Established Toronto restaurants explain what they're doing to stay relevant

Toronto is a city that sees new restaurants open up nearly every day, drawing onslaughts of online attention, so how are its longer-standing establishments working to stay at the top of mind?

In an earlier article about the symbiotic, though sometimes fraught, relationship between restaurateurs and content creators, prolific Toronto chef Jen Agg said something that's been rattling around my brain like a dime in the washing machine ever since.

"Influencer culture thrives off flashes in the pan," she said to me. And, if influencer culture is, as it is generally understood to be, now a core element in ensuring the immediate success of a restaurant, it stands to reason that, in a way, the Toronto restaurant industry thrives on "flashes in the pan," too.

Hell, half my job is keeping an eye out for and cataloguing as many new restaurants in the city as possible. And people are receptive to it. That's just the way it is, especially in a city like Toronto, where myriad factors, including but not limited to its sky-high costs, mean that restaurants close and are replaced in record time.

In the past year alone, Toronto has lost a staggering number of restaurants, from longstanding institutions to spots that only survived for mere months. So it begs the question: what, if anything, are older restaurants in the city doing to make sure they don't get buried by the avalanche of buzzy newcomers that take over the city's collective social media feeds day in and day out?

For Adam Minister and Adrian Niman, the chef and managing partner at Michelin guide fixtures Sara and Rasa (also co-founders of Food Dudes), it's a particularly relevant question, as they embark on an adventurous rebrand of the former.

The Wagyu Reuben is just one course in Sara's new 8-course tasting menu, The Journey. Photo by Kristina Ruddick.

"The original vision behind Sara was to create the natural evolution of Rasa. Sara was meant to represent our growth as restaurateurs and chefs, a more refined and mature expression of what we loved about hospitality and food," Minister and Nimam explain to blogTO.

The restaurant opened in 2018 and, as time progressed, they noticed an inclination among diners to more relaxed and lively dining experiences over formal ones, so they adapted to follow suit.

More recently, though, they've noticed that diners are increasingly looking for a meal that offers more than just something to line one's stomach with: an experience, a story. In response, this past spring, Sara evolved again, shifting to a tasting menu-only concept called The Journey.

"I also think people are craving connection and storytelling more than ever. There's so much noise in everyday life that when people go out for dinner now, especially for special occasions, they want to fully immerse themselves in something. They want to feel like the restaurant is giving them its full attention, not just serving them dishes," Minister explains.

The Journey is exactly that. The $125, eight-course dinner is designed for connection. Each dish is a heartfelt encapsulation of a page in Sara's story. The flavours and elements lend themselves to discussion around the table, while the service is attentive and personable.

Another question inevitably rises out of this move, though: if a majority of Toronto residents are increasingly finding themselves in tight financial positions, will multi-course prix fixe menus really appeal to them?

In Minister's opinion, it's less a question of affordability (though, it should be noted, Sara's tasting menu falls toward the lower end of the spectrum, anyway) and more about the value a diner is getting out of each dollar.

"Diners are much more value-conscious than they used to be. People work hard for their money, and when they choose to spend it on dining out, they want to feel like it was truly worth it. That doesn’t necessarily mean 'cheap,' it means meaningful. Guests want to leave saying, 'That was special.'"

It's in league with a swath of other celebrated restaurants, like MIMI Chinese and Bar Allegro (formerly Vinoteca Pompette), undergoing rebrands of varying severity, either to contemporize (as in the case of the former) or become a more earnest interpretation of its team's mission (the latter).

In all cases, these shifts have happened in the service of offering something that feels more genuine to diners, believing that's the key to keeping them coming back.

Not all established restaurants are undergoing significant rebrands or menu overhauls to keep themselves on local diners' rosters, though.

George has been a Toronto fine dining fixture since 2003. Photo by @georgeonqueen.

Chef Lorenzo Loseto of George tells blogTO that, while the menu at the Michelin-recommended Corktown restaurant has, inevitably, changed over its 23 years in business, the secret sauce that's given it city-wide recognition hasn't.

What is that secret sauce, you ask? "I believe a successful food program can only be achieved by cooking what you are truly passionate about; a menu should reflect the ideology of the chef and their team," Chef Loseto says.

That's not to say that the menu hasn't reflected dining trends over the years, though.

"We've seen various trends come and go—from the charcuterie craze, which led us to produce more in-house items like 'nduja, salami, and prosciutto, to the strict '100km' movement where some chefs stopped using lemons or chocolate," he explains.

Most recently, the restaurant has introduced a four-course tasting menu that offers a more accessible price point and time-effective meal that opens the experience of a meal at George up to more people.

But, even when trying to appeal to customer trends, Chef Loseto points out, the most important thing is being genuine.

"While trends can be influential, they should never compromise your core food and service philosophy."

It's a different approach than that of Sara, opting for nearly imperceptible, incremental changes over a major conceptual overhaul, but one that distills down to the same central theme.

For a restaurant to stay "relevant," it seems, is less about chasing the current "It" trend in dining, but more about being clear in the vision that it opened with and rising to the challenge of offering the most honest version of that vision at any given time.

It's that quality that makes a meal truly memorable, beyond the photos that'll collect dust in your camera roll and the momentary clout you'll get among your foodie friends for being the first to try the city's latest "flash in the pan."

It's that quality that makes a restaurant particularly apt to survive in a city that is craving authenticity more than a lot of the people who live in it have really even realized yet.