Pioneers on Harbord Street — Part I
Meet the partners that helped shape Toronto’s independent dining scene
By MARTA S
Several years ago, I was not, I’ll admit, “in the know” when it came to Toronto’s food and beverage (f & b) scene. I was ensconced in a blind desire to live and work as a professional dancer, and the restaurant jobs I held throughout those years were simply a means of subsidizing my income. Industry tastemakers were not, really, part of my world.
So when my boyfriend took me out for a meal a few years ago at a small restaurant on Harbord, I was blissfully unaware of the importance of the food and drink I was so happily consuming. All I knew was that the place was run by friends of his.
And I knew I adored the place’s unapologetically pink walls.
That restaurant was the Harbord Room. It would only be over the course of the next few years, as I became more involved in Toronto’s hospitality industry, that I would fully grasp just how big a hand these “friends of my boyfriend” had in redefining — or indeed, defining — the entire independent culinary industry here in Toronto.
Before I became so enlightened, I’d met all four of the Harbord Room partners on separate occasions.
I met Dave Mitton — or Mitty, as I quickly learned to call him — at the Drake Hotel Sky Yard one night. He made me laugh handily. I met Cory Vitiello in the same way. Cory had apparently worked at the Drake once upon a time and people seemed to like to rib him for his good looks. I met Liz Campbell my first time dining at the Harbord Room. I thought she was lovely, and had no clue just how talented of a bartender she was (and is).
And my first encounter with Chris Shiki (simply Shiki to those who know him) was most hilarious of all. Let’s just say I found myself utterly stranded at a north-most subway station very early one Sunday morning, and it was Shiki who pulled up like a smiling superhero — in a silver BMW convertible, no less — to transport my hungover ass to where I needed to be, thanks to the quick-thinking of a mutual friend of ours. It took us only a few minutes to realize who we each were (having another mutual friend in my boyfriend) and dissolve into incredulous laughter.
In the years since these encounters, I’ve fully realized that without these four, there may not have been any boîtes to get behind in the first place.
And I’m lucky to have met them years before I ever guessed that one day I’d be writing Behind the Boîte. When my boyfriend and I recently decided to visit their second outpost on Harbord Street — THR & Co. — Cory and Shiki sat with us for most of our meal. Before I could even unabashedly fully pitch the idea of writing a piece on them, they were already on board.
Just a week later, I managed to get all four of them — Shiki, Dave, Liz, and Cory — to sit down with me in the same place, at the same time. Not a small feat for four industrious people with so many responsibilities and projects on the go.
Harbord Room humility
Besides my own past ignorance of the f & b scene, a reason why I never suspected the partners’ importance when I first met them is because they are all so incredibly humble. While defining their roles in the partnership, for example, Cory never once utters the words “executive chef”. It’s Dave who brings up that that is exactly Cory’s title, and when he does, it’s as if to tease him with the grandeur of it. Dave never calls himself the “head barman” or “mixologist” of the bunch — this time it’s Cory who lobs these titles at him, much to Dave’s chagrin.
Dave also explains, affably, how in the beginning, “Shiki took care of some of the more important stuff that Cory and I weren’t as strong at — accounting, all of the office,” outlining Shiki’s role in overseeing restaurant operations. And Liz has been an integral part of the team for years, managing both the Harbord Room and THR & Co. from their inception, her serious bar skills bringing along some serious clout.
Despite the fact that all four of them work the roles in which they’re undeniably most talented, Dave still self-effacingly adds, “[When we started,] those were job descriptions, titles that we didn’t have the money to pay [someone else] for,” as if to imply they simply took the roles out of necessity. He quickly adds, “I mean, we obviously do this because we love it.”
And because you’re all so damn good at it. Just admit it, man.
Background check
Despite the impact they’ve had on the Toronto dining scene, none of the partners was born and raised in the city. But through a confluence of circumstance, this is where they all came together.
“The Harbord Room would be one of my favourite date spots in the city if I had nothing to do with it.”
Dave Mitton was born and raised in Albert County, New Brunswick. At the age of 18 he made his way to L.A., and shares that his first job in hospitality was as a bathroom attendant in Beverly Hills. “Dave was also personal security to many A-list celebrities that we can’t mention,” Cory tells me, smiling wryly at Mitty. (I can neither confirm nor deny this.)
After learning the ropes in L.A. and throughout his travels in Europe, Dave ended up bartending in Toronto. Around 2002, Bradley Denton, an old friend of his from back east, approached him with the idea of opening up their own place. They ended up opening Czehoski on Queen West and, in the process, went through the special kind of hell that’s reserved for so many first-time hospitality business owners.
After their relationship with an investor went sideways, “we got out,” Dave explains. “Lost some money, learned. As my father said, it was the most expensive five years of university anyone’s ever gone through.” As tough as it was, the knowledge he gained opening Czehoski would prove invaluable.
“A true neighbourhood restaurant — we want our guests to feel as though they’re part of the family.”
You may have seen Cory Vitiello on TV or in print once or twice over the last few years.
A graduate of the lauded Stratford Chef Academy, Cory moved to Toronto from his hometown of Brantford at the age of 18 to gain experience working in big city kitchens. He honed his craft cooking for Keith Froggett (long-time chef at Scaramouche). Dave had originally slated Cory to be the chef at Czehoski, but due to the amount of time it took for Czehoski to open its doors, Cory moved on to the Drake Hotel. There he became chef de cuisine for then-exec chef Anthony Rose (Rose and Sons).
Over the years, Cory’s skills (and pretty face) have garnered public attention. He’s been a featured expert on the Steven & Chris Show, has done promo work for Thermador, and you’ll soon see him on the Food Network’s newest program, Chef in Your Ear.
“They’re places we would want to eat and drink at ourselves.”
Chris Shiki did not, in fact — as Cory once told me — arrive in Canada as “a young immigrant boy with two million Yen strapped to his chest”. He was born and raised in Niagara Falls. Both of his parents are hospitality industry veterans, and it’s clear the industry runs in Shiki’s veins. He happened to meet Dave back in 1997 while at university in Halifax.
Eventually, Shiki came back to Toronto. He learned to cook at George Brown, and worked the line at various establishments, including the Drake Hotel where he met Cory. Laughing, Dave tells me, “Shiki came and started doing a documentary about [Brad and I opening Czehoski], but we took too long for him to make it.” Documentarian dreams derailed, when Czehoski finally did open, Shiki went to work for his old pal Dave. It’s there he eventually learned the ins-and-outs of restaurant ops.
“Whether from the kitchen or behind the bar, you can taste how good the ingredients are here.”
Liz Campbell came to Toronto from Australia in 2006. “For a boy!” all three of her business partners chirp. “He was a man,” Liz tells me, pointedly. She’d spent eight years working in some of Melbourne’s best kitchens but wanted a change of pace in Toronto. She began looking for front-of-house work. “I was handing out résumés, pounding the pavement, and Czehoski picked me up,” she says. It was there she honed her pro-level bar skills.
Since then, Liz has racked up the cocktailing accolades, including an invite to study at the Cointreau Academy in Angers, France. In 2013, she won Toronto’s first-ever Fortuna Mezcal competition (“I’ve never been so nervous!” she tells me), and the chance judge Mexico City’s first-ever cocktail competition. That same year, she became a full partner when the team bought the spot on Harbord that became THR & Co.
The creation of the Harbord Room: “Let’s open a place we would wanna go to”
As for what sparked the idea for the Harbord Room, Dave explains simply, “Shiki brought up the idea to myself and Cory. And the idea was to open a place together. A place we would wanna go to.” So in 2007, the three of them found a property available on Harbord Street and were lucky enough to land it.
“We knew we wanted to do something, we had half an idea,” Dave continues. “So we got the space and we were like, ‘Okay, now we have to build a damn restaurant.’ The three of us, luckily, worked out.”
“We were also a lot younger,” Shiki adds with a smile.
With Dave being too burned by his Czehoski experience to trust outside investors, Cory explains that they financed their endeavour with help from their families and by scoring the ever-elusive small business loan. “That [loan] was hard to get then and almost impossible to get now,” he says plainly. “It’s still not close to enough [money], and it was structured in a way that made it very difficult to even use that money the way we needed to.”
On top of all the usual gambles one has to take when opening their own restaurant, Cory, Shiki, and Dave found themselves confronted with a whole new challenge: back then, the concept they’d dreamt up for the Harbord Room was almost entirely foreign to Toronto.
“There weren’t many 30- or 40-seat, owner-operated restaurants here,” Cory says. “Eight or ten years ago, every single place was serving more or less the same thing on the menu — there was no place like the Black Hoof, a kind of place that identified itself as outside of the norm.” He is, of course, referring to Jen Agg’s charcuterie-gone-wild boîte on Dundas West, another pioneer of Toronto’s specialized f & b scene.
Back then, he says, there were largely “just these general menus of a compilation of dishes that chefs had learned throughout their cooking careers in Toronto. You could go to ten restaurants and see the exact same dishes or exact same types of food on the menu.”
And it’s clear that Cory wanted to do something different.
“I think halfway through [our inception] is when mixology really came through,” Shiki chimes in. “Frankie’s always been a pioneer of the industry in Toronto,” he says, paying respect to master barman Frankie Solarik and his mad-scientist mixology lab, Barchef, on Queen West — largely touted as the place that put Toronto’s cocktail scene on the global map.
“But for us, I think it was Dave,” Shiki says graciously. “When we started pushing the cocktail, we had a lot of attention because of Mitty’s ability to…”
“Bring bartenders together?” I offer. Dave was the president of the Canadian Professional Bartenders’ Association, and many top barkeeps — in this city and beyond — are indebted to him for creating a real community within which they could connect and learn from one another.
“Exactly. It reached outside of Toronto, and we benefitted as a restaurant.”
It begins…
So it was 2007. College Street and Sex-and-the-City-cosmopolitans reigned; Queen West was just gearing up. And here was a chef wanting to take Toronto’s diners out of their comfort zone, and a bartender aspiring to share his skills with a public that, at the time, was largely cocktail-blind. All in a space that could only seat about 30, in a neighbourhood that was a far cry from College Street hot spots.
How did this all come together to become the success that helped spawn a whole new dining movement in Toronto? Stay tuned for Part II: the partners share their insights on the Toronto f & b scene, describe the design process that led to those iconic pink walls, and talk about their future… As well as what they would each be doing if they weren’t running the Harbord Room.
Read Part II here.
Find the Harbord Room at 89 Harbord St. and THR & Co. just a few doors down at 97 Harbord St. Both places boast patios and late-night menus.
Marta S is a freelance writer and bartender living and working in Toronto. She also has a nifty little blog called Booze Noob. If you or someone you know would like to be profiled by Behind the Boîte, email her at marta@behindtheboite.com. She takes all kinds.
