The new Don Alfonso 1890: Is this the best restaurant in Toronto?

TORONTO – I don’t pretend to know everything about the food scene in the city. But if there’s a better restaurant in the city than Don Alfonso 1890 Toronto I haven’t eaten there. I also haven’t seen it, haven’t read about it and haven’t even dreamed of it.

My wife and I recently had the chance to have dinner there (I also got to attend an opening lunch a few weeks ago) and were, quite frankly, overwhelmed by the inventiveness and quality of the menu, the whisper-quiet but friendly service, the presentation of the food and the variety of the dishes, and even the changing cutlery.

The word “unique” is tossed around too frequently by travel writers like me, but for this place it works.
From the gleaming white and silver/grey décor to the open kitchen with its various, spotless work stations to the style of the chairs and the displayed art work, this is unlike any restaurant I’ve seen in the city, and one of the most striking I’ve dined at anywhere in the world.

The restaurant, located at 19 Toronto St., just two blocks east of Yonge near Adelaide, is the brainchild of Nick Di Donato and his wife, Nadia Di Donato. Nick is president and CEO of Liberty Entertainment Group, which runs the Liberty Grand, Cibo Restaurants in Toronto and other enterprises. Nadia is Vice President and Creative Director, and was responsible for the look of the restaurant.

The husband and wife team have long felt Toronto deserved a Michelin-starred restaurant. The trouble is, Michelin doesn’t rate restaurants anywhere in Canada, apparently due to a lack of advertising and marketing. Regrettable for we Canadians, but I guess it’s pretty expensive to send folks out to review restaurants and cover an entire country, so I do understand.

Anyway, the two Di Donato’s want to change that, so they went around the world to Michelin-star restaurants in the hope of finding someone they could lure to Toronto to get the proverbial ball rolling. They went to Lima, Chile, New York a dozen times or more, Los Angeles, Chicago, France. They ate and ate and chatted with chefs. They covered Italy top to bottom and finally stumbled on Chef Alfonso Iaccarino, who runs Don Alfonso 1890 on the Amalfi Coast of Italy, oddly enough quite close to the Di Donato family home.

Nick Di Donato told me at the opening lunch that bringing Chef Alfonso to Toronto sends a strong signal.

“This tells rest of world we have great chefs here,” he told me. “We may not have Michelin stars but we have Michelin chefs. We’ll have stars soon and it will inspire the city’s chefs. It also will be great for tourism.”

Chef Alfonso stood up at the lunch and waxed poetic about the fresh seafood in Canada. He also loves the bison, calling it “the best meat in the world.”

Chef Alfonso is said to be the first chef in southern Italy to earn a Michelin star. Don Alfonso 1890 in Italy has two Michelin stars in the 2018 guide, which says the restaurant is a “bulwark of Mediterranean cuisine … with a hint of creativity.”

I was told the Chef is bedding down for the night at the King Eddy Hotel while in Toronto and loves getting up in the morning and feeding the black squirrels at nearby St. James Park. I like that.

Nadia Di Donato told me she was responsible for everything from the plating to the cutlery and the interior. A server at our lunch mistakenly poured slightly too much olive oil into one of Nadia’s distinctive plates, causing it so spill over on to the bread portion. She quickly addressed the situation and sat back down to tell me about her ideas.

The centrepiece of the room, a huge, high-ceilinged and very airy space, is a large, white skull with a few gold teeth. White butterflies emerge from the skull and seem to take wing.

I’m personally not sure what to make of it, except that it feels vaguely like something South American author Gabriel Garcia Marquez would enjoy. It’s certainly a unique (there’s that word again) piece.

One of the most impressive things to me about Nadia’s work are the plates she helped design. Our canape selection, a wildly colourful and wonderfully tasty array with four pieces, arrived on what looked like a hewn-off, white tree branch. Chef Alfonso’s vermicelli with mackerel (OMG good) arrives in a swirling white dish that resembles strands of spaghetti.

She also told me the open kitchen was important to her.

“I want people to see the ingredients in every dish.”

The only options for now are the eight-course dinner menu, which is offered in either a “contemporary” or “classic” group. A la carte orders can be placed in the sleek upstairs lounge, where they don’t take reservations. There’s also an opulent bar at the ground level that serves classic cocktails, but no food.

The menu items are all dishes that Chef Alfonso has made in Italy, but often with Canadian touches.

We start things off by testing the bartenders (I refuse to use the word “mixologist”), ordering a French 75 and something called a Lucien Gaudin. Our server explains the Gaudin drink is like a negroni, with gin, dry vermouth, Campari and Cointreau. It’s delicious. But the French 75 is a stunner; a perfect and zesty mix with just the right lemon. Easily the best I’ve had anywhere. The sommelier tells us they use fresh lemon zest, which is probably why I get that great citrus zing. I can’t imagine a more refreshing drink on a warm summer’s night in Toronto.

I had tried four dishes at the opening lunch, each paired with a different wine. Customers at dinner can order wine a la carte (the wine list has 650 types to choose from) or can pay $100 for a wine-tasting menu that pairs a different wine with each dish. That’s what I had at lunch, with a deeply flavourful Barolo to accompany the Manitoba bison and a lovely Canadian ice wine with our sfogliatella. At dinner my wife and I held back a bit and ordered our wine a la carte.

The lunch menu was terrific. But the dinner experience was far more elaborate, with eight courses instead of four. Since my wife and I had different menus, I actually got to try 16 items in one sitting.

From top to bottom, almost everything was excellent. The presentation was truly spectacular, and the inventiveness of Chef Alfonso was in fine form. On the slightly negative side, the mini-baguette I had was a tad soft. And, of course, it’s not an inexpensive restaurant. But that’s nit-picking of the highest order for a restaurant gunning for a Michelin star, and for a dining spot that’s a potential game changer in Toronto.

The canapes included flavoured, rainbow-coloured crisps made with chili, basil and squid ink, with toppings that ranged from turmeric-encrusted uni to sea asparagus and purple potato puree. As I mentioned, the presentation was sublime.

I had an amazing soup with soy-smoked, organic tofu (Chef Alfonso loves Asian food) and potato and garlic broth hat came in a crispy pod of layered bread crust with sesame, which they cut open at the table to reveal the soup inside, as if a clam shell was being sliced open to reveal a creamy pearl.

The bison in a rustic bread crust was tender and sweet, and Chef Alfonso’s vermicelli with mackerel, pine nuts, and caramelized onions will have you dancing in the streets.

The dishes kept changing, as did the cutlery. One seafood dish (I think it was the Canadian ling cod) came on a wavy, green plate that evoked the Mediterranean. My Rigatoni Vesuvius, covered with red and green and white sauce that evoked a flowing volcano, or maybe the Italian flag, came on a black plate with volcanic ash. We started with silver cutlery, then had gold, then some that was almost black.

They do a nice job with their Neapolitan Sfogliatella, with layers of crispy phyllo, cinnamon infused pastry crème and an amarena cherry glaze. More interesting to look at is the selection of petit fours, a lovely selection (especially the raspberry) that arrives on a clear plate bubbling with dry ice.

A truly spectacular dining experience. And a huge addition to Toronto’s culinary scene.