This week's guest is Chamez Unlani, who joins us from Toronto, Ontario. Chamez is the co-owner of both La Palette and Dromtaburna, both on Queen West and downtown Toronto. Chamez is a very passionate restaurateur and small business owner, and this passion comes through in our interview with him. We talk about Chamez's start in the industry when he got his first job as a busser at the age of 19, his desire and the idea to open up his first restaurant, La Palette, the inspirations behind the Dromtaburna and how his favorite role in his work is as a bartender.
As Chamez pointed out, small business makes the culture of a city. If you're ever in Toronto, definitely visit both spots. You can also check them both online at La Palette, Queen West, and at Dromtaburna, or check out the show notes for all the links. Enjoy the show.
We're back with another episode of the industry podcast. I'm Kip, this is Dan. What is going on? Oh, not too much.
Just getting ready for the Christmas holidays coming up. So, yeah, that's what the stuff, picking up presents. We have lights. And you?
What about you? I'm not doing anything else yet. All right, I'm going to finish. I saw that a few times.
I didn't go with you. Things are great. Things are great. We're going full Christmas party season at the bars.
So, that is good news. Nice. Lots of good party schedules. Yeah, most of them are...
Yeah, we had a good weekend at two of the spots. Oh, actually, we have some breaking news for the podcast that I think about it. So, Babylon and Babylon Sisters and Sugar and Both did great this weekend. Our gal not so much.
And we made decisions to close the doors at the old Argyle Arms. Oh, really? Yeah, unfortunately, we made a good run at it, but it just did not work out. So, this is the first business I've actually had to close down.
A little sad, but it is what it is. It's a tough way to make a living these days. Yeah, I'm starting to do that. Yeah, it's all right.
So, wait, if you're listening to this right now, it'll be Monday the... What's the 18th? 18th and the 22nd Friday will be the last night at the Argyle. So, come by and drink the rest of the booze that we've got left.
And yeah, so it'll be Friday the 22nd, December, the last night for the Argyle. So, if you're listening to this, come by for that for sure. If you're in the Kichorwara-Loo area, Sugar Run is the speaking easy and downtown kitchener at Sugar Run Bar on Instagram and Babylon Sisters, Wine Bar, Uptown Water Loo, Pat Babylon Sisters Bar on Instagram. Check both those places out and check the Argyle while you can.
You got one night left. So, that's impressive Ontario. Aside from that, if you like what we're doing here on the show, you can follow us, you can rate us, you can review us, that helps quite a bit. And if you want to be guest on the show, info with the IndustryPodcast.club or you can DMS at the Industry Podcast on Instagram, where you will find the amazing artwork from our man, Zakhana, at zakhana.co, for all your graphic arts needs.
Really? Yeah, anything else you want to talk about? Yeah, I got nothing much else to add. Okay, great.
That's the usual. Let's get to our guest here. Maasamalani is here with us coming to us from Toronto. How are you?
Fantastic. I was just to say, not to forget then, the 22nd is also the first official day of winter. So, oh, is that right? Perfect kind of shut up, Bart.
Bring it in with style, right? Yeah, exactly. So, you know a little bit about the pains and trials and travails of owning your own restaurant and bar. Is you currently on to yourself?
Why don't you tell us a little bit about those places? Yeah, well, it's funny. Life is what happens to you when you're busy making other plans. I think that's credited to John Lennon, but yeah, I got a summer job as a busboy back in 1989.
I thought that's gonna be a fun thing to do and quickly discover that it's the passion of my life. And we quickly got behind the bar and started slinging drinks and learned to love this career. I ended up spending a year traveling in Europe. It was a very exciting time.
It was 1990, so a year after the Berlin Wall came down, it's been a lot of time checking around, traveling in Poland, Hungary, Romania, Czechoslovakia, while in Western Europe getting jobs in bars in Berlin, in Amsterdam, in Kent, in Belgium, and eventually I ended up eventually moving to Paris and working in bars and cafes. In 2000, 11 years after getting my first restaurant job as a drunk busboy, I like to say, opened a place with my wife and chef partner. We met working at Liss like to be Strel on Queen Street West, and we thought, we're gonna shoot an arrow at the moon. We're probably not gonna hit it, but we had, same, six grand apiece.
We found a little hole in the wall in Kensington Market that was for rent for $1,100 a month and said, let's go for it. Let's turn this little ratty old Chinese takeout into a French bistro that clearly looks like a French bistro crammed into a ratty old Chinese takeout. I felt like we were a little bit ahead of the curve. We got really lucky and it was an exciting and tumultuous time to open a place.
And here we are, 23 years later, still running that place. That's crazy. And so congratulations for a thought, because I know it was well as anyone out, how difficult that is to do, especially maintaining it through the pandemic, etc. But even just being open that long and in Toronto, there's so many different choices.
That's quite a credit to you. No, it's been pretty wild to imagine that the year after we opened, it was 9-11. In 2003, there were stars that purportedly touched down at a bar about 10 doors from us in Kensington Market. 2008, that financial recession, we've been through a lot of big hurdles.
But being someone who works in my own place, like that's the fun part is being ambassador to good times, creating people. Not only do you get to hang up your own troubles at the door when you work in this business, but you also get to be that host in that third place, what is not home and what is not work where you can be free. And that's the most exciting part for me. Certainly running a business like a restaurant, a bar is not about dealing with broken vertices and water pipes.
It's not about talking to the CRA on the phone or dealing with accounts. And lawyers, the fun is making the magic within these four walls where another universe exists. And that's nothing that I ever grow tired of. So whenever we've come across these hard times, as much as it sucks that we've had to let staff go or downsize or as you know, when the pandemic came, we lost everything.
If we hadn't been in the guts of this thing doing it ourselves, we wouldn't still be around. So as much as it has been tough times, I wouldn't know what else to do. Yeah, it's crazy to think about going through all of those different things and keeping it going. But you've always been like a working owner, it sounds like.
So it's interesting to imagine all those things you just mentioned about dealing with the CRA or the furnace or the pipes. I'm like, wow, that's seemed like that's my job. But at the same time, if you're doing it right, your bar is a community center. It is much more than the sum of its parts.
And it's where people come to forget their troubles and be swept away. And for me, being a bartender is a magical job where you introduce strangers to each other, you create opportunities for them to meet and friends come and become deeper friends and their bonds grow thicker in those four beautiful walls. But it's also a place where strangers meet and the accidental can happen. And that's where magic lies.
And so very soon, as I mentioned, very soon after opening the original location in Kensin and Market, a little hole in the wall be strode 24 chairs, we became involved in the community. We started, I hate cars. I live in Toronto and as much as cars are convenient, having had the pleasure of living in great cities of the world in Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris. You see what public space can be.
You see what communal living is. The city itself is a shared space. And I just wanted people to imagine that another Toronto is possible. So I started asking around, we threw some parties in the street where we fed parking meters.
We took each parking spot and had a band playing at one free bike repairs and another gas patch. Oh, a third, some of them showed up and they blocked traffic in every direction. And there were people dancing in the streets. And when the next day came around, you couldn't look at those streets and not imagine your kid dancing in the street with a bunch of strangers.
You couldn't imagine what it was like for people to put the groceries down and forget them and meet a stranger and maybe go home with them. That's not just anything else. That's the space of our job is getting people late. So what ended up happening is we created these street events called pedestrian Sundays in Kensin and Market.
I went to all the neighbors, to the shop owners and to the residents and said, hey, maybe sometimes, can one some of them come to be a pro party in the street and have fun and there will be street food and there will be bands playing. And we can just forget about how mundane Toronto is every day. Today is not a day for construction. Today is not a day just for deliveries.
Today is a day of fun where we take back our city and that became another element where a dinner party in your house, you throw dinner for 10-12 people at your bar or restaurant, you make a good time for 100 people, 200 people at a night. And here we started throwing events in cooperation with the City of Toronto, with our local merchants and residents. There was an accidental community building element where people got to know each other as we threw a party every month and invited people from all over the city and all over the world. We imagine what our speeds could be without cars and with more fun and culture and play.
And that door was opened by the fact that I opened the restaurant and I became a community activist and leader. And then eventually we brought in a car that was dead and we cut it open and filled it with dirt and planted trees and got local artists to paint it. And then the city told us we have to take it away and then we got a toad back and then eventually we got to stay as public art became this iconic symbol of Kansas Americans. All these things happened as a result of this restaurant.
And it's not incongruous because we are ambassadors to good times. And I think it's nice that we got to have this experience with us spilled out onto the street beyond the doors of the actual establishment itself. And that is something that we still celebrate to this day 20 years later. And it's something that I eventually gave birth to the new place that we opened six years ago which is a live music venue at Eastern European Tavern.
But with world music at its heart, all these good people got to know where some of the band playing Afro-Brazilian drums, 5,000 year old rhythms from Africa, Spanish Flamenco, New Orleans, party brass orchestras, Eastern European folk fans. We started to throw events, we rented halls and brought diverse musical communities together. We brought their fans to the same room so they could check out each other's music, meet each other. There's that getting late part again.
And then the bands themselves started to collaborate. So it's a very intense and beautiful mixture of things that sort of spontaneously erupted. Something that I feel like our city was right for and went better places than Toronto where people from all over Canada end up here. And then people from all over the world as well.
And so when we opened Drumton Arena in 2018, it was just like a part of that progression. And now this vibe this community spirit had a permanent home. And there you go today, the place as well, the success where we have 4am license every Thursday, Friday and Saturday. We do.
We are bar till 4am. So we're also doing things to help us join the ranks of great cities around the world. And most of the great at nighttime economies where we make jobs, not just for the door people and the kitchen staff, the bartenders, but also the musicians and artists that come there and we create a place that's very industry oriented. It's a, you know, when we work nine to we don't work nine to five Monday to Friday.
So what do we do when we went into work at three in the morning, do we go home and go straight to bed? No, we need a place. We need Arthur a place too. And so it's a very industry focused place where people work in local bars and cafes also have a place to go and cut loose and beat themselves and remember why they do this thing that we love so much.
It's so interesting. Like how do you go about getting the 4am extension? Is that a pain in the ass through the city or? It has been in the past and certainly I understand that it should be and could be if your mission is only to, you know, get people wasted and make as much money as possible.
Right. Then the powers of you should make it harder for you and they should scrutinize you. But instead we've got the support of our city councilor. We've got the support of the Toronto music office and we show them what our programming is every month.
We culturally diverse programming in a very open and safe space that's a very queer friendly space. It's a very friendly space for women to feel safe. The scene, the culture of the place is is a very unique vibe. And it's also a place that I think it's important when we talk about things like diversity, not just to look at ethnic diversity, but to also look at diversity of economic background and look at diversity of ages.
And if you've created a place where where little kids and 20 something's and 40 something's and 60 something's all feel comfortable, if you've created a place where it doesn't matter how much money or how little money you have, you can come if you broke, hey, what you can, it's like Marxist door policy. You don't have to put a million bucks in the jar. But if you make a lot of money, you can put 50 bucks under bucks into the into the hat for the artists and musicians. The artists are always well-recognansated.
That's something super important for us to make sure that artists are treated like gods and eat and drink and have a good time. All of these things have to come together to make this magic formula. And I think that as much as I can complain about how regressive or backwards our society can be in so many ways here, I think that's something where the city of Toronto has actually done something right for a change and allowed us to safely express another way of living, another way of being then what is considered culturally normal, more presbyterian and conservative place like on the road. Yeah, that's amazing.
Okay, so let's back up a little bit. We're working with, like, a very famous French restaurant in Toronto, Fine Dining. So that's like kind of ultra fine dining there on Queen West. So that's what you kind of got your bar training experience, would you say?
Yeah, exactly. I was there from 89 to 90. I went travel for a year and Europe came back from 91 to 93. And then in 93, I just had had it with here, you know, like so many people in our industry, just falling into a rut of drinking too much and not seeing a future and just partying every day.
And I wanted to do something completely different in recent my life. So in 93, at the age of 23, I just gave away everything I owned and I moved to the city where I didn't know anybody, the city that I already knew that I had infinity to Paris. And started a new life from scratch there and eventually ended up becoming a manager of a small bar there, where I, it was a little rock and roll bar. I fancied myself about the writer and wrote songs and I got together with some interesting people.
I met working at a jazz club there. And so I was playing with a band there. And then I moved to Poland. And in Poland, I didn't work in the bar industry in Poland.
I went there to write a book, but I ended up getting sucked into this other universe where I toured with the blues band and talking and all sorts of other funny things. And that's where I met my sweetheart, who is Australian and Polish, and eventually ended up back in Paris working at this bar. And so that just, it became a thing. Finally, when I came back to Toronto in 97, I told my wife, look, we're only passing through town.
We're not finished. We're going to travel. We're going to see the world and do all sorts of things. And in the meantime, I knew that my career was going to keep on ascending in the restaurant industry.
And that's where I got more interested in wine in the management end of things. So from 97 to 2000, I was the bar manager at List Like to be strobe. And finally, that reached the ceiling. And I thought, well, this is it.
The only thing to do next, is open my own place now. I got to tell you, the original business plan is pretty funny. People looked at us and said, you're absolutely nuts. I have this idea.
The bar that I worked in Paris was an in old anarchist neighborhood called the Guggo guy, the Hill of Wales. And it was a place that came to much prominence during the Paris commune. And the Paris commune happened when the Prussian army had left Paris, Paris was defeated. But all these soldiers were there, all these people were there, and they decided to form a revolutionary society.
And they declared themselves independent from the state. And their demands were the abolition of child slavery, equality for women, and a separation of God in the state. So they created this free city of Paris. It didn't last that long, less than three months.
But the distinction of people around the world, who looked at a society that couldn't be possible, that hadn't existed yet. So the restaurant across the street from the bar that I worked, Le Donne said, he's the time of the cherries, the named after an anarchist at a poem about that heady time in those days of the Paris bombing, was a co-op restaurant. So imagine there were 13 wares and cooks. They each owned exactly one 13th of the restaurants.
They would make all their decisions in a non-hierarchical fashion, they would have meetings once a month and say, well, how about this station? So I'm going to be like, how about this one? And they don't vote on everything. And I thought that was fascinating.
So I had this business model for the original La Palette, where I would get 10 waiters and cooks together in the bartender to like me. And we'd each pitch in 2000 bucks a piece. And 10 of us would have 20 grams and we'll open this co-op restaurant and learn something about what it is to run a restaurant. We'll volunteer two shifts a week, keep our day jobs and do something radical and different.
Of course, everyone came to my house, ate the food, drank the wine, and said, you're nuts. This is like communism or something. You're insane. Why would you be close?
And they're not interested. So when the dust settled, it was still just me and my wife and the chef, there's three of us going, well, everyone thinks we're nuts. Instead of doing it that way, let's just open the place anyway. And sure, it took off.
It took off. And all of those people came back to us later on, kicking themselves in the fancy, can we buy him now? No. But do you think that concept?
Well, I got to tell you that what ended up happening, what came back to in 2018, when I saw the place for a rent in Augusta, what became drunk, at the Eastern European fabric, all those things came back to us. And I invited my staff to be partners in the business. So we got to do that cool off situation. After all, I picked four of my staff and said, listen, guys, you get to have a share in the business.
You don't have to put in any money and just work off your shares, keep track of your hours. And you can own your own bar. It's not a time that we can open a business for 20 grand in the North. It's hard to be a young person who's about an entrepreneurial spirit.
But let's do this thing. And it's, I call it venture communism, where we've taken the best of capitalism, the best things about communism, about the worst things I've put them together. So anyway, please, I didn't mean to interrupt you. No, no, no, no, I was gonna ask you a question that you just answered.
So, okay, at the new spot, it's more of a co-op style place. But are you still running it in that way that everyone gets a vote on anything that happens in there? Well, in fact, what I think I'm glad you asked the hard question. Eventually, you know, one of the team ended up dropping out before we opened another one, moved to the States to work at 11 Madison, the famous restaurant in New York City, and then went to California study physics.
Another great pal, we're all still friends today, moved out east to Half Axe and started family. So as the desk settled, it was still me and my wife, and Misha, who is now an equal partner as well. So it's three of us, the technically, are the owners of the place. And in fact, I spend most of my days and time at most of my time running La Valette.
And then Misha has the one that runs Jerome Taberna. So as wonderful as that concept is, it's not that it failed, but it's saw its natural life cycle through. But that said, the spirit and ideals of creating a safe, inclusive space for people, the way that our team and all the artists and the customers to feel in a place like specifically Jerome Taberna, but also La Valette is a very community center oriented vibe. It is a very family business.
We all not only do we work together, we hang out together after work, we go to each other's houses for dinner, like that spirit. And something like the pandemic, where we, you know, we turned La Valette into a wine shop, and we turned Jerome Taberna into an Eastern European deli and grocery store, eventually with bands playing on the roof as we sold hot wine on the sidewalk and people could be safely distanced from each other. We just got closer as a family in essence in those things. So yeah, on the one hand, that co-op model didn't necessarily work, but who's left of us, we still like to build consensus and come to decisions, not by not by outvoting each other, if you know each other, but by holding hands and making sure that we're going in a direction that we want to go together.
It is a lot easier to make those kind of decisions when you're sort of view yourself as a family or like close friends, because it's very easy to clash with somebody, you know, business partner relationship, if you're not maybe in that sort of close relationship, but when you're fighting with your family, you know, you're going to get over it at the end of the day, right? But if you're just like a business partner, we maybe are not that close with, you get an argument about a major business system, sometimes you can't come back from that stuff. Yeah, exactly. Like, you know, James Diverge, our first business, as I mentioned, it was with our chef, Mike Harrington.
We were great friends. I worked as bartender. He worked in the kitchen. We were in our 20s, and we were having a good time.
And one day at like the jazz festival, the colony hotel behind City Hall used to have these four-end licenses. You could smoke indoors at the time, it was great. Jam session scene, and we got drunk at Seyetal, but our old restaurant together one day. And when that idea still stuck, it's like, remember we were talking about that last night?
Yeah, I still want to do that. Yeah, me too. It starts with these dreams, but there's a lot of hard work that follows. And eventually, your dreams might diverge by the time 2005 came rolling around.
He had a new partner. They wanted to move to Central America, to start a place there. We weren't necessarily dividing in what we wanted to do. I was getting more involved in activism and that direction, the community involvement.
He just wanted to sneak more to traditional restaurant kind of stuff. And we found an amicable way to sneak about each other. And so, in fact, even the same business as it exists for 24 years is, as you know, it's not the same business. If you don't constantly have that change, then you go the way of the dodo.
So at 2005, our rent went from 11, 12, 13, 15, 100 to 25, 28, 31. By the time we left, Kenz and Mark, our rent was $5 grand a month. So there's justification if you as a business owner don't own your building, if you didn't have the privilege of being able to start a business with millions of dollars to buy a property and imagine downtown Toronto, it's nuts, man. We started a business for 20 grand.
Our second business cost us 80 grand to start in a building that costs $5 million. Our third cost is $4.25 million to start in a building that's worth $8 million. As regular owner operators of small business, are not commercial property owners. There's something we're always chasing that it feels like we'll never catch.
I'm 54 now. I don't expect to retire in 10 years. I expect to go to the day I die and I love it. And I don't think and I don't know if I'll ever be able to afford commercial property downtown Toronto.
And so just right now, as we speak, construction is going on for a subway stop that's going to open a couple hundred meters from here in five years. I don't know. So while the property values keep going up and the taxes keep going up and the cost of everything keeps going up, that is carat dangling, that being able to actually own the building you own a restaurant that we will probably never catch. As we were kind of victims of our own success in the market, when we got chased out of it, we couldn't afford anymore.
The silent partner in any business like this, the silent partner in any bar restaurant, if you don't own your own building, it's your landlord. And so you have a relationship with your landlord and they're happy to make a living and not a killing if they don't need to keep on pressing you for more and more. If they get what's fair from you as rented, you pay what's fair and you have a good relationship, well then hopefully you'll have that longevity. I don't know if you own your own building or not.
I wish. I think about exactly what you're saying. And the problem is that you're very rare now to find a building owner who wants to have that kind of partnership with the tenants. And so we're all struggling.
This is a very difficult business to make a lot of money in. If you don't own the building, if you own the building, that's the dream. Like you said, but if not, we're all just renting off these people. Yeah.
And if you don't have a great relationship with one of my landlords and a terrible relationship with another one and the difference is crazy. You can wait one, I'm getting sweated and constant for more money all the time and the other one, the guy's willing to work with me. And recognizing that. I had a good relationship with those places that we were talking about earlier that just closed.
But sometimes it doesn't even matter. There's so many other factors that go into this that rents just your biggest expense every month. It's not certainly not the only one. And this is why people need to support smaller businesses if you want these places to continue to exist, right?
Like I'm going through it now. But if you have had success for now like 23 years in the one spot, get to open another spot and La Palette has now moved to a different location from Kensington Market. And so tell us about the location where it is now? Yeah.
So now we're on Queen Street West, kind of a cultural backbone of the city, a place that's known for great food, great live music venues, great bars. One of the two neighborhoods that I've hung out since I was a young teenager all my life. I think you had on something really important though when you were talking about small business. And it's really a small business that makes the culture of a city, right?
You inform the flavor of the street you're on and the city you're in. People are going to come from far and wide from across Canada and around the world to a city like Toronto, not to see another franchise. I'm not going to name names, but not to see the repeat cookie cutter strip mall garbage that you can find anywhere else. We're the ones that actually generate culture in our city, generate tourist dollars.
And as much as we can recognize that say, sports teams and arenas that have great live bands that are world famous will bring tourism and bring dollars to a city and investment, we have to remember that it's a small business that makes the culture of a place. So for now a neighborhood like Kensington Market, neighborhoods like Queen Street West are changing that gentrification, rears inside the town all the time. You have to look at certain landlords that will only rent to these big big ticket luchib customers that don't bring that extra element that extra flavor. So if we want to keep our main streets vibrant and lively and cultural, then certainly we need to do more to support small business.
Yeah, we ended up having to choose in 2010 whether we're going to close altogether. I just didn't, I'm too stubborn. I don't know what else to do. I've been working for myself for so long.
No one else is going to hire me. I can always go to the left and they'll hire me back. They already hired me back three times. They'll hire 50 year old bartender.
Then they ended up being sort of having their hand force by the pandemic and they had to sell, but they did own the building. They did get to sell the business itself with all its channels and its mind-seller. So they spent half a century of lifetime of work helping to create the dining scene in our city, the way it is. And they got their their just desserts at the end, they got their fair share when they did retire.
But anyway, back to your actual question. This place La Palette on Green Street, the building is an old, is built as a stable for horses back in 1895. So the ceilings are 20 foot tall with glass windows showing Queens Street. There's an open kitchen and we live in an exciting time where we don't want our food made by minions in a dark basement somewhere that we never get to see instead.
These guys get to be up here and show off their talents and they get to feel the praise from the customers as they walk out the doors. And thank you. Thank you guys are amazing. It's a fun building.
We are a very bohemian place in that sense that it's not your traditional stiff upper lip kind of bistro with formal service. If people come in here that are rude or unruly or belligerent, we will slap them in the face. They'll make sure they'll never feel welcome again. And we like to throw down wild parties where we have 16-piece brass bands standing on the bar after dinner service.
And it really takes a special team who after eight, 10 hours of amazing service where from 60 chairs we're feeding 200 people instead of cutting loose and mid-nighting and finishing work, we kick it up a notch and throw a wild party. So if you're here on December 21st, we're talking about 22nd being the first day of winter. December 21st is the winter solstice. So just nearby in the market, you have the festival of lights and lantern, for a very percession with celebrating winter in a very pagan way.
And we're also going to have the entire Charlie Brown Christmas album we've done live at Drum to Verda at midnight. We'll have get Ram Bunch's. We're going to have a 16-piece party brass or just a plain standing on the bar. So we'll face the long cold dark winter with a smile on our face and a drink in our hands.
That's great. That's why you should tell our listeners while they're listening to us right now where they can find you online to get this information where they can get reservations tickets, whatever they need. Yeah sure. We're Lappelle at on Instagram.
We're Lappelle at Queen West. We're at 492 Queen West. And then Drum is Drum Taberna. And we're at 4.50 at Queen West.
So you can you can have your grown up fun and have a nice steak and fries. So currently one of the best in town. You can search into your dancing shoes and book each other weekly hours just a block away. When you say you're still like a working bartender, are you physically involved in making the cocktail list?
Are you actually behind the wood on certain nights? Or is it more of a management role for you now? Oh no, that's management's boring. I'm definitely.
That's where the fun is, man. Like I'll do all that other stuff as a chore. But being behind the bars is my favorite place in the world. Like I said, like creating opportunities for strangers to meet.
I've got solo person here and solo person there who don't know each other. I made a before I shot for them both and went for myself and raised a class and started a conversation. I did some funny things. I'm just confessing to my old boss.
One of the things that I had done when I was working brunch at Liss like the East Drunk Queen West. It was kind of quiet and this beautiful old puree bar. No one would come on Sunday afternoons at a certain time. So I filled a train with mimosasas and caesars and I walked down the block.
Please don't tell the liquor. And I went to all the clothing stores on Queen Street. And it was like, hey man, it's all pretty girls that work there and they're managers. There's a fun scene and I went and I asked the manager, can I offer your staff drinks?
It's a tree cold Sunday afternoon and winter. Sunday shopping had kind of just begun. So it hadn't quite gotten traction yet. They'd only just changed the service.
Back then you couldn't serve liquor until noon on a Sunday. I remember that. Yeah. Then they switched to 11.
But in any case, I would go and drop drinks and all the clothing stores on our block and say, just bring the glass back to Liss like P-Strull. And of course, all their shops at close at 5 p.m. They'd all bring their glasses back and say, and have a drink. Of course.
Yeah. This is such a works in the Fisco. Hey, this is such and such who works at Candy Bellville. And like, hey, all of a sudden, all these people who work on the same block, doors away from each other never met each other.
And they're in the same industry, in the same business, got to see each other, got to know each other and become friends. I didn't have to do that too many times before there was all of a sudden a whole scene and my boss would come in and say, the hell's going on. I'm absolutely far so full. It's all like, just fashionable gay dudes and pretty girls like, what do you, how did you do this?
I'm like, whoa, no, no. That's our job as a bartender. I'm just social. I'm just social.
Yeah. It's a job I'll never get bored of by anything. So definitely, obviously, I'll be standing behind the wood here. I do, we're more of a wine oriented place in a cocktail bar and I do get to choose the wines, but I want to get my staff involved in that.
As well as so, whenever we have merchants come by, the great relationships we have with small importers, I'm always making sure that my staff also get their jobs and their education and their fun up to bar. But ultimately, yeah, I think, well, my wife is Polish and she has all these expressions about everything. And she says, the owner's eye fattens the cow. And you always count on your staff to go that extra mile and make a fun place in the spring.
You've got great staff. But often enough to, if you're a small business, here there's the owner, you will see things, you will do things instinctually that other people wouldn't think of. And I always worked in other bars and restaurants and treated them as if they were my own. And I want to empower my staff to feel the same in the best and most positive way.
And ultimately, I think that is the most fun part about running a place is to get to every now and then take a step back and look around and see what a good time everyone's having and feel that energy, feel that vibe and be part of something bigger than yourself where you get to really create a space where people leave their troubles at the door and forget their worries and escape to a magic place that third space where they can be free. Well, that's a perfect way to manage the mess. Thanks so much for coming on the show. It's been a pleasure talking to you.
And obviously, like your attitude about the industry is something we should all be checking out and copying frankly. So, thank you for the invitation and thanks for doing what you do and actually picking up our industry because it's not an easy one but it can be really rewarding if you haven't had the right attitude, right? Well, you certainly do. So, everybody check out Lapolette and Dom Teverna, who will be coming to Toronto and Shamais, thanks again.
Thanks for doing this. What an absolute pleasure. Nice to meet you guys. Yeah, that's very much.
That was great.