I opened in the Monarch because I was broke and it was cheap. Yes, I love the room but given my education and experience I believed it was an awful place to open. You know the saying: “what are the three most important things in the restaurant business? Location, location, location”. So what do I do? I open a Jewish Deli on the second floor of a side street dive bar – in an Italian neighborhood. No walk by. No parking. No signage (at first). Crazy? Many would say so. But I was hungry for smoked meat and unable to afford a typical storefront resto. What’s a Jew to do? You know what I did and in doing what I did I proved that playing by the rules isn’t always a recipe for success. ”Sometimes you just have to say: what the fuck” (Risky Business – 1983).
Now, almost exactly one year later, we’re moving into exactly the kind of space I would have moved into if I could have afforded it. The question is: what’s to do with the Monarch. The owners think I’d be crazy to leave (although they also said I was crazy to open there). Customers? You are a fickle lot. In the first six months I caught tonnes of flack over the “dingy, dank, disgusting” – ness of the Monarch. I took it in stride. After all, what could I do? I owed my livelihood to this place and while I tried not to let on, working there has pushed me to my limits and beyond.
I fixed every piece of equipment – twice. I carried thousands of pounds of meat (and soup and sacks of potatoes) up and down those long staircases from the basement to the smoker and down again on a knee that barely functions and shoulders that ache nightly. I put up with (but didn’t necessarily accede to) the outrageous and unreasonable demands of multiple landlords. I endured anti-Semitic venom from a neighbor who seems to hate almost everyone in the area (including my afore-mentioned landlords). And I collected a stack of parking tickets that could wallpaper the entire basement beer cooler.
Eternal romantic that I am, my love for the place endures: the dark wood, the blue leather, the Leafs memorabilia on the walls and the smell of stag parties long forgotten. I even love the characters at the bar. But I think what I love most is that the Monarch is a Toronto landmark and being there makes me feel a part of something bigger than myself. For generations the place has been somewhere you had to seek out, had to know about. You’d walk by that door your entire life if someone didn’t tell you that there’s a nice place upstairs to sit and hide from your troubles for a few hours.
And while I was once certain I’d move everything and everyone with me to 356 College (locks, stock and bagels) I have heard your pleas to maintain a presence in the Monarch. My (zen) dilemma surrounds the issue of quality. The toughest thing in my business is finding great people to help me serve my customers the best food possible. I’ve been blessed to have found exceptional people willing to work long, hard hours and I’ll need every one of them to open and operate the new place. In fact, the staff will likely triple. So who will operate the Monarch? And what happens if there’s a problem because there WILL be problems. Compressors will blow, people will be sick, pipes will burst, deliveries will be wrong and I will be called upon to fix this stuff.
So, dear readers, as Mick Jones of The Clash used to say: should I stay or should I go? And try to look at this from my perspective: if it were an easy thing to operate a successful restaurant at the Monarch someone would have done it before me. In fact, someone did do it before me: a little old Italian lady whose customers still rave about her tomato sauce and pasta 20 years later. We may make it look easy (awwww, shucks) but what we do is far from easy. My belief is that opening and operating 356 College will take everything I’ve got. Don’t get me wrong: I’m ready. Like John Irving’s Owen Meany character, the events of my life have prepared me for this challenge.
Too many pop references for you? I must be channelling Dennis Miller. Ohhh, thats another one. Well, excuuuuuse me! The kid’s on fire. Shwing. I’ll stop now.
