Toronto Life
October, 2008

Lighten Up

by James Chatto

Nota Bene has Splendido’s chef but doesn’t charge Splendido’s prices. No wonder it’s the hottest new restaurant in town.

We first heard the rumour in the summer of 2006: Yannick Bigour­dan and David Lee, owners of the super-deluxe Splendido, were opening another place and their partner was none other than legen­dary restaurateur Franco Prevedello, the man who reinvented Toronto fine dining in the 1980s with his high-energy restaurants Biffi, Pronto and Centro. Prevedello had left the industry a decade ago—what had brought him back? Would he manage the room, or would Bigourdan? Would Splendido suffer? The location was spectacular—on the street level of the 15-storey federal court building at Queen and University, close to the opera house. Walking past, I peered in at the space—7,000 square feet of bare grey concrete, some massive support columns—then they covered the windows with paper and the long wait began.

Two years later, on a hot morning in early July, I’m back for a second look. The place has a name now—Nota Bene—and though paper still masks the windows, the inter­ior has been transformed. A bar stretches across the front of the restaurant, with seating for 35. Behind it and up five steps is the dining room: an elegant modern design with Brazilian cherrywood floors and chartreuse leather banquettes. Filling a quarter of the room are the 35 young men and women who will be the restaurant’s front-of-house team, chosen from more than 250 applicants.

Dapper in a striped shirt and silk tie, Bigour­dan is pumped, making little jokes as he explains what they are about to experi­ence this morning: learning the numbers of tables and seats, how to set up cutlery and plates, serving each other dishes from the kitchen where Lee and his brigade of 25 are already hard at work. “Yes, you can eat the food,” he says. “I expect you to ask a thousand questions! Today will be chaos—the only day that is allowed!”

Chaos by Bigourdan’s perfectionist standards seems more like well-ordered calm to me. Anyone hoping for the manufactured melodrama of restaurant openings on reality TV would find scant entertainment here. No raised voices; no klutzy mishaps. The servers are more like professional actors in rehearsal, familiarizing themselves with a set. They practise putting down the wooden charcuterie board for an invisible customer at a hard-to-reach corner of a banquette. They study the place setting laid down by the managers, then reproduce it. Bigourdan leans in, moves a knife half an inch to the right; the server nods. The staff at Splendido have had years to perfect their choreography; this team has a week.

Bigourdan is still smiling as he joins me at a distant table, and he laughs when I ask what it’s like to work with Prevedello. “That’s what everyone wants to know! He’s a madman! All the stories about him are probably true—the obsession with detail, the way he used to yell at his employees one moment, then put his arm around them the next,” he says. “But he’s mellowed. I’m not intimidated—I’m honoured.”

And, after all, Prevedello, Bigourdan and Lee have a history. Lee’s first job in Canada was at Prevedello’s Centro. He remembers the kitchen staff dreading the owner’s outbursts when a dish was less than perfect, though Lee himself, coming from England, was used to such shows. Prevedello is also Splendido’s landlord, and he drops by there several times a week to have dinner at the bar. He knew Bigourdan and Lee had been looking for another adventure for years and was sympathetic when a plan to take over and develop the Original Motorcycle Café on King West fell apart four years ago.

“One afternoon in 2006, I had a call from Prevedello,” says Bigourdan. “ ‘You have to come and see this space! Right now!’ David and I went down. We loved it. The size, the location, the potential…” Prevedello had long admired what Bigourdan and Lee were doing with Splendido, slowly building it into the city’s top fine-dining destination. Will Nota Bene follow suit? Not a chance. It’s been designed to be Splendido’s polar opposite—no tasting menus or champagne cart, no amuse-bouche, no waiters issuing instructions on how customers should order. It’s a pragmatic creation that reflects today’s unfussy zeitgeist. Yet, because of the people involved—their experience and their investment—this casual spot is the most anticipated opening of the year.

That two-year gestation began with the acquisition of the intent to lease. Bigourdan and Lee would have signed right away, but Prevedello revels in the cut and thrust of negotiation (a game chef Michael Bonacini once called “the Prevedello dance”) and the process took a good six months.

David Lee, meanwhile, was busy working on the structure and style of the menu, a necessary preliminary to designing the kitchen. The location promised a varied clientele: suits at lunchtime and after work, opera-goers, Queen West gourmets. With 175 seats, he knew it had to be simple: appetizers, mains, desserts, just one daily special. Ingredients would be seasonal and local wherever possible and also readily available—no point offering red snapper when it comes into Toronto only once a week. The style would be contemporary, with plenty of Asian and Latin flavours, and it would be relatively affordable, with most main courses hovering around $25.

At 38 (four years older than Bigourdan), Lee is a shadow of his former self after losing 55 pounds over the past year on a diet that included two pounds of leafy green vegetables a day. “I fell in love with rapini,” he explains, “so that will be a permanent dish on the menu. It took me three months to come up with the first draft, scribbling notes at one o’clock in the morning as the ideas came. When that was done, I began to design the kitchen around it.” There was only one contractor the team wanted: Chris Dineley, veteran of Bymark and One, the very best man for the job. Lee had some requests: Double the size of the dish pit. Give me another oven here. Put the new sous-vide machine downstairs. And an area devoted to charcuterie. In 24 hours, they had the kitchen mapped out. Finding an architect and designer went equally smoothly. The building’s own architects, Kuwabara, Payne, McKenna, Blumberg, the firm behind the Gardiner Museum and the new Royal Conservatory of Music, were eager to take on the job. Nota Bene was taking shape.

The best-drawn plans… They assumed the landlord had organized zoning for the entire space but found out that the city had only agreed to zoning for a 6,800-square-foot restaurant. The matter went before a committee of adjustment; it took another six numbingly frustrating months to get a permit—all for 200 square feet. Lee threw away his fall menu and started to think about spring flavours, then summer ones. Construction began last January. Seven months and $3 million later (the three owners have no other investors), it’s almost complete.

The following Tuesday, I’m invited back for a tryout evening for family and a handful of staff from Splendido—a dry run, literally, until the liquor licence is granted. Bigour­dan has asked the Splendido people to be hypercritical, and they gleefully take him at his word, noting when a waiter fails to ask about allergies, when water is replenished too slowly, when someone’s espresso arrives twice. The windows are still papered over, but the room has been brought to life by the paintings on the walls—architectural abstracts in merry colours.

“You like the art?” asks Prevedello, slipping into the banquette beside me. “My wife, Barbara, found the paintings in a Toronto gallery. The artist is a young Cana­dian woman, Alex D’Arcy. Long ago, she worked for me as a waitress at Acqua.” Prevedello’s hair was darker back then, but otherwise little about him seems to have changed in the intervening decade. There is still a mischievous twinkle in his eye, still a staccato passion to his speech patterns. He has spent the past 10 years concentrating on real estate, his fashion wholesale business and his wine agency, but restaurants have never been far from his thoughts. He is the landlord of many, including Splendido, Pastis Express and Thuet; an avuncular presence, he’s always ready with advice. But this is his return to the limelight.

Prevedello has always relished the details involved in creating a restaurant. He points out the dark brown leather chairs from the Italian firm Cassina, which look much like the oxblood ones he put into Centro back in the ’80s. “I wanted oxblood again. KPMB wanted black. We compromised.” Lee and Bigourdan had balked at the price—$1,400 a chair—but Prevedello persuaded them to buy 135 of them. “They will last 20 years. A restaurant is only as good as its chairs. And these wine glasses. I found them in Verona. Nowhere else in Canada has them.”

He has also had a major hand in deciding what will eventually go into those glasses, though he points out it will take six months before the wine list is where it should be. (An Ontario restaurant can’t put in private orders for wine until it has its liquor licence.) This will not be an extravagant list—very few wines in the three figures, but those that are look like bargains. Quinta­relli’s awesome Alzero cabernet franc, for instance, is sold here for $650. At Harbour Sixty, they ask $1,570.

“It’s the right list for Nota Bene,” muses Prevedello. “In proportion. We never set out to build a Bentley or a Ferrari here. It’s more like a BMW, elegant and very well engineered.” I’ve been listening to Prevedello compare restaurants to cars for 20 years, and I’m happy to hear it is still his default analogy. And it’s true: the engine seems just the right size for the chassis. Tonight, the restaurant has no trouble serving 90 guests. In the kitchen, the team is preparing the dishes mastered over the previous three weeks, closely scrutinized by Lee and Nota Bene’s chef, Geoff O’Connor. Is the mafalda pasta too underdone? No. That’s how Lee wants it, to contrast with the tenderness of the morels and chanterelles in the mushroom bolognese sauce. How many morsels of pig’s head on the charcu­terie plate? Three. Behind the clatter of pans, the air of concentration is palpable.

Out in the dining room, the acoustics contribute to the calm mood. Prevedello is speaking softly, but I can hear every word he says, though the conversation at a table 10 feet away is inaudible. KPMB brought in an acoustics engineer for just that reason. There’s padding on the underside of the tables to deaden sound, and camouflaged acoustic panels on the ceiling. “It’s important for two businessmen coming here for lunch,” says Prevedello

Not everything is perfect yet. One waiter has a mishap, letting a tiny, lard-covered toast slip from the charcuterie platter onto a tablecloth, but it is cleaned up in seconds, the smudge covered with linen napkins. Our table seems to be in a humid pocket the air conditioning cannot reach. Three or four of the other tables are bathed in a much brighter halogen glow than most normal-sized egos would wish. One of the desserts—a banana cake with banana ice cream—fails to wow. Recognizing and solving such quibbles is why an evening like this is so valuable.

Watching the attention Bigourdan and Lee are lavishing on this new baby (they expect to spend 80 per cent of their time at Nota Bene for the first few months), I can’t help but remember that Splendido’s previous owner-chef, Arpi Magyar, was brought to his knees when he opened a second res­taurant, Cucina, and tried to be in both places at once. Bigourdan acknowledges that many of his regulars are concerned Splendido might suffer. “But what nobody knows,” he explains, “is that David and I have been away from Splendido a lot. Has anything changed?”

Well, I haven’t noticed any slip in standards. Long-time sommelier Carlo Catallo is now Splendido’s general manager, though Bigourdan puts in an appearance every night; former sous-chef Brian Seme­nuk is now day-to-day chef. Lee and Bigourdan seem to have accomplished one of the most difficult tricks in the business: the transition from front-line commanders to staff officers. They’ve learned to delegate. Not that Lee, a self-confessed control freak, is divorced from either kitchen. The menus are entirely his and he is as meticulous as ever about maintaining standards, going from fridge to fridge when Splendido is closed to make sure ingredients are precisely as he would wish or visiting a farm that hopes to supply him with pork. He seeks input from his chefs, working through their ideas, finessing them until he is satisfied.

Nota Bene opens quietly on July 22. City hall, in its inimitably discouraging way, still hasn’t granted the liquor licence. Bigour­dan is greeting guests and patrolling the room with his usual charm and good humour, but when I ask how he feels, his eyes flash and he admits the delay is eating him up. “I want to start inviting people to come, but I can’t! It’s like having a beautiful new car but no gas!” I have to smile. Prevedello’s influence has apparently extended itself into his partners’ speech patterns.

Down at the bar, Prevedello seems mellow and relaxed. “We’ve waited two years,” he says. “We can wait two more days.”

There will be no big party tonight. About 30 customers are scattered about the room, sipping complimentary cranberry and elder­flower mocktails and tucking into Lee’s food. The charcuterie plate is the obvious star. Lee has broken free of the soft-chewy Toronto charcuterie cliché by varying textures. The pig’s head has been slow-cooked for 36 hours until the fat is almost as soft as warm butter but the fringe of crackling crunches between my teeth. A crisp little crostini is spread with snow-white Berkshire pork fat, marinated and rendered down but not aged like lardo; it melts on my tongue. Lobster salad is another hit, the perfectly tender meat tossed with avocado, romaine, crunchy parmesan croutons and just the right amount of a cheesy buttermilk dressing. Crisp rashers of maple bacon lie across the top, strewn with colourful flower petals. For a small menu, it covers a lot of ground. At the light end stands a fresh salad of mango, cucumber and coriander leaf served in iceberg “taco shells” and crowned with juicy barramundi tossed in an intriguingly bitter tandoori spice marinade. For those who relish calorific protein, a puff pastry tart topped with pulled suckling pig, slices of soft, spicy boudin noir, maple bacon, mushrooms and cheese is irresistible.

Splendido was and remains a work-in-progress. Its creators have a rule: make one significant improvement every month. Nota Bene was designed to be complete from the outset, the food interesting, unfussy and delicious, the service impeccable, the overall mood unpretentiously sophisticated. I’d say they have nailed it, though at the expense of any feeling of romance. Prevedello’s former restaurants were always flamboyant, ostentatiously dynamic; but that was a different era, with a more self-indulgent agenda. I can’t help but conclude that the old master still reads this city like a book, giving us just the restaurant we need in these more cautious times.