[door clicks open]
- Hey AD, what's up?
I'm Matty Matheson.
I got a new restaurant.
Come inside, check it out.
[upbeat jazzy music]
Here is Prime Seafood Palace.
It's a beautiful room designed by Omar Gandhi.
The biggest thing that I thought about when I wanted
to design this restaurant was I didn't want
somebody who designs restaurants.
Very quickly, restaurants start looking similar, right?
So I wanted to have a fresh beginning.
I wanna work with somebody who doesn't know
exactly where the booths go.
Exactly how service stations work.
I need to make a restaurant that adds
to the culinary tapestry of the world.
To set that stage, I was truly lucky enough
that Omar said yes.
He's here in the building.
Omar.
Is Omar here?
Here he is, look at him.
Beautiful.
You're so beautiful.
- My name is Omar Gandhi.
I'm an architect here in Toronto and in Halifax.
And I've been working with Matty
for the last six years on this incredible space.
- Come check it out with us.
Walk this way.
Omar, after you.
Let's show 'em some tables and stuff.
[upbeat jazzy music]
This is our dining room here at Prime Seafood Palace.
- [Omar] We started actually with the base building
on the streets.
On the outside of the building is actually
white brick and black windows.
We were gonna take this very sort
of ubiquitous urban building, and when you come inside,
we wanted to have this huge barrel vault with a canopy
that deflects natural light.
So it's very inward looking,
but you get a good sense of what's happening on the street
just kind of through the silhouette as well.
- [Matty] It's very simple.
It's four booths and some tables and a bar.
And how do we make that special?
How do we make that feel cohesive?
How do we make that flow all together
and create shape within a single rectangle?
These tables, like Peter Coolican, his carpenters,
and his team, we worked very at length
on designing the tables and how they feel.
And every single thing is thought of.
And like even under here, you have a sliding kind of
like cutlery drawer for steak knives to be able
to sit here with four, five, six people and enjoy food.
- This is just gonna be a place like Matty said
where people are gonna come together and hopefully have
the kind of moments that you don't forget.
And so there was sort of an intersection between
Scandinavian and Japanese and maritime architecture
that we really thought kind of pulled this together.
- We put in this brass divide here, if this wasn't here
and the room was completely opened,
how do we have something that gives this table
as much privacy as this table?
And where they're still together, they're still in the room,
but allowing them to kind of each have
their own space where this isn't some heavy blocked divide.
[upbeat jazzy music]
We found some beautiful leather from Sorenson in Denmark
just goes really well with the wood.
The Edwin chair here is kind of a nod
to maritime chairs.
We wanted brass doweling.
- Just talking a little bit about materials,
there's something really traditional and classic
about all of the brass and leather and wood.
And I think one of the things that we really loved
about it was the idea that each
of these materials would develop a beautiful patina over it.
So this isn't something that just looks beautiful now,
I think it's just the starting point.
- Yeah.
- [Omar] And as those scratches take place and the leather
starts to darken, and the brass starts to have
little markings on it.
I think it just kind of becomes that restaurant
that we imagined just as a timeless place
that just kind of becomes more beautiful over time.
I would say that maybe the most important material
in this space is light, natural light, and artificial light.
And this brass light by Concord Lighting, the idea was
that it would just kind of illuminate a really gentle glow.
We started with not a very big space.
And so I think the idea of the screen here,
this is the brass screen.
And then of course we have horizontal maple slats.
It was really about keeping things open
which really just changes the quality of the space.
- [Matty] I think it is one of those things that gives you
shimmering light at nighttime.
It sparkles different than in daytime.
Brass and wood and this leather, it's warm.
This looks like a thing that has been here.
When they come down, the aliens, they'll be like,
"This place is kind of tight."
[upbeat jazzy music]
Here's the bar.
This is pretty much like a beautiful butcher block.
Maple, the canopy, kind of like an ode to a diner
or like some kind of old oyster house, steakhouse.
We wanted to keep it very simple, very minimal.
My grandfather had a restaurant
in Prince Edward Island called the Blue Goose.
He had a little soda pop shop connected to it
and me and my brothers and my sister would sit
on those stools and swivel all day,
just swivel and swivel and hang out.
And I really wanted swivel stools to be attached
at the bar here.
And then Omar's job, make it cool.
You know?
- I'll show you.
So, you know, it was the same designer as the chairs.
And so this was custom to this restaurant
with brass detailing and same maple wood
and the same leather.
- [Matty] At the end of the bar here
we have like a semi-private room.
We wanted just a little moment to have a little more design.
So we got the E15 Bigfoot table in there.
The chairs are really nice with matching leather.
The Noguchi, when you walk in, you see that
and it looks like a moon.
The actual canopy, like the shell or the barrel of it
that took like, what?
Six months for engineers to figure out.
And we had to put in extra iron steel beams
and it's over 9,000 pounds of maple hanging inside
of this building.
[upbeat jazzy music]
Here's a washroom, check it out.
It's got a sink, a toilet, walls like every other
washroom or restroom, but what should you do?
Take a little look up.
I wanted the whole bathroom to feel like you
were kind of inside of an oyster.
Tiling is incredible, Omar.
- [Omar] It's an amazing marble all the way up.
- There's gonna be moments when people come
in this washroom, sit on that toilet,
and then you take a little look up.
And then you're like what the [bleep]?
I had an idea that I wanted the sink to be a lake.
I grew up on Lake Erie.
- [Omar] Incredible concrete artist, Brandon Gore,
out of the Ozarks who I was in touch with.
And so he made this erosion sink of Lake Erie
but I think a really, really cool detail
is this little pin off to the side, which is-
- My farm.
So like right here is my farm.
And then Toronto is up here,
because Toronto's on Lake Ontario.
So this is Lake Erie.
That's the thing is like,
we wanted just like these little nuances.
- [Omar] Little details, special kind of aspects
of Matty's life.
[upbeat jazzy music]
- This is kind of like my dream kitchen.
We have our ovens, we have our stoves here.
We got a French top.
We got some burners.
A plancha, a fryer.
We got really beautiful pots of pans from Made In.
We had a giant butcher block pass created.
We don't have a lot of space on the ground
but we have a lot of height.
So creating a pass with shelving, we'll have plates
on the outside, we'll have some ingredients
and small wares up top, fridges lining the entire pass.
This is gonna be for fish butchery in the back corner there,
and then we have our hearth, which we bricked all the way
to the ceiling, 'cause I thought it looked great.
This is gonna be a steak and seafood restaurant
that serves a lot of vegetables.
I want the vegetables to shine just as much as a lobster,
just as much as prime rib.
We want there to be surprises.
We want there to be excitement and for people
to be able to come in here and eat vegetables
in a very thoughtful, beautiful way is our goal.
We're trying to think of colorways and what we can kind of
allow in this space and what the space can kind of handle.
We didn't want to get too fussy with a lot
of different colors and different kind of pottery.
So I think these gentle blues and darker blues,
these like almost like indigos are our colors.
We wanted to keep the plates all porcelain.
All the glassware is gonna be crystal.
Our serving spoons are all gonna be Kunz spoons,
beautiful steak knives coming from Paris,
even our pepper mill.
This is like one thing that I'm really proud of
is my pepper mill that I designed with Castor,
and salt cellar made out of oak and marble.
There's definitely gonna be dishes that represent
kind of my life and where I come from.
My grandfather's restaurant, Blue Goose,
it just holds such weight in my memory.
And it's something that is gonna be a part
of everything that I do.
And I think this restaurant is a perfect example
of my life through a culinary lens.
I wanna show you the next room,
which I'm calling the cottage.
Let's go AD.
[upbeat jazzy music]
Well, we're here in the cottage now.
And me and my friend, Omar, we're just like,
"How many different little things can we do?"
- Yeah.
Gray herring bone tile on the floor.
We have maple throughout and we have these beautiful kind
of knotty pine boards on the walls and the ceiling.
- In the summertime, we have the doors open,
outside a couple bistro tables, in the wintertime
some fire pits and some just some ambiance.
Well here we'll have like a service station.
We'll have pastry.
- [Omar] This is sort of an extension of the kitchen.
- Even more casual, even.
- Casual, and I think intimately connected
to kind of the food. - Yeah.
This is the beautiful biker stool from Castor Design.
Here's apple wood from Tamarac.
The lamb furs are all from Tamarac as well.
Absolutely animal welfare approved.
Little, what do you say?
Jotol? Jodol? Jotol?
- Jotul.
- I think it's Jotul. - It's a Jotul.
It's a Jotul fireplace.
You know you open that up, throw a couple logs in there.
It's gonna heat up this place.
In the summertime, throw a big beautiful bowl on there
and saw some champagne in.
We got the beautiful, what do you call these Danish things?
- [Omar] Poulsen.
- [Matty] Poulsen yeah, we got some Poulsens up there.
- Yep. - You know, cool shit.
- [Omar] But, but you can see that the restaurant is
like the ground floor of a house in a way.
There's the kitchen, there's the big dining area.
This feels like the family room almost.
- We've been working on this project for over half a decade.
And I'm just really excited that we're getting
to the point where we can cook and serve people
and give people a place to come and be able to come
to a place that is warm, uplifting, serving great food.
I wanna put the money into the the farmers,
the ranchers, the fisher folk.
I wanna be able to do that and serve that
in a place that shows the hard work that they are putting
into product.
And that's what this is.
This is a champion moment for purveyors, for trades people.
Hopefully you come in and check it out,
everyone watching this on the internet.
You're worldwide.
We're in Toronto.
If you wanna come hang out, we'll be here.
We'll be serving food.
Love to have you in.
[upbeat jazzy music]
AD, thanks for coming by checking out Prime Seafood Palace.
I got a lot of stuff to do.
We gotta open up this restaurant.
I'll see you soon.
Thanks for coming by, later.
Okay, world peace.
[upbeat jazzy music]