FROM DECEMBER 2020 ISSUE OF WEST END PHOENIX

The grand experiment

Toronto’s restaurant industry had problems well before the pandemic hit. But if there’s hope, says Len Senater, who runs the collective kitchen Depanneur, it’s in a new style of business that puts people ahead of profits

Len Senater is not a chef or a restaurateur, and it shows. His restaurant, if you can call it that, is the Depanneur. It looks like, and is named after, a corner store. Described as a place “where interesting food things happen,” it has become the little engine that could when it comes to ticking all the boxes for ways in which the traditional restaurant industry – toxic in culture, patriarchal, largely white and nearly broken – might fix itself. And he’s been doing so quietly and with loving support on a corner of College for a decade.

“Food is one of the fundamentals of all human experiences. It’s something that everyone for all of history has as a common experience,” he tells me over the phone from his shop. “There’s an incredible capacity for food to connect people, across language, age, race, gender, class. Besides art and music, there aren’t that many other things that connect people in such a remarkable way.”

To his thinking, this is something that doesn’t get touched on in the traditional restaurant model. Especially in a city where food and access to it – whether at top restaurants, in firewalled media, even at farmers’ markets, where the hugs might be free but the heirloom tomatoes most definitely are not – is tied to social hierarchy and status. Len wants to disentangle food from luxury. “You can position yourself to show that you have taste, distinction and are part of an in crowd. That’s what food does socially.” And if the food you offer isn’t seen as part of that elite strata? “You will essentially live on the margins.”

Len’s decade-long journey to upend the model started with a fortune cookie. The fortune inside read, “Enough is as good as a feast.” He taped it to his laptop and spent a lot of time thinking, as he puts it, “What is enough and what does it look like?”

Len had studied photography, working with Ed Burtynsky in the ’90s, before moving into advertising, branding and marketing in the early 2000s. “It just started to grate. It didn’t feel honest. I spent so much time trying to convince other people to do something meaningful in the world that I just figured that I could cut out the middle man and do it myself.”

He had never worked in a professional kitchen and had no training. But his interest was piqued by pop-up dining, and he watched it grow in the San Francisco underground market, where it was showcasing the talents of home cooks. Then he looked at his own city – the big-name pop-ups with big-ticket prices. “The whole thing became this elitist clusterfuck. Very little happens outside of the box in Toronto, because the box is rigidly built. You want to open a Kelsey’s in a strip mall? Sure. Everything in the rule book works perfectly for you.”

So in 2010, he opened the Depanneur, a kitchen that gives chefs, many of them non-professionals with no status or following, the chance to cook for people in a welcoming environment and get paid. “Because it has a low barrier to entry, it just leans very naturally toward women, immigrants, the BIPOC community, the kinds of people who get excluded from participating in the mainstream.”

He compares it to live music in a city, where small venues help bands build an audience before they go on to bigger stages, all the while contributing to a dynamic music scene.

“It’s a different kind of model,” he says of the Dep, where guest cooks take home 60 per cent of their sales. “It doesn’t require much money and it doesn’t make much money, but that kind of modesty is something we can perhaps all look forward to in the future.”

Early on, he tried to sell coffee and sandwiches during the day. “It was a fucking disaster. I lost my shirt. Nothing about this was obvious or easy or quick.” So he moved to a model that doesn’t allow for walk-in customers; he shifted instead to dinner pop-ups and cooking classes with tickets purchased online in advance. During the pandemic he’s trimmed his programming to one pop-up dinner per week – pickup only – and the space has become a commissary kitchen for a number of fledgling food businesses.

Luckily he had an ace up his sleeve, in the form of a human landlord who charged below market rent. “If I had to pay full-price rent I would have had to do a trendy concept that would immediately be popular just to survive, and if it wasn’t, it would have closed. Which is why you have so much derivative, copycat trend-chasing [in restaurants], because you can’t afford to take a risk or try something new.”

For him, the future of a great food city hangs on rent. Affordable rent allows for innovation and progress. “It becomes incredibly hard for something to emerge that isn’t backed by investors and corporations and is essentially a manifestation of the very inequality we’re trying to push against,” he says.

Even with reduced rent, Len went grassroots in every way, outfitting the Dep’s kitchen through a kitchen drive. “There’s enough stuff in people’s garages and basements to fill a hundred kitchens,” he told me. “Why buy all that stuff new? Also, it connected people to what we were doing. We became a hospice for unloved mugs. People would say, ‘We should go eat at that place – they have my forks.’ They were invested in a certain way.”

Six years later, in 2016, he launched the Newcomer Kitchen project out of the Dep to give Syrian refugee women a space to cook. It got the attention of the New York Times, The Guardian and Time, and was graced by a visit from Justin Trudeau. It is now a fully fledged non-profit food company that provides opportunities to a wide range of cooks.

Ksenija Hotic, who was the subject of this paper’s first Kitchen profile, developed an enthusiastic following for her Bosnian cabbage rolls after her pop-ups and cooking classes at the Depanneur. Alchemy Pickle Company started there, as did Cookie Martinez and Bombay Street Food. The Dep is currently playing host to a roster of new start-up food companies, including bawang.to, Art Pasta and Spice Girl Eats, and offers an ever-changing calendar of Pick Up Dinners twice a week. “Some of the most popular have been Seder in a Box by Alissa Kondogiannis, Guyanese Oxtail Pepperpot by Eshwar Sarwan and a Lebanese fundraising dinner for the Beirut earthquake by Mary Freij and Sana Daoud,” Len says. On the Friday that WEP photographer Gillian Mapp visited, Becca Pereira was preparing butter chicken and mango mousse.

All of this makes for a kind of magic that comes from neighbours donating cutlery, home cooks creating dinners for paying customers, refugees sharing food from places they’ve been torn from, and professional cooks trying on food entrepreneurship for the first time. It becomes more than a hot spot, and there is no place for it on a top 10 list, because it has evolved beyond what those lists celebrate.

Given that Len’s in the business of upending staid institutions, he’s turning to publishing next and releasing a cookbook. True to form, he’s doing it without a book deal. “My goal is to make a cookbook that is the Humans of New York of food; a hundred different recipes from a hundred different chefs over the 10year history of the Dep.”

And he wants to pay those 100 people for their contributions. “There’s just no way the regular publishing model is going to do that. The only way to make it work is to make my own gravy,” he says. So he launched a Kickstarter.

He kept his fundraising target modest – at $20k – worried that if the goal were too high, he might not hit it, given the pandemic. He rallied all the support he could in the days leading up to the Kickstarter launch on Nov. 19, giving himself 28 days to reach his goal. It was fully funded in 18 hours. “[It] is now Kickstarter’s Feature Project in its food category, and about $5k away from being the most-funded Canadian cookbook project ever,” he said in the last week of November – more than $16,000 over target.

Len will be able to pay his contributors and photographer Ksenija Hotic, whose cabbage roll recipe will be featured.

All this was spurred by a guy in marketing who wanted to make the restaurant experience truly accessible for everyone. And he did it. He’s not rich, but who is these days? Outside of a few billionaires, the rest of us are just plugging along. We might as well do what makes us happy. I always see Len when I stop by the Dep for my CSA basket from Wheelbarrow Farms (the Dep is also a pickup spot for the vegetable farm, based in Sunderland, Ont.) and he’s always smiling, a genuine smile that crinkles up the corners of his eyes. No one can say what the future holds. We won’t know until we hit it.

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