Shooting an arrow at the moon
Behind the Boîte with Shamez Amlani, co-owner of beloved bistro La Palette
By MARTA S
15-second, deliciously snackable intro video filmed and edited by Carrie Hayden.
There’s a reason why fuss-free French bistro La Palette is now in its 16th year of operation. Everything about La Palette is just… Great.
There’s no better word I can think of. I’m a fan.
From its décor and atmosphere — high ceilings, a long, bustling, wooden bar, an open-air kitchen, French language lesson recordings playing in the “toilettes” — to its classically French menu — escargots, cheval, cou de canard — stepping into La Palette is truly reminiscent of stumbling into a small, local resto off a side street in Paris.
Its eclectic bar menu adds a touch of whimsy that helps La Palette distinguish itself from other bistros in the city. It includes hard-to-find items like Hungarian Palinka, Serbian eau-de-vie, Polish wódka żołądkowa gorzka (a deliciously warming fruit and herb vodka that is close to my own Polish heart — good luck trying to pronounce it), and real absinthe, served in the proper, traditional fashion.
With a kitchen that’s open until midnight (or later), and a bar that serves until last call come hell or high water, seven days a week, there’s a reason why La Palette has been an industry darling since it opened at its original location in Kensington Market back in 2000.
At La Palette’s newer home on Queen West, sitting down to chat with Shamez Amlani — who co-owns the bistro with his wife, Polish-Australian artist and cookbook author Maria Litwin — is a pleasure. Shamez gained my affection long ago, when I started stopping into La Palette regularly after work. He is a truly hands-on owner who still schedules his own shifts behind the bar. He remembers you after two visits, loves to introduce patrons to whatever rare alcohol he’s managed to get his hands on that week, and tells colourful and engaging stories. His love for what he does is apparent and infectious.
The time of cherries
Shamez began his journey to opening La Palette — truly — back in 1989, when he got a summer job at Le Sélect Bistro.
“My position was drunken busboy,” he jokes. “I soon got promoted to bartender and I just took to it — it just came naturally to me.”
A young Shamez then spent a year travelling around Europe. “I ended up getting jobs in bars and cafés and restaurants in places like Berlin, Amsterdam, Belgium,” he tells me. Eventually, he settled into Paris.
It was there that Shamez worked his way up the industry ladder and found himself managing a little rock’n’roll bar in the Buttes-aux-Cailles neighbourhood in Paris’ 13th arrondissement. He describes Buttes-aux-Cailles as “a wicked little anarchist neighbourhood [that] was one of the last places to fall during the Paris Commune.”
As such, many of the bars and restaurants in the area were named after the works of Jean Baptiste Clément, the anarchist songwriter and poet. One of these spots — named Le Temps des cerises — operated across the street from Shamez’s own bar. Its unique, socialist business model captured his imagination and didn’t let go.
“[Le Temps des cerises] was a co-op restaurant,” Shamez recalls, still with a touch of wonder in his voice. “It was owned by the 19 staff that worked there — they each owned a piece of it, all the waiters and chefs. It was this non-hierarchical manner of running a restaurant. And I thought that would be such a cool idea to try to recreate.”
Turning away Joanne Kates, and other misadventures
The idea stayed with him after he made his way back to Toronto.
In 2000, Shamez and Maria, along with original La Palette chef, Mike Harrington (who was a partner until an amicable parting of ways back in 2005), hosted a huge dinner. They invited a score of friends from the industry in an attempt to entice them into starting a co-op restaurant together.
“People came, ate the food, drank the wine, and said, ‘You’re nuts. That’s never going to work,’” Shamez recalls with a dry laugh. “So when the dust settled, it just left the three of us — the chef, my wife, and myself. And we said, ‘Okay… Let’s go for it anyway.’ We found this crazy, tiny, hole-in-the-wall cheap spot that was a Chinese take-out place in Kensington Market. The rent was ridiculously low — $1100 a month — and so that’s how we got a restaurant off the ground for $6000 apiece among the three of us.”
A feat that’s basically unimaginable these days.
Along with the help of a team of friends, Shamez and his partners worked round the clock, literally sleeping on the floor of the space. They managed to get the place fixed up just enough to open in under two weeks — also unimaginable.
The opening weekend of La Palette in the then-very sleepy milieu of Kensington Market — “There wasn’t much life there, especially in the evening time — things were shuttered up,” Shamez remembers — managed to create quite a stir.
“The first weekend we were open, we packed the place with just friends and family to smooth out the wrinkles and bumps, and it was funny,” Shamez recounts, starting to laugh. “Joanne Kates [former Globe and Mail restaurant critic] lived in the neighbourhood, I think, and she was banging on the door of this — our — new French bistro saying, ‘I want to get in!’ And my wife was like, ‘No!’”
That night, the very uneven floor in their kitchen caused the fat rendering off the ducks roasting in their oven to spill over and start a small fire, and the team ended up spending their very last cent on purchasing wine and beer to sell.
“It was a very ‘Fawlty Towers’ take-off — a clumsy, albatross take-off,” Shamez laughs. “But things kind of worked. And before you knew it, we got a couple of great reviews and it took off.” It seems Kates didn’t take being turned away by Maria too personally.
Partners in time
It’s lovely to hear how Shamez speaks of his wife — as a bold, capable, resourceful, and creative partner, without whom La Palette would surely not have survived. A poor review of La Palette’s lemon tart early on compelled Maria to put on an apron and take over pastries. Her artist’s touch managed to inject a boho chic style into the old Chinese restaurant on a non-existent budget. And eventually, she took over managing the financial aspect of the business, allowing Shamez to focus his energy on front-of-house operations.
“I’m very lucky my wife got involved in the project,” Shamez says affectionately.
In the beginning, Shamez and Maria treated opening La Palette as a sort of real-life learning experience. Shamez says that their thought process was, “If it’s going to fail, we’ll drive it into the ground and we’ll have learned something. It’ll be like a year of university but rather than sit in the classroom, we’ll actually deal with bureaucrats, and paper pushers, and city hall. We’ll actually know what it’s like to get on our hands and knees and scrub and clean.
“I really feel as though we were shooting an arrow at the moon, and we hit the moon,” he continues. “I never could’ve guessed that it would work so well. Just like I never could’ve guessed after getting a summer job as a bus boy that I’d be running my own place 27 years later, and it would become my life’s work.”
The bad, the good, and the social movements
The crew at La Palette is a very tight-knit one. “We drink together, we eat together, we share time together. We’re pirates out at sea together,” Shamez says warmly. “I would definitely say that everyone who works here is a friend, a true friend, and they would say that, too.”
He’s managed to build his La Palette family out of a handful of very talented individuals. This, funnily enough however, is what Shamez finds to be one of the biggest challenges he faces in the industry here today.
“With so many new places opening up all the time in Toronto, we’ll feel sometimes like good help is hard to find,” he explains. “The talent pool is stretched thin, and if you have someone who is really great — whether we’re talking about server or chef — they’ll get headhunted by a corporate place, or go help someone open up something new.”
About the staff he has managed to secure: “We have a vast number of characters who work here who are from all over the world. It’s not enough to be French to work in a French restaurant,” he says frankly. His staff need to be knowledgeable, first and foremost.
“It’s funny because people from France come in here and say, ‘Why do you own a French restaurant? You’re born in Kenya, your grandparents are from India…’ And don’t forget, my wife is Polish-Australian. ‘Why do you own a French restaurant?’ It’s like, do I need a DNA test? Am I only supposed to serve you curry now?” he scoffs.
The varied cultural backgrounds at La Palette illustrate what Shamez feels is one of the greatest benefits to running a business like theirs in Toronto.
“Here we have a French bistro,” he says of La Palette, “and you have the African-Indian and Polish-Australian owners serving you Serbian eau-de-vie with a Hungarian bartender and an Irish waiter. This is Toronto, and that’s one of the things we should be proud of. We have that multiculturalism, it’s not gimmicky, and some people could not imagine that coming from other places in the world.”
This city also affords Shamez the freedom to express his very strong opinions on a myriad of issues. His time spent living in the anarchistic Buttes-aux-Cailles was not a phase — Shamez is a man of firm beliefs who relies on action in order to change the landscape of the environment around him. But while he’s not one to shy away from conflict, he always finds a most creative way in which to enter it.
For example: have you ever enjoyed a Pedestrian Sunday in Kensington Market? If you have, you have Shamez Amlani, in part, to thank for it.
“When I came back to Toronto after living abroad,” he recalls, “I’d think, ‘What’s broken? What’s wrong with our city? What is it that’s missing here that I saw everywhere in Europe?’ And what it was was public space.”
So back in 2002, just a couple of years after La Palette had opened successfully in Kensington, Shamez and a group of his friends threw a “parking meter party” in the neighbourhood. Guests were encouraged to feed the meters lining the streets, but instead of parking cars, they parked their bikes, rollerblades, and skateboards.
“I myself have never owned a car. Never will. I’m 46, and I don’t have a driver’s license,” Shamez tells me with pride.
The party grew — with La Palette handing out bowls of gazpacho, and the street filling with a samba band leading to a huge dance party — and from that one act of playful defiance, Pedestrian Sundays became, and remain, a tradition in Kensington Market.
Shamez also tells me about how he’s dealt with his own social backlash — activists protesting his menu, which offers somewhat “controversial” dishes, like foie gras and horse meat. It’s here that I learn what I’ve suspected for some time now — that Shamez Amlani is a bit of a shit disturber, and fairly proud of it.
Fuck you, I won’t eat what you tell me
Foie gras cultivation involves force-feeding ducks, a process which angers many animal rights activists. When foie gras protestors threatened to picket his restaurant, Shamez amped up the menu in defiance. “We had on our menu foie gras terrine, seared foie gras, the option to top your venison or horse with foie gras. I made little buttons — ‘Fight for Your Right to Paté’.” It’s a turn of phrase which I — a shameless meat-eater — gleefully enjoy.
“And when I met up with the protestors a few weeks later, I said, ‘Thank you! We are selling five times more foie gras than we ever did!’ Careful who you fuck with,” he warns with a grin.
As for the horse meat protestors (protesting because they thought eating horses rather than riding them was perverse), Shamez would put up a sign in the window — “Happy Hour for Horse Lovers — Free Tartare During Protests” — every time the group would picket in front of La Palette’s floor-to-ceiling front windows.
“It looked like it was a crypto-advertising campaign I had orchestrated or something,” he chuckles. “But tons of people would show up and say, ‘I want to eat horse meat sitting right there,’ in the window,” in full view of those who were trying to dictate what was acceptable for them to eat.
To be clear, La Palette doesn’t serve these dishes simply because they’re controversial. For a French bistro, these dishes are necessary and traditional.
“Even now people will show up and question why we serve horse, and I’m like, ‘Why?’,” Shamez says incredulously. “It’s a big world, and it’s only strange to eat horse in the English-speaking parts. And the thing is, we do eat it within North America — in Quebec and Mexico.
“Canada is one of the biggest exporters of horse meat to countries like France,” he informs me. “It’s so common to see that kind of food in so many other parts of the world. It’s really culturally ignorant to say, ‘Don’t eat this.’ Think about it. Do research.”
Make the grass greener around you
If Shamez wasn’t a restaurateur, he tells me his chosen medium would be cultural production.
“Cultural production and activism are things that are close to my heart,” he says genuinely. “And when I help organize shows and do events, we love to bring music and revolution to the people — that’s something I would love to be more involved in.”
It’s why he’s still involved in Pedestrian Sundays, and has a big hand in organizing the seemingly random and delightful events that take place during Toronto’s annual Blackout Anniversary Party.
Here you’ll see the incomparable Lemon Bucket Orkestra (a band Shamez loves to work with, along with Rambunctious) leading a crowd of 300-strong in song and dance, all in promotion of public space. Also featured: a crowd-surfing kayak and fire spinners.
“We want to remind people about this amazing day when the blackout happened and we experienced this sense of community that ties us all together,” Shamez says.
For him, exploring this interconnectedness and using it to find creative ways to create change is the way to go.
“Look at injustices you see in the world around you, but rather than react in the more traditional, angry, placard-waving protest manner, use art and humour to show people the world that they want to live in,” he says passionately.
“I love the idea of rather than complaining that the grass is greener on the other side, making the grass greener around you. If we expend a little more effort exploring that interconnectedness we have, and stop bitching, and cultivate it ourselves, we’d be living in a much greater city. In a much greater world.”
Whether you’re for horse meat or against it, you can’t argue with that.
La Palette is open seven days a week for lunch (11am — 4pm) and dinner (4pm — midnight, or later), and serves drinks and bar snacks until last call.
They also offer one of the finest prix fixe menus in the city, daily.
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.
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