Pioneers on Harbord Street — Part II
The partners behind two of Toronto’s most successful boîtes share their thoughts & stories
By MARTA S
For a full introduction to Dave Mitton, Cory Vitiello, Chris Shiki, and Liz Campbell — the partners behind the Harbord Room and THR & Co. — read Part I here.
Credit where credit is due
It was a miracle I could get all four partners behind the Harbord Room and THR & Co. to sit down with me at the same time. But I can’t go on telling their story without mentioning the incredible work of Curt Martin. Curt was, until very recently, the fifth partner. Just last month, he stepped away from the partnership on good terms — “He just went on to another chapter in his life. It’s all good,” says Dave — but his involvement can’t be overlooked.
“Curt was with us from day one,” Cory tells me, “and instrumental to the set up and running of both restaurants. He was the executive chef at THR & Co. for two years and opened [the Harbord Room kitchen] with me.” For more on just how integral Curt was in the running of THR & Co. after it opened in 2013, read this: Cory Vitiello is not the chef at THR & Co. So who is? (via Swallow Daily)
With five very talented people at the helm of opening two successful joints, the team has garnered their fair share of experience over the years. So I have to know, “What’s something you know now that you wish you’d known back then?”
Due diligence
“Good question,” is Dave’s reply.
“With the Harbord Room,” Cory says, “all the due diligence that went along with it, and all the moves we made with the building process. We did a lot of the day-to-day jobs — renovating, construction. We learned those on the fly. We didn’t really research properly along the way the first time.”
“We just weren’t diligent with actual budgets or controlling costs in the beginning,” Shiki elaborates. “We just had to plow our way through to continue it.”
“Our budget probably doubled,” Cory adds “[Surviving] was day-to-day for half a year,” after they opened.
And now, with eight years of experience and a second successful property, do they feel fully informed when it comes to opening restaurants? All the partners laugh.
“God, no!” exclaims Dave. “We’re still learning.”
“We know the basics now, but there’s always something,” Shiki says.
Flexin’ in the Annex
Another thing Dave tells me the partners were uninformed about back in 2007 was the neighbourhood that now houses both of their properties.
“The four of us didn’t really know anything in 2007 about Harbord Street. Dundas West and Ossington hadn’t even happened yet,” he says. Back then, there certainly wasn’t boîte after boîte dotting the DuWest and Ossington strips. Yet there they were, gearing up to open a 30-seat, specialized resto in the Annex of all places.
“It was a little scary,” Dave continues. “We didn’t know what would happen up here.”
In the eight years since it opened, Harbord Room has consistently been credited as the pioneer of Harbord Street’s own “restaurant row”. So in the end, was it the neighbourhood that shaped their business, or vice versa?
“It’s reciprocal in a lot of ways. I think we’ve grown with it,” Shiki replies. “It was different then, the businesses were different. Now we’re kind of one of the older [restaurants]. We have a lot of neighbourhood people coming in. We’re lucky with that.”
Dave echoes the sentiment. “If we didn’t have the people here in the Annex, we might not be as busy.”
And Liz is quick to add, “We also had a lot of support from friends.”
Some very timely and very positive reviews just weeks after their opening — “in the dead of winter,” Cory says — also helped ensure their success. Both the Globe & Mail and late, prolific restaurant critic Gina Mallet (National Post) published glowing reviews within the Harbord Room’s first two weeks of service. This pushed people to journey to the Annex and discover the little pink restaurant serving the fresh local ingredients and hand-crafted cocktails they were having a hard time finding.
The timing was right. Toronto, it seemed, was finally hungry for a new and unique way to dine.
Competition crops up
While they managed early on to capture the zeitgeist, they weren’t immune to the unavoidable hardships involved in opening a restaurant. So when I ask the partners what the greatest challenges are to opening a place in the city, I’m surprised by Cory’s response. “I think Toronto is an easy town to open a restaurant in,” he says.
“As soon as you have a good idea,” Shiki adds pointedly.
Cory clarifies. “It’s a city where you can open a restaurant. It’s not New York City, it’s not Miami, it’s not LA. You don’t need two million dollars to open a restaurant. It’s an accessible town; anybody can go grab a piece of it if they want. It’s just if they can keep that restaurant open — that’s a different story.”
Due to this accessibility, “there’s much more variety now. So unless your product is good, you won’t make it,” Shiki explains. “We were fortunate that we really paid attention to the food and how we wanted to present ourselves.”
So despite all of the new competition cropping up on all sides, the Harbord Room has managed long-term success by simply following one crucial philosophy…
Give the people what they want.
“Look — you can make any kind of food or drink menu you want, but if your guests don’t want it, it doesn’t matter,” Dave says matter-of-factly. “In 2005, people would lose their minds if there was Ontario wine on the list. They didn’t want that! Now, ten years later, you get berated if there’s not Ontario wine. Ten years ago, if you tried to serve a Manhattan or Old Fashioned, well, the city of Toronto wanted Sex and the City cosmopolitans.
Don Draper got the average person very excited for brown, boozy, stirred cocktails and, all of a sudden, the guests wanted it. Same as the food. As Cory has said, ten years ago, everyone was serving the same thing. People are wanting to try new things. [Now] there are so many different styles of food in this city, you could go around the world in a week if you wanted to.”
“Smarter dining public, too,” Cory adds. “They now know how much a dish should cost, how much a bottle of wine should cost, what restaurant’s doing it better, what restaurant’s not doing as well.”
“So what you have won’t sell unless it’s wanted,” Shiki sums up.
It’s this kind of ear-to-the-ground awareness of style that has kept the partners in business for so long.
Speaking of style, let’s talk about those bubble-gum coloured walls.
“Three guys open up pink restaurant”
Cory, Shiki, and Dave are the original partners who opened the Harbord Room in 2007. Why did these three (manly) men decide to paint the walls of their first restaurant pink?
Dave tells me that his friend Bradley Denton — whom he’d partnered with to open Czehoski in 2005 — masterminded the design of the Harbord Room (and later, THR & Co.).
“With Harbord Room in the beginning, we walked in and it was brown bathroom tile everywhere, slate block floor, stucco ceiling, track lighting, brown-yellow walls,” Dave says, grimacing.
So Brad — who now does design work full-time — built out a coffered ceiling and painted it a clean white. And then — seemingly running with an idea to make the place look more inviting to the ever-important female clientele — Brad announced that they were going to paint the walls pencil eraser pink.
“Our first reaction was just, ‘No!’” Dave says, laughing.
But because they had seen the incredible things Brad had done with Czehoski, they wanted to trust his design plan. Although it wasn’t always easy.
“We painted it pink, and you have to imagine — it was a white ceiling and there was nothing else in there. And I thought, ‘My god, we fucked up and wasted money on this pink,’” Dave remembers, and the partners erupt in wry laughter.
After painstakingly applying five coats of the thin paint, Dave confronted Brad with their doubts about the unconventional look.
“I’ll never forget it. He came in, sat down on a milk crate, had a couple Heinekens — we always had a couple cold beer around — and smoked half a pack of cigarettes without saying anything, staring at the room. Then he turns around and goes, ‘Nope! We’re doing it!’ And he was so sure of himself that we all just put our faith in him.”
Their trust was well-placed. “In the end,” Dave says, “we all agreed that pink’s just the colour of that room and it always will be.”
“We’re known for those walls,” Shiki says with pride.
“I was on a cocktail tour in LA years ago,” Dave recounts. “These bartenders at a place called the Roger Room — the Canadian accent always stands ‘oot’ when I’m in the US — ask me where I’m from. I say Toronto and right away one of them goes, ‘Oh! There’s that Barchef place, and there’s something called ‘Hoof’[referring to Black Hoof], and what’s that other one… A pink place? Just a pink room, apparently, where you can get cocktails?’ And I loved it. He had no idea what the restaurant was, but he’d known that there was a little pink room you could get cocktails in.” Dave pauses. “I hope it was us!” he jokes. “It gave us an identity, no question about it.”
Times, they are a-changin’
While Liz deftly holds things down at both properties, the guys have switched to part-time roles in order to pursue new ventures.
About a year ago, Dave stepped away from day-to-day ops to go work for Corby’s, the massive Canadian marketer and distributor of booze. “My title there is fancy: ‘Global Canadian Whisky Ambassador for Corby and Pernod-Ricard’,” Dave says humbly. “I travel, educating people about Canadian whisky.” He tells me about his work in detail, and it’s clear he’s very passionate about it. But whenever Dave is in town, you can still find him behind the bars on Harbord Street.
“Cory and I have also moved to part-time because we’re about to open another place,” Shiki tells me. “It’s called Flock Rotisserie and Greens. It’s signature salads and rotisserie chicken. Fast, casual, primarily lunch.”
In fact, Flock Rotisserie + Greens just opened this past week. If you’re downtown, go visit the guys and get something better than Subway for lunch (or grab their after-work dinner special). Flock Rotisserie + Greens serves hormone- and antibiotic-free, naturally raised chicken at 330 Adelaide St. West (Peter & Adelaide) and is open 11am-7pm daily. Take out or dine in.
If they weren’t restaurateurs…
One of my favourite things to ask my subjects — people who have poured their hearts and souls into running their own restaurants — is, “If you could be doing anything else in the world, what would it be?”
“I think I’d be a carpenter or metal worker,” Cory replies, “in a capacity that would allow me to design and work with my hands.” Which makes sense for a chef who produces such pretty (and delicious) plates.
Shiki and Liz, it seems, are destined for the hospitality industry.
“My parents were in hospitality as well,” Shiki tells me. “I definitely [want to explore] different aspects of this industry, more the business side, or having more projects, or more involvement in different areas. But I don’t think I’ll ever get away from hospitality. I just don’t think I can picture anything else at all.” So he’s living his dream. (Ed. note — yep, Shiki, I printed it.)
If she won the lottery, Liz would live her life as — as I described it — a “professional traveller”. “I have friends all over the globe,” she says. “That, or I’d lying on a beach somewhere,” she laughs. “But if I was to say what really interests me, it’s event planning. I do a lot of the events [at the Harbord Room and THR & Co.] but I’d take it even further,” with large-scale event coordination. And with the large team she manages day-to-day, this seems like a perfect choice.
But Dave’s response takes him completely out of the realm of hospitality… And into the wild.
“Let’s see, I’m too old to be Spiderman,” he says contemplatively. “But, you know, I travelled and backpacked for a few years straight [out of high school]. So I would’ve loved to be someone that worked for, say, National Geographic and photographed animals or nature around the world. Like Sean Penn does in that [Secret Life of] Walter Mitty movie. Usually solo, in seclusion — you just travel the world.”
Awesome.
Hypothetical dreams aside, the real-time goal of the Harbord Room partners remains — and will remain — the same: To give the you — the diners — what you want. It’s that philosophy that’s made them a shining example of just how successful a boîte can be in this city.
If you’re diligent, of course.
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. 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.
