, where our offices are now, where the bakery was, twice a day. Because he felt that have that wet, fresh-washed sidewalk, spoke to what was going on within the bakery. Some of those things are subliminal messages to the staff and to the consumer.

RESTAURATEUR vs CHEF

BONACINI

Do I miss being a chef? Not as much as I thought I might have. Or not as much as I did about seven or eight years ago when I thought, I am a quite distancing myself from the kitchen. There was a time when I would spend 15-20 percent of my time in the kitchen, at the pass, helping out here and there, special events, trying out new dishes, tasting. But I’ve got to leave it to other guys now.

MINTZ
Did you realize at some point you were doing it for yourself and not for them?

BONACINI
To some extent, you’re right. When you hang onto something that’s been a part of you for a long time, it’s tough to let go. You’ve got to learn to delegate. Otherwise you’ll never grow.

Date of publication: Saturday, April 9th, 2011