Canada’s first and only Ritz-Carlton hotel opened quietly in Toronto’s deep downtown on February 16, five years later than originally intended, but no less welcome for that. It boasts a five-star hospitality experience consistent with the other 75-or-so Ritz-Carltons around the world, which will be lovely for everyone who stays there. Those of us who already have somewhere to sleep in the GTA are more interested in the property’s public spaces, its restaurants and bars, and also at the mirror the hotel holds up to the city. It is always illuminating to see ourselves as others see us, especially when the “others” are some of the most successful and professional hoteliers in the world. Building from scratch (the location was a parking lot) gave Ritz-Carlton the opportunity to create precisely the restaurant they wanted. There were only two provisos – that it should suitably represent the company’s deluxe reputation and simultaneously please the city. And that must have raised the question down at company headquarters in Chevy Chase, Maryland: were those two criteria compatible? Post-recession Toronto has turned away from white-linen fine dining. Burgers, pizzas and rustic Italian cooking currently turn our crank. Mickey Mouse could count our remaining restaurants of conventional stature on the fingers of one of his gloves – Scaramouche, North 44, the newly revived Centro, maybe Chiado. Add to that the unfortunate truth that Toronto has its own weird, 30-year-old prejudice against hotel dining rooms of any kind and you begin to sense the dilemma facing Ritz-Carlton. On the plus side, it helped that the company’s vice president of worldwide food and beverage operations is George McNeill, who spent the 1990s as executive chef of the Fairmont Royal York – a guy who knows our hotel scene backwards. It’s also true that Ritz-Carlton (the company is discreetly owned by Marriott hotels) has mastered the art of balancing its own brand culture with a uniquely local vibe. Within the company, the poster property is the Ritz-Carlton in Dallas where celebrity chef Dean Fearing runs an independent restaurant within the hotel that is widely seen as one of the best places to eat in the country. There are no white cloths on Fearing’s tables and the food is an elevated take on down-home Texas fare – smart but unpretentious and staunchly regional, in other words. How could such a model apply to Toronto? Well, we already had something like it in the high-end Canadiana on the menu at Canoe, a restaurant with a proven appeal to the financial district’s hungry suits. At this point, the stars begin to align. Tom Brodi had worked at Canoe for 11 years as executive chef Anthony Walsh’s right hand. At 35, he was more than due for a kitchen of his own, the city’s most eligible cook. And while not a hotel man, he was used to the rich corporate culture of the Oliver Bonacini organization that owns Canoe. In January 2010, George MacNeill and Ritz-Carlton Toronto’s general manager, Tim Terceira were seen dining at Canoe several times. “In February, Tim called me up,” says Brodi, “and by April, I’d signed. I liked the fact that they wanted me to use my connections with local suppliers. And there was an opportunity to put my own imprint on it, to use a little of my Hungarian background on the menu.” Not that corporate education was neglected. Brodi was flown to half a dozen key Ritz-Carlton properties to study room service, breakfast and restaurant systems, even to a ranch and slaughterhouse in Kansas for a lesson in raising beef. He was also exposed to the company philosophy, the little “credo cards” that all employees must carry reminding them they are “ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen.” This January, three weeks before opening, a team of 38 experts from other Ritz-Carlton properties as far away as Moscow and Asia arrived for “the countdown,” an intense live training period designed to bring service up to company standards in every aspect of the hotel. Where the restaurant, now called TOCA by Tom Brodi, was concerned, that meant detailed scrutiny of every ingredient of every dish, of each cocktail in its bar, of the manner and attitude of every front-of-house employee. By the time the hotel opened on February 16, everything was supposed to be running as smoothly as Brodi’s silken lobster bisque. I waited until March to pay my first visit, a mid-week lunch. The restaurant looked handsome, floating above its own bar at the top of a broad flight of stairs. It seats 120 and centres around a glass cheese cave where $250,000 of mostly Canadian cheeses from Cheese Boutique age in cool splendour. The place was busy with Bay Street suits who had made the unaccustomed journey across the great divide of University Avenue and were tucking into massive steaks, cute Canoe-like takes on classic Canadiana (for example, fish and chips of battered lobster) and occasional Hungarian moments like a fluffy fried-dough lngos decorated with New Brunswick smoked salmon, crme frache, seedlings and fried garlic chips. One or two problems became more apparent on a subsequent dinner visit. Music from the bar below, where ace bartender Moses McGintee has created a fine cocktail program, is obtrusively loud in the front part of the restaurant. So many friendly, zealous members of staff came to our table that the normal rhythms of service were disrupted. But Brodi’s food was often terrific. I loved my hearty starter of juicy crab meat tossed with bone marrow and fennel and gratined in the split marrowbone. I felt the same way about a proudly homespun stew of incredibly tender Quebec piglet with root vegetables and delicate, pan-browned sptzle served with a side of sweet-spiced red cabbage. (Click here for a more detailed review of TOCA.) Is “stew” what you expect to find in a five-star property? Not at the Ritz in London (no relation) but here in North America, yes it is. Ritz-Carlton has created TOCA to play in the same suave but unbuttoned league as, say, Nota Bene and Luma. Some citizens who were hoping it would take the place of the late lamented Truffles in terms of hushed, old-world gentilesse will be disappointed but I have a feeling it will do well. It will certainly be interesting to see how it fits into the emerging neighbourhood. Where Toronto hotels are concerned, the energy has now moved south from Yorkville to the deep downtown south of King. We already had luxe boutiques Le Germain and the Soho down here, both with good restaurants that somehow never show up on the city’s radar. The Thompson hotel opened last year, following the chain’s usual pattern of bringing in a star chef from outside – in this case, Scott Conant of Scarpetta in New York; but Toronto has given the room a very cold shoulder. The next couple of years will bring us the Shangri-La, currently promising a version of Manhattan chef David Chang’s Momofuku, and the Trump hotel, where the latest gossip whispers of a restaurant by local man Todd Clarmo, who spent most of the last decade as an apparatchik on the Oliver Bonacini executive but without a long-term kitchen of his own. What kind of nosh Charles Khabouth will build into his edgy Bisha boutique hotel on Blue Jays Way is anyone’s guess. Will TOCA and the coming generation of hotel restaurants break the curse and finally take back their place in the urban landscape? Perhaps they can at least help to lure the city away from its infantile infatuation with Nonna’s gnocchi or Billy-Bob’s burgers. [venue_info venue=toca ]