Episode 3
· 51:12
We wanna make delicious food. And how do we do that? We do that by focusing on the ingredients. The food coming in the back door is of the utmost importance. You need the best mushrooms, the best leeks, you need the best fish, you need the best beef, which is why we break everything whole animal and have butchers on the team is because you can't get great beef if it shows up in a box in a bag.
Ryan Donovan:If you want the best, they come from really close by, and it's not more complicated than just because food doesn't travel well.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Hey, everyone. Welcome to Tasting Notes Toronto by Insider Wine, the podcast where I speak with the restaurant owners, somms, and winemakers making Toronto's food and wine scene so exciting. I'm Alex Abbott Boyd, somm and founder of Insider Wine, a wine importing agency based in Toronto. In this episode, I sit down with Ryan Donovan of Richmond Station in Downtown Toronto. We got into everything from how to create a culture that keeps a restaurant vibrant and thriving for over a decade, why Ryan is so passionate about going direct to the farmer for all ingredients, whether they be mushrooms, cows, or back vintage chardonnay.
Alex Abbott Boyd:We got into the nuts and bolts of opening a restaurant and the most important things to look for when choosing a location, as well as how to balance working and hospitality while also prioritizing family life. If you love great food or wine or have ever thought you wanted to open a restaurant, this is an episode for you. Here's my conversation with Ryan Donovan. Brian, thank you so much for being here.
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. My pleasure.
Alex Abbott Boyd:To kick things off, would you be able to share just a little bit about who you are, what you do, and how you came to be doing it?
Ryan Donovan:Go ahead. My name is Ryan Donovan, and I co own Richmond Station Restaurant. Here in Toronto, we're right in the downtown core, not far from the Eaton Centre. We're kinda sandwiched between the ballet and the opera and Massey Hall, And our restaurant's been around for thirteen years. I'm a sommelier and a chef by training.
Ryan Donovan:I started in restaurants when I was about 17 or 18 years old. It was one of my first jobs. And I really enjoyed the camaraderie and how social it was. I liked that it was people facing and people focused and about people and about relationships. So I think I was attracted to it from a very young age, but I've been in restaurants for almost thirty years, and I've done just about every job.
Ryan Donovan:I started as a barback and a busboy and hauling kegs from the keg fridge to the bar patio. I really enjoyed it. I'm not eventually found my way to a restaurant that I really enjoyed being at. I love that restaurant and being there, the people there were lovely. And the owner was really great to me.
Ryan Donovan:Was a really great mentor. I remember spending weekend days with him at off-site events, out in fields cooking, and I would spend overnights at the restaurant with him sanding down shelves and doing repairs. He was really hands on and did everything himself. And it was a really good insight for me into what owning a restaurant looked like. And I really enjoyed it, and I was really committed even at that point to owning a restaurant.
Ryan Donovan:And even buying a restaurant, I looked around at buying an existing restaurant, and I was maybe 23 or 24. Just why? And I realized I didn't know anything about being a chef, and so I went to culinary school. I went to a really fun culinary school in Stratford, Ontario. Sort of like a boutique college that takes about 60 students at a time, and it's a two year program.
Ryan Donovan:And so there's, let's say, 30 students in first year and 30 students in second year. Yeah. And it's kinda like boot camp. School lasts four months, and then you spend eight months working, and then you go back for four months before schooling, and then you go back out and work, and really, really intense.
Alex Abbott Boyd:What's the name of that?
Ryan Donovan:It's called the Stratford Chet And it was on the very first day of school there that I met Carl, who's my business partner at Richmond Station. Carl and I have been friends since then. He was 17 maybe, and I was 22. We were really young. And that was a great exercise for me to learn about food and learn about the best restaurants in the world and learn about the best chefs in the world.
Ryan Donovan:That was it's as much as the Stratford Chef School is maybe a culinary school, it's not like George Brown or Conestoga or Niagara. It really is like an MBA for for chefs. You learn about Fron Empoin and Escoffier, and you learn about the great independent chefs and entrepreneurs and the great restaurants of European history. And it was a really lovely experience. I left there convinced I would be a pastry chef.
Ryan Donovan:I loved the pastry classes and got a really high mark. I loved baking bread. My chocolate work was on point. And, yeah, three weeks after graduating, I was working at a butcher shop. And at the hips of this Chilean butcher who broke all the animals down from scratch hanging on a chain.
Ryan Donovan:And that was a little shop here in Toronto called the Healthy Butcher. Okay. And Sebastian taught me everything about breaking down whole animal and making charcuterie, which was great. Made hundreds of pounds of sausage every day, and we would break down whole carcasses. They were coming right from local farms, and that was really an important piece of my introduction to buying locally.
Ryan Donovan:Sounds like
Alex Abbott Boyd:some really inspiring and incredible experiences. To take a slight step back, you said you were convinced you wanted to be a pastry chef, but weeks later, you were a butcher.
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. You know, I think like a lot of students, I just kinda took the job I was offered. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, it was a rare opportunity.
Ryan Donovan:I understood what was going on at that butcher shop. I'd watched it open. Being from Downtown Toronto, I kinda had my eye on all the spots that were opening and closing and the spaces that were available, and that was a really exciting opportunity. Okay. So I couldn't pass that up.
Alex Abbott Boyd:No. It sounds like it was an incredible experience. Hearing about that culinary program exposing you to all the great chefs of the world and what they've done, were you ever tempted to leave Toronto or to leave Canada and go get some experience in either Europe or The US?
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. Leaving Toronto for sure was on my radar. I thought long and hard about about going to Montreal. In particular, at the time, was all the all the rage, the Cromevskis and the pig trotters. This was before they had opened Le Caban Sucre.
Ryan Donovan:And that was such an exciting restaurant. And Picard came and worked with us at the chef's school, at Shreveport chef's school that was part of the mandate there is that chefs would travel from other parts of the world and come and work with students for a few days. So we met chefs from Scotland and Australia and Montreal. So those opportunities were always there. You know, I never really had the travel bug, to be quite honest.
Ryan Donovan:I was never that fascinated about seeing other parts of the world. I had a fantastic girlfriend, an apartment, and my cats in Toronto. Rachel and I have been married now for almost twenty years. We've been together for twenty five. And and so I I thought that was really important for
Alex Abbott Boyd:me Yeah.
Ryan Donovan:To stay in Toronto and and to keep my roots there. And and that served me really well, actually. I've been in Toronto all these years. And only in the last ten or so have I really gotten the interest to travel, and it's wine that's brought me there more so than food.
Alex Abbott Boyd:When did wine start to enter into the picture for you?
Ryan Donovan:You know, those early days at the Stratford Chef School was probably the beginning of my introduction to wine. Wine had been a part of my life working in restaurants before I went to chef school, and I have some good memories of those moments. But it was really at Stratford Chef School that I first was exposed to wine and wine education. The Yeah. Wine teacher when I was there was a living legend.
Ryan Donovan:His name is Jacques Marie. He helped create the VQA. He wrote the very first wine textbook in Ontario that had any consideration for what was happening in Ontario. And Jacques was a French chef. Okay.
Ryan Donovan:He spoke with a very thick French accent. And he had come through culinary to wine and to become a wine educator and a sommelier, but he told great stories about mom working in the kitchens in Paris and in France. And he had just an infectious way of talking about wine. It was very clear to him and being a student of his that wine and food made sense together, that wine was just a form of food. And maybe you ordered it on a different menu, and it always came in a bottle, but it was no different than ordering an appetizer, ordering a Maine, or deciding whether or not to have dessert.
Ryan Donovan:The same. I just went on a trip to Alsace with Carl and Hayden, my business partners, and all three of us are chefs by trade, and all of us love wine. And Yeah. It was a great trip. We ate at restaurants and walked around vineyards and hung out with winemakers and ate great food and ordered great bottles, and that all made so much sense.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. Yeah. Especially in Europe where it is so much just a part of the table and a part of the culture. Yeah. Were there any bottles that kind of early on did get you really excited?
Ryan Donovan:I I definitely have early memories of bottles. The wines themselves, I'll tell you about them. They were not great wines, but they were great people that I was spending time with, and they were special moments for that reason. And I still really think about wine emotionally Yeah. That way.
Ryan Donovan:And even when I think about it at Richmond Station, people ask me often, how do you pair this dish with this food? And yet, questions like that. And I still tend to lean towards pairing wines with people more than with food. But those early days for me, you know, I remember a bottle of wine that we drank a lot of in Stratford. Carl and I and my wife would come visit us and the other friends we had in school.
Ryan Donovan:The wine from Margaret River in Australia called Ringbolt, and you can still get Ringbolt. Today. Yeah. You can still get Ringbolt. And you know, it probably still tastes exactly the same way.
Ryan Donovan:I mean, it's a wine that I would imagine is probably made more by formula than than by harvest Yeah. You know, conditions or seasonality. But I think really fondly about that wine. And my my wife and I still laugh and joke about it, and I see the label and I think about it really fondly. A lot of my early food memories and wine memories are are like that.
Ryan Donovan:Right? They're about they're about the people I spent time with. And, you know, another bottle my wife and I drank a lot when we were young, just getting to know each other. And in our first apartment, we drank a lot of a wine called Chateau de Gourguise, which was a Minervois. It was a Carignan from Languedoc.
Ryan Donovan:And I still think about that region and that Garigue and that that structure Yeah. Of deep brooding wines that are herbaceous and elevated in alcohol and just dry, dry, dry. I think about those really fondly. And it's, again, just a still a lovely joke between my wife and I. And so those are the bottles that I came to drink early on when I came to wine.
Ryan Donovan:And it really taught me the power of wine. Right? The idea that you can share these moments and the wine can anchor those moments or or frame those moments or just help you remember those moments.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. That's beautiful. And especially as someone who absolutely loves Australian wine, I'd love to hear that it was Margaret River that got you got you hooked initially. As you approach trying to learn more about wine, especially after you left culinary school, it it can be so intimidating. There's so many regions, so many styles.
Alex Abbott Boyd:I've never even had Minervoir wine before. I've studied it, but I've never even had it. So I would be curious, like, how you went about structuring your learning.
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. Really unstructured, I would say. There's been periods of my wine education where I have sought out structure, registered for courses, taken some courses, practiced for exams. Yeah. But the best learning I do today, just like the best learning I did in the early days, was always just being with winemakers at the winery.
Ryan Donovan:Being in the cellar, being in the vines, being on the crush pad. Sometimes that involves wine, tasting wine. But often for me, today, and in the early days too, it's really just pointing at things and being like, well, what is that? Yeah. You know, when when you see a sorting table for the first time, you get a pretty good understanding of what happens to the fruit when it arrives from the field to the winery.
Ryan Donovan:Like, how they put it on the sorting table. And then you see a crusher and you're like, oh, okay. Well, after you sort it, then you crush it. Okay. I got it.
Ryan Donovan:Oh, and then you have to see a few of these things, whether they're concrete tanks or foudres or, you know, traditional bariques. Stainless steel, you see this stuff around and the hoses and the equipment and the carts and the bottling lines. And similar in the vineyard. Right? You go in the winter when the vines are dormant.
Ryan Donovan:You go before they flower. You go when they flower. You go at harvests. And you have these moments where you see the vines and you see the plants and you see the equipment. And the whole while, the winemaker is narrating for you Yeah.
Ryan Donovan:What they're doing or what's happening. And to be quite honest, I would lose 90% of what they were saying, and I'd be fixated on one question that I had and one thing I couldn't figure out. And I'd missed everything that they were saying. But you do that enough times, and then eventually you figure it out. Yeah.
Ryan Donovan:And that that passion or that process, I would say, for me started as a chef. It was the same thing when I ran the butcher shop. When we needed more chickens, and I needed a new chicken farmer, was it you when you want good food as a chef, you don't open a catalog. Yeah. You know?
Ryan Donovan:And you certainly
Alex Abbott Boyd:call up Cisco.
Ryan Donovan:You don't certainly don't take the advice of the salesperson who's like, well, trust me. I've got the right thing for you. I mean, the best way to find food as a chef is to go out and find the food. Right? And Yeah.
Ryan Donovan:Drive down rural roads and go to farmer's markets. And that's how I found food for ten years as a chef and as a butcher. And a lot of those producers we still use at Richmond Station. Those are relationships that I've been cultivating for almost twenty years. And with wine, it's the same thing.
Ryan Donovan:You you have to go out to the farm and then visit the farmer and walk around in the fields and ask questions. I remember when I was a butcher, we had a customer who would call to place a special order, and they asked me. They said, well, can you get me some duck eggs? And I said, well, I mean, probably I'll I have a duck farmer, so why don't I just call them and ask them for duck eggs? And I called the duck farmer and
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah.
Ryan Donovan:And Dale his I'll never forget his aunt. I asked him. I was like, can you get me, like, three dozen duck eggs? And he said, maybe. And I was like, what do you mean maybe?
Ryan Donovan:Like, who would know if not you? Like, why not why is it maybe? And he was like, well, it depends how many ducks I need. Like and I was like, oh, yeah. I guess the eggs become the ducks.
Ryan Donovan:And if you need more ducks, then you need all the eggs. And Yeah. If you don't have enough demand for ducks, then you've got extra eggs. And there's something about just being that close to food and being able to ask those questions without any ego that really helps you understand what's happening. Yeah.
Ryan Donovan:And it's the answers are simpler than you think. Yeah. And I find being out in the vineyard and being at the winery with the winemakers just asking those things is the most exciting way to learn. And I say it's unstructured because I think it is just you just go visit and you spend time there. And eventually, that brought me to travel internationally, and I continue to feel like that's the best learning that I do.
Alex Abbott Boyd:You know, we're so lucky here in Toronto having so many wineries that are just within one or two hour drive from here. Did you ever actually work a harvest or work for a day, a week, a month at any of the wineries around here, or was it purely just visiting?
Ryan Donovan:Purely visiting, I would say. Last year, I spent some time on the sorting table at sixteen Mile Cellars in Creekshores in West Niagara. Morgan was kind enough to invite Linda and I to go spend the day there. And, again, just so much learning, seeing the totes come in and get dropped at one end of the sorting table, and you're sorting for fruit. And I feel like I picked out very little, and it was a great indication of the quality of the fruit in the first place.
Ryan Donovan:And that's an that an old adage you hear in the wine industry. Right? All the good work happens in the vineyard.
Alex Abbott Boyd:And Mhmm.
Ryan Donovan:What, honestly, on the sorting table and then downstream of where I was working, it felt like it was a relatively simple process, which I'm sure it's not.
Alex Abbott Boyd:I'd love to hear more about how Richmond Station came to be. You mentioned you met Carl in culinary school. You had been even looking to buy a restaurant. What was the process? What was the inspiration?
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. I don't know how long this podcast is gonna be, but that's a process that I yeah. That's a process that I loved. I had been ever since, let's say, 2027. I had been sort of seeking out a spot to build my own restaurant.
Ryan Donovan:At that point, I knew nothing about wine. I knew a little bit about running a business. I'd worked for enough small business owners that I'd seen a balance sheet and seen a profit loss statement. I'd managed people and managed some difficult employee situations. I'd bought things before and paid for things before.
Ryan Donovan:I I knew how to deal with suppliers and all that stuff. I was like, I think I'm ready for this. And I'm glad nothing really went through at that stage, but I guess that's just to say I'd had the bug and I knew that's the direction I wanted to go in. Yeah. Even at that time, I knew I wasn't gonna be satisfied with any job long enough to dissuade me from wanting to do it myself.
Ryan Donovan:Mhmm. And when Carl Carl was working in New York, he went to work for Daniel Ballude. He spent years working for Daniel Ballude in New York, which was a great education for him. And so while he was in New York working with Daniel Ballude, was here running this butcher shop and developing a whole animal culinary program. And Daniel Balloude actually bought a restaurant in Vancouver that had been quite famous at the time called Feeny's and opened a location in Vancouver.
Ryan Donovan:And Carl's from the West Coast. And so this was an opportunity for him to go home after having been away for many years. Yeah. And Carl was on the original opening team for Danielle Balloude's Vancouver outpost. And that restaurant was sort of doomed from the beginning only because of the two thousand eight financial collapse.
Ryan Donovan:They barely got up and running, and then the market plummeted, and 2008 happened. Daniel believed Vancouver didn't pan out as a result. And Carl called me and said, well, you know, I'm I'm kind of free now. I could go back to New York. I could go to Paris.
Ryan Donovan:I could do whatever. I said, well, can you come to Toronto and crash on the couch for a bit, hang out with us, and see if you find anything you like? And to make a long story shorter, Carl basically found a home in Toronto, which was great. He met his wife Julia, found a great job. And him and I started cooking together.
Ryan Donovan:We were able to connect working together at a place called Cowbell, which was a small 40 seat whole animal butchery restaurant in Parkdale. And it was a great opportunity to be on the same team, Carl and I together. It was a very small restaurant. We were resurrecting our way out of the financial collapse. And so him and I, with the help of a handful of other people, basically did everything.
Ryan Donovan:We built all the menus, prepped all the food, cooked all the services, washed all the dishes. And we parlayed that foundation in our friendship and working together into another restaurant owned by somebody else. This was a spot on Wellington called Marvin. And we ran Marvin for about eighteen months, and it was much bigger. It was about a 140 seats with a private dining room and the patio.
Ryan Donovan:And here we got to hire everybody, build all the menus, basically revamp everything from scratch, design the plates, buy all the cutlery. And we managed all the things. The compressors didn't work. The tax wasn't getting paid. The people who'd been running the company before us had sort of bankrupted it, for lack of a better word.
Alex Abbott Boyd:And so
Ryan Donovan:the CRA was involved. Bank accounts were getting frozen. It was dark days. You know, they bounced payroll at one point, and this was all the people we had hired. Alright.
Ryan Donovan:And so, you know, promises had to get made and fences had to be mended. And so we got to do all those things, and that was a great lesson. Like, what an amazing education that was.
Alex Abbott Boyd:It sounds incredible, but if I had essentially built several restaurants and been through a financial crisis, it might give me pause about opening my own restaurant. Yeah.
Ryan Donovan:Maybe I should have paused. Yeah. But Maybe I didn't have the wisdom for that. I don't know. I still have so much passion for all those things.
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. I think even now having survived COVID at Richmond Station, I'm no less Yeah. Passionate about restaurants. Anything, even more so. I think hospitality has an incredible capacity to change people for the better, to enrich people's days, their lives, their afternoons, their meals, their work lives.
Ryan Donovan:Hospitality can have a real impact on people. I'm still passionate about that. Yeah. So we were at Marvin. Carl went away for sort of three weeks on a vacation, air quotes.
Ryan Donovan:And nobody knew at the time, but he was away filming Top Chef. And he won Top Chef. And he came back and was like, hey, I won. And so then and then we kinda knew, you know, I I Rachel and I had some money stashed away. Karl had his winnings from the show.
Ryan Donovan:We had, at this point, I wanna say learned just about everything you can learn before you do it yourself, before you start. And so we went about diligently looking for the right location, and we looked at probably 60 locations. Roncesvale, Danforth, Queen West, Ossington, which was still just a a new sort of part of Toronto.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. Were you set on downtown or
Ryan Donovan:you're all up in San Not at all. Actually, we looked at the current location where Richmond Station is now, months before we said yes to it. We walked away from it, to be quite honest, because I didn't wanna be downtown, neither did Carl. We were never downtown. Who hangs out downtown?
Ryan Donovan:Alright. But at the same time, we had a really strong business plan, and that location checked all the boxes.
Alex Abbott Boyd:What what were some of the boxes on that plan?
Ryan Donovan:A silly one is that we didn't want there to be a lot of stairs because we butcher only whole animal, and cows are really heavy, and pigs are really heavy. And we had run a location in the past where you have to walk those carcasses up and down a flight of stairs. Yeah. And it's too much work. So Ground Floor access was for us kind of key.
Ryan Donovan:Mhmm. We also wanted to be near transit. We knew that the show that Carl was gonna win was gonna be on TV around the time we were gonna open, and that would draw people from hopefully lots of different areas. And being on transit was sort of key for us. So that could have been the speed behind a streetcar or the subway on the Danforth.
Ryan Donovan:It didn't necessarily have to be downtown, but that for us was a check mark. You know, parking and and transit. And then Main Floor access so that we could Preach. Keep them bring the carcasses into the meat locker pretty easily. We knew we wanted to be around 80 seats.
Ryan Donovan:Carl and I both had seen 40 seat restaurants and 50 seat restaurants and 100 seat restaurants. And forty, fifty seats is really hard. Even if you're really busy and you're really successful, you are doing everything yourself. You have to do everything yourself. When you get to be eighty, ninety seats, you're doing as much work, but there's a little bit more revenue.
Ryan Donovan:And so if you need to hire an HVAC engineer or a commercial plumber Yeah. And those bills can be 3 or $4,000, that's really hard to handle when you're a 40 seat restaurant. It's a little easier to get the front door fixed and get the grease trap pumped on a regular basis. Like, these are just nuts and bolts restaurant things that are fixed costs with high price, high high value.
Alex Abbott Boyd:That sounds like that experience coming in real handy.
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. Right? And so, you know, the size was right for that location. It was great. And that was the right price for us.
Ryan Donovan:That's about what we could afford. Okay. So this exact sort of four or five block radius where we're in now has really developed since we started here. Like, Alo Group wasn't a thing at the time. Tarrone wasn't down here except over on Adelaide.
Ryan Donovan:The Chase wasn't here. Even Oliver and Bonaccini, like, of course, they had canoe.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Did you think it could work in the way the neighborhood was back then? Or were you hoping that it would get developed a little bit more?
Ryan Donovan:Both. If you go to our website on the very first page, that's how we talk about Richmond Richmond Station. It's a neighborhood restaurant. This is a neighborhood.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah.
Ryan Donovan:And when we walked around this neighborhood before we signed the lease, it was the keg and Jack Astor's and Red Lobster. That's what's down here. There's lots of chains. Right? And and you see that more and more as real estate prices go up.
Ryan Donovan:And and our vision was always just to be a neighborhood restaurant. So there's a fellow having lunch at the restaurant right now while we're sitting here talking. If he's come in every day for lunch since we opened, wouldn't I be surprised.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Oh, that's incredible.
Ryan Donovan:And it's great. If there's something that's not on the menu anymore, but it's his favorite thing to eat, we'll make it. Because we know how to make it. You know?
Alex Abbott Boyd:What are the characteristics of a good neighborhood restaurant for you?
Ryan Donovan:Well, I think in a good neighborhood restaurant, you feel comfortable when you're there, and you feel like it's your spot. And I really like that. And we see that today in Richmond Station on a busy Wednesday night in November. You can come to Richmond Station in the evening, and there's gonna be people in suits celebrating a business deal. And they're gonna be next to people in Leafs jerseys who are convinced that this is the year the Leafs are gonna win the Stanley Cup.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah.
Ryan Donovan:Next to people in Raptors jerseys on their way to the game Yeah. Next to a group of friends out out, and they haven't been out in a long time. I I really like that. You can come in and spend a little bit of money or a lot of money. You can celebrate.
Ryan Donovan:You come in by yourself and post up at the bar, we see a lot of travelers who come in. And the concierge at their hotel has said, this is the place you go to have the best meal. And we noticed those people, they walk in by themselves. I love when guests walk in by themselves and they have their luggage. It's such a compliment that you would go through all that work and bring all your things, and maybe this is the first stop you've got or the last stop you've got before you leave.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah.
Ryan Donovan:So I think a neighborhood restaurant can and should be all those things. Just because you're a neighborhood restaurant doesn't mean you can't be a destination restaurant. Yeah. When I think Richmond Station, we work hard to be all those things for the right emotional reasons. Right?
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. What's the food like? Is there a certain style to the food? How do you think about catering to everyone from the celebrating business group to the couple with their two year old?
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. I think that's easy. Everybody that you just described, everyone we just talked about, all those people just wanna eat delicious food. Yeah. And so that's really our mandate.
Ryan Donovan:We wanna make delicious food. And how do we do that? I we do that by focusing on the ingredients. I think, like, a winemaker might say, all the work happens in the vineyard and you need the best fruit to arrive at the crush pad to have a chance of making the best wine. The same is true for a chef.
Ryan Donovan:The food coming in the back door is of the utmost importance. You need the best mushrooms, the best leeks, you need the best fish, you need the best beef, which is why we break everything whole animal and have butchers on the team is because you can't get great beef if it shows up in a box in a bag. Yeah. You just can't. You have to go to the farm, and you have to walk around and meet the farmer, and then you have to say to them, I'll just come get it, or I'll just pick it up at the abattoir, which we do.
Ryan Donovan:We have a refrigerated van, and we drive to the abattoir, and we pick up the meat ourselves, and we control the process there. Right? So great ingredients is the focus, and that's gotta be primary. So for us, that's what drives the food. Look.
Ryan Donovan:If after that, what we make is inspired by Indian cuisine and maybe the sauce has a little bit of curry in it, I think that belongs in Toronto. That belongs at Richmond Station. And if what happens is the potatoes are rolled up into gnocchi and we make a dish that's really rustic and Italian, I think that belongs in Toronto as well, and that belongs at Richmond Station. We have a killer burger. We have an amazing vegetarian menu.
Ryan Donovan:We love cooking for vegans. Please tell us you have allergies. We're so good at that. Tell us what you wanna eat, And we'll do that. We obviously do a beautiful tasting menu.
Ryan Donovan:So six, seven courses, and you can get that anytime. The menu changes every two weeks. But we're driven by those that focus on great ingredients, and then excellent technique is the next most important thing for us. So having cooks that are really engaged, they wanna travel, they wanna learn, they're reading cookbooks. They're fascinated by techniques maybe that they find online.
Ryan Donovan:We've got all the gadgets. The charcoal gadgets, the smoking gadgets, the sous vide gadgets Yeah. And all that stuff. And that makes it fun. Right?
Ryan Donovan:Because then you can just get the best thing for that ingredient. Sometimes the best thing for an ingredient is to do nothing to it. The absolute if I'm allowed to say the best thing to eat, the best thing to eat is just an oyster. Just open an oyster and eat an oyster. It doesn't need anything.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Oysters and martinis are probably my favorite meal.
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. You know? And so and so sometimes food, when you get great ingredients, it it tells you what to do. Yeah. And sometimes it tell you not to do anything or not to do much.
Ryan Donovan:And so we try not to tell the ingredients what to do. We try to let them tell us what to do. And I think that can be respected at every price point no matter what the occasion is.
Alex Abbott Boyd:This level of passion for your ingredients and the level of effort that you're going to, it's something that I hear more often from places that are aspiring to be the very best that are trying to get a star. I'm curious. Is it really hard to put in that level of work and then to keep it as a neighborhood restaurant from a price point perspective? Were you ever tempted, especially with Carl's experiences, to shoot for fine dining?
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. That that's a great question. I would say that we we do aspire to have a star, and we do aspire for aspects of what you'd call fine dining. I think we probably will never put white tablecloths
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah.
Ryan Donovan:On the tables. I just that's just gonna make the restaurant more expensive. Yeah. And if anything, I'd love for the restaurant to be less expensive. We fight hard to keep the value there.
Ryan Donovan:And if anything, what we risk is being too expensive. Yeah. And that is a consequence of being focused on the food we buy. And if the right mushrooms go up in price, the right mushrooms go up in price, we're not gonna get less good mushrooms because it's a better price. Yeah.
Ryan Donovan:And so being focused on quality from an ingredient point of view is reflected in the price of the restaurant. And for sure, I'd accept a good conversation about maybe that threatening our ability to be a neighborhood restaurant, but I don't think a neighborhood restaurant has to be cheap. No. And I also don't think that fine dining, quote, unquote, holds the definition for quality. I I think you could spend a really good amount of money on a white tablecloth restaurant, and the food could be of very poor quality.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yes. 100%.
Ryan Donovan:Because the ingredients are not very good quality, and and I think I think we'd both agree you paid good money for wine you didn't like that much and been blown away by the value of wine that cost far less. Yeah. I want Richmond Station to always be that bottle of wine that blows your doors off for the price. And in hospitality, we achieve that in the ingredients, but we also just achieve that with the hospitality. Yeah.
Ryan Donovan:Just being genuinely nice to people. I'm happy to see them and caring about why they're there and what they need. And and we talk to the staff about that a lot. It's a primary focus for us. It's just making sure that when people leave us, they are better than when they
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah.
Ryan Donovan:Arrived. That's not necessarily the case in a lot of restaurants. People sometimes leave restaurants upset.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. And thinking back to so many of my favorite restaurant experiences, sometimes it's the food. Sometimes it's the bottle of wine that over delivers. But more often, it's the incredible hospitality that you got there.
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. And it can be all those things. Right? And I think in a neighborhood restaurant, you get to focus on all those things.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. Yeah. So switching gears to the bottles of wine on the menu. Yeah. Tell me about the wine program at Richmond Station.
Ryan Donovan:The wine program at the restaurant is really focused on our locale and our regionality. So just like the food, I'd say, what I try to elevate on the wine list is the sense of place. So our entire by the glass program is represented by Ontario wines. So let's say that's four four whites and four reds and an orange and a rose and two traditional mother bubblies, two dessert wines. I don't know where I'm at there.
Ryan Donovan:Fourteen, fifteen wines. Those are all those bottles are open, and they're all Ontario. And those are producers that I know well. I visit them regularly. We walk the vines.
Ryan Donovan:We hang out in the cellar. And we tell their stories in the dining room and the vintages might change and the bottlings might change. And we might swap out one winery for another for a few months on the list. But the focus there is to pour local wines because the food is local. Why is the food local?
Ryan Donovan:Well, because we want to have the best food. And there's no secret to that. If you want the best mushrooms, they come from really close by. Yeah. And it's not more complicated than just because food doesn't travel well.
Ryan Donovan:We have lemons and limes at the restaurant, for sure, in the part of the bar program, but we don't serve tomatoes out of season. You know what I mean? And we serve a lot of beets in the winter. And so when you're pouring wines that are local and you're serving food that's local, like, that works really well together. We've always had a focus on Ontario wines, but we've really dug into that since the pandemic.
Ryan Donovan:We've really elevated our commitments there, and it's been really well received by guests, of course, by the winemakers, but by our staff too. Yeah. And the kitchen, it makes a lot of sense.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Have you noticed a turning point either lately since COVID with people being more receptive to the local wine?
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. For sure. We have always wanted to support local more.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah.
Ryan Donovan:But prior to the pandemic, the oxygen just wasn't there, table side. Lots of negative opinions about Ontario wines leading all the way up to 2018, 2019. And some of those lingered today, but there's far fewer of them. It was it was after the pandemic that it really clicked in for me that I thought guests were ready for us to make that change. And part of the reason is that during the pandemic when the LCBO's were locked down and nobody could go anywhere, the sort of millennials, 30 that were all in their condos working from a home or maybe back with their parents trying to navigate life, they all signed up for mailing lists and subscriberships with Big Head, with Stratus, with Pearl Morissette.
Ryan Donovan:And these wineries would do video tutorials, and Jacob or Andre or Gabe would jump online and teach a little lesson Evening. The evening that the case of six wines had showed up on your porch. And so we found when we reopened the restaurant and we were doing full service again, tableside, guests were asking for Ontario wines. They were ordering
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah.
Ryan Donovan:The Ontario wines we had. And not only that, they were saying things like, oh, I know Francois, or I met Gabe online during the pandemic. And so that was really encouragement for me that, okay. Now's the time to flip the script on this and just go whole hog. We'll get rid of all the international wines and pour only local.
Ryan Donovan:And look. That sounds like a huge gamble, but the truth is we could always reprint the menu and change our mind. We knew we were testing something, but we haven't looked back at all. It was it's been such a great initiative.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Do you think there's also coinciding with the pandemic and its effects just an increase in quality?
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. The increase in quality is so exciting. Where does that come from? I think it just comes from more vintages under their belt. I think Francois at Pro Morissette is a really great example.
Ryan Donovan:When Pro Morissette first got started and Francois was here from Burgundy, that was a chardonnay pinot noir project. Mhmm. And now that's a Cab Franc and Riesling project. Yeah. And I'm putting it too simply, by all means.
Ryan Donovan:I'm putting it far too simply, but they still make Pinot and they still make chard, but the cab francs, the Rieslings really sing. They're making lamb burgers now. These are things that no self respecting burgundy producer would be caught dead doing. Yeah. But that's what Ontario needs.
Ryan Donovan:That's what Creekshire needs. That's what their property offers them. Yeah. Like, everybody deserves the right to be better at the thing they do as they do more of it. And so how much farther along are we in Ontario just with the winemakers we have now, with the fruit we have now, than we were ten years ago.
Ryan Donovan:I could name so many people, but we're also getting into second generations for some of these growers. Jacob Lipinski, a big head working with his dad, Andre, the Witty family at Thirteenth Street taking over there, Dean taking over from Gilles at Stratus. So we're starting to see torches get passed from one winemaker to the next. We're getting into second generation winemakers here, and maybe those new winemakers are taking with them the experiences that they learned from their predecessor, but also more willing to ferment in clay or ferment in concrete or not necessarily filter. A lot of m
Alex Abbott Boyd:four when I visited Stratus.
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. Yeah. And I remember going when they had just one. Yeah. And they were like, we just tried one.
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. And they're telling a story about how it leaked the first time they put wine in it. Like, these things happen. Right? So is the wine they're making from the m four in that better now?
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. But that's to be expected. Right?
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. Yeah. It just takes time. Right? You gotta figure out what to plant, how to plant it, where to plant it, and that takes time.
Alex Abbott Boyd:And then once you figured out all of that, then you need the vines to mature, and then you need to get better at the winemaking. So it it makes a ton of sense that we're at this really exciting time where all of those factors are really coming together. Yeah. Relatedly, do you think this trade war we're having with The US where we just can't access US wines, what effect do you think that's having?
Ryan Donovan:Great.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Are are people buying any US wines off your by the bottle list now?
Ryan Donovan:And so I I think the tariff situation there has only been good, in my opinion. Certainly, guests at Richmond Station are not suffering. If you come in and you want American wine, we have some left. But more to the point, if you wanna buy Ontario, no one's better suited to help you with that than us. We have all these by the glass Ontario wines, but we also have an incredible Ontario seller collection.
Ryan Donovan:We've got Ontario bottles that go back to 02/2008, 02/2006, 02/2011, 02/2012, all the way back. And we have them all listed by by vintage in a separate section of the wine list. And so if you don't like Ontario wine, you need to come and see us because we can change that for you. And and it might mean you need to start by drinking 15 year old Chardonnay. But you can tough job.
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. Yeah. Not a not a not a tough thing, but, like, go try going and getting 15 year olds burgundy.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. Good luck.
Ryan Donovan:Brett's gonna cost you an arm and a leg, but you can drink 15 year old Chardonnay from Ontario at incredible value.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. That sounds great. I've had 20 year old Ontario Cabernet Sauvignon. That was pretty pretty killer.
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. Right? Yeah. Yeah. So fun.
Ryan Donovan:So I I we love talking about that at Richmond Station. Our somm team's really well suited to help you drink champagne or drink Barolo or get Sancerre if that's what you come in needing and that's what you want.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Did you intentionally hold back some bottles so that your menu would get that vintage depth, or is that just there's a couple bottles that no one ever bought and they're still just they're just little hidden gems?
Ryan Donovan:You know, actually, comes from the relationships we've built with the growers and with the winemakers. I often will just message them and ask them, like, do you have something to hold around that you wanna sell? Do you have six bottles or eight bottles? And so we have a chef's menu that changes every two weeks at the restaurant. It's seven courses, and there's a wine pairing that goes with it.
Ryan Donovan:So we change the wine pairing every two weeks as well. And often, I'll pour some old Ontario wines on that pairing, and we'll buy 12 bottles. And maybe at the end of the two weeks, we'll have gone through nine bottles. Yeah. And so there's three left, and I can kinda sneak them on the buy the bottle list.
Ryan Donovan:And we've got on the menu coming up next week some twenty fourteen Charles Baker Riesling. And Charles' Rieslings are legends in Ontario. He's such a fun dude and has been a good friend of the restaurant for so long. And so to scoop some twenty fourteen vineyard specific Riesling that's got 12 years of age on it, You can go find that stuff from Mosul if you want to, but you'll pay a lot more for it. Yeah.
Ryan Donovan:And you won't be supporting Charles.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Oh, that's incredible.
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. It's fun.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Switching gears just very slightly when you're just drinking wine for yourself. So it's not for work. You're not tasting wine with an importer like me. What does that look like?
Ryan Donovan:It looks like champagne. Does it? As What? It looks like champagne as much as it can be. Yeah.
Ryan Donovan:You know, my my wife is my partner in crime and life, and she she likes to drink the way I like to drink. And we like we've grown up together. We've been together since we were just young. So I think our our we're really in sync in terms of what we wanna drink together. And I love drinking champagne.
Ryan Donovan:You know, I read Peter Lehme's book a little while ago and sought about learning about champagne by reading about it and drinking the bottles while I was reading about it. And What
Alex Abbott Boyd:was the name of that book?
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. I think it's called Champagne. Oh. Or maybe it's a guide to champagne. And Peter Leem lives in champagne full time and writes about champagne.
Ryan Donovan:And he goes around champagne. It's a great resource. But I love drinking champagne. I love the texture of the bubbles and the traditional method fermentation. I I really like the complexity that comes from being able to reach for sometimes 20 year old wines or 30 year old wines, even even in a percentage, 10%, 15%, to blend into a vinclair to bring complexity.
Ryan Donovan:And then that wine is effervescent, and so it has freshness always. And maybe 40% of the blend is only a year or two old, so that also is bringing freshness. But to sneak in Yeah. Tertiary flavors like that, I think that's very similar to how I might make a salad. You know, I want fresh, crisp greens, freshly picked, freshly washed, and I want maybe a pickled vegetable in there, right, to add some sharpness, and champagne can do that.
Ryan Donovan:But then, sure, I wanna put hazelnuts on there, and I wanna roast them, and I want this nutty quality too. And so I think about how dishes are made and champagne is made like that. Know, traditional method wines have the ability to be made like that, and we do a great job of that in Ontario as well. And so, look, I don't mean to give you the impression that my wife and I are sitting at home drinking champagne all the time, but I I try not to fuss around with champagne, to be honest. Like I will open a bottle on a sundae because the raptors are playing.
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. So I mean, I think in an ideal world, you know, maybe that's that's what I get to do. But I'm also not picky. I love orange wines. I love roses.
Ryan Donovan:It's really fun to drink the Ontario stuff, and I love Ontario traditional method bubbly. I think that's a real strength for our region, especially Prince Edward County. So thirteen years is an incredible accomplishment, I feel like, for a restaurant.
Alex Abbott Boyd:So many restaurants come and go, and for whatever reason, even if they're very successful, they don't make it past ten. You've touched on a lot of the things that you're very passionate about and that you take very seriously. Is there anything else that you haven't added yet that you think might be one of the keys to success and to keeping a restaurant so vibrant thirteen years in?
Ryan Donovan:We have a few really basic rules at Richmond Station. Simple adages or premises, whatever you wanna call them. One of them, for sure, the core one is that everybody leaves the restaurant happy and wants to come back. We teach that to every staff member. We talk about it at every moment.
Ryan Donovan:Whenever we're at a crossroads or there's a situation we need to resolve, maybe we reflect on it a little bit. Coming back to that as our touch tone has always proven right, and it helps our managers deal with situations when we're not present. And it's a it's a good rule. It's a good rule for your coworkers as well. And that's, I think, really one of the hallmarks of Richmond Station is the way we treat each other on the team Yeah.
Ryan Donovan:And the way we expect each other to treat each other. Yeah. You know, that's really helpful because then you can build a team of people who expect to be treated like that. Yeah. And then they also know that they're responsible for affording that to other people.
Ryan Donovan:And so that makes for a pretty special environment. That's on purpose when you build your own business and you choose who's there and you set the tone for how people should feel when they're there and certainly when they leave, you can drive those principles. So I think for us, that's really core is making sure that people are happy.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. You haven't mentioned it explicitly, but you you do seem to really invest in your people. You know, you've invited me to taste wine with your staff, and you do that every week. Right? You give them a blind tasting and just even if they're not involved in wine, you just wanna give them a chance to, like, professionally develop and learn a little bit more.
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. I think that makes people happy. Right? Yeah. My kids are happy when I have time for them, And I can sit around and play cards with them or teach them a new card game or teach them to ride their bike or learn how to do a braid.
Ryan Donovan:I'm doing a lot of that. You know? So spending spending time with my kids, then what happens? Then your kids feel loved. Right?
Ryan Donovan:And that that and then you have a house full of love. And so the same is true in the restaurant. Right? If you spend time with people and you show them you care about them and you're invested in the things they're doing and you ask if you can help them and you ask them why they're doing it, Maybe there's a better way for them to be doing it, and you know that, and you can share that with them. So I think opportunities to get educated and continuing to grow in your education are are just as meaningful.
Ryan Donovan:I was afforded so many of those when I was young and in the industry. Some of them were intentional learning opportunities, and some of them were just opportunities to swing and miss, right, or to swing, hit a home run. We try to put people in positions where they can succeed often. And sometimes that's with us right beside them. I like the education seminars you're talking about.
Ryan Donovan:Sometimes that's not with us beside them. Sometimes that's, hey. Here are the tech sheets, and I won't be around this evening, but I trust you to take really good care of people and know everything about the wines. And the next Tuesday, I'm gonna go there. So if you wanna come with me, come along.
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. The staff love those trips when they get to be in the cellar and they get to be in the vineyard. And that's that's how I started learning about food and wine, at least in a way that really drove my passion, was being in agriculture and seeing that. Right? And so we still try to drive that home for people to get out of the restaurant and go to Montreal and take a trip, go to Peru and take a trip, go to France and take a trip, go to Greece and eat olives, go to Niagara and visit some winemakers.
Alex Abbott Boyd:And when I was just sitting around with the staff, they well, they were very welcoming Hey. To your to your first point, and they were they just seemed genuinely excited about learning about the wine and about guessing. You know, you also mentioned just now your family. You know, I think hospitality can be a really tough industry. Just from the point of view that there's a lot of long hours either in the kitchen or on the floor, on your feet, late nights, what do you think is is key to balancing working in hospitality and then being a really present and available partner and dad?
Ryan Donovan:It's great partnership for sure. Without Carl and Hayden as partners, I couldn't be at home. Yeah. But also it's my wife, Rachel. Without Rachel, I couldn't have built Richmond Station in the ways that I've contributed there.
Ryan Donovan:I couldn't have been there as much as I was. So, you know, I would in the early days of the restaurant, I was at the restaurant all the time, seventy, ninety hours a week, just, like, relentlessly. And my wife was always very encouraging. Like, go. Go.
Ryan Donovan:Like, I know you have to go. You should go. And then I would be at the restaurant, and as the 07:00, 08:00 would tick around in the evening, the staff would be like, you should go home. Go see your kids. Go home.
Ryan Donovan:Go home. I always felt like people were kind of shooing me out of one place to the next. But that all comes from such a great great place, I think. Sure. There's a few things.
Ryan Donovan:To be kind of fun about it, I think the quick answer to your question is having just one restaurant is really helpful. If I could be at Richmond Station more, I would be. And if I could be at home more, I would be. If I had a third thing in my life vying for more of that time, I think I'd be doing both of them less well. Yeah.
Ryan Donovan:So I think for me, personally, that's part of the equation. And then just having partners that have and want the same things as well. I know Carl wants to be at home with his kids, and he wants to be a present father. And so we want the same things, and that's really helpful. I could imagine that being a difficult partnership if one of us wanted three Michelin stars and worked ninety five hours a week, and the other one was like, I'm going home for story time.
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. Except. Yeah. Darn But Hayden's a partner in our business now too, and his youngest is not even two years old. And so the same now.
Ryan Donovan:Can we afford that for him? And what how can he how can he contribute back in ways that are meaningful, but but also be the dad he wants to be and be the partner he wants to be for his partner? Yeah. I think it's hard for me anyways to imagine having a healthy restaurant and being hospitable and caring and loving and in a restaurant space and not having that reciprocated at home. Think one for me, one feeds the other anyways, and I find that really beneficial.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Yeah. That that makes total sense. Yeah. What's next? Just to finish things off, it sounds like there's no more no new restaurants on the horizon, but what's keeping you excited, and what does the future of Richmond Station look like?
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. I think the future of Richmond Station, in a way that I don't mean poorly at all, is more of the same. I think for us, we can always be more excellent, and so can the food be tastier? Can we find ways to enrich people's experience that we don't do now and that we don't know about now? Are there things we can do to make people happier on their way out?
Ryan Donovan:That's probably my work and Carl's work. Hayden's work is building a team that cares about those things genuinely. You know, for me, the version of Richmond Station we have today is better than any version we've had up till today. And I like that a lot. So we'll continue to work on that.
Ryan Donovan:I think for me, professionally, I'm really fascinated by the wine journey that I've been on the last few years. Traveling and meeting winemakers has been really fun. Seeing how other wine regions tick has been really instructive. It's helped me develop the wine program at Richmond Station, especially switching to entirely by the class wines that are local. It was being in Ponte Vedra in Galicia on a rainy day, looking at wine lists that were only local Galethian wines that really helped me click that through.
Ryan Donovan:And so taking that passion and doing that here, we went to a, I went to a great restaurant in Northern Italy. We ate at a Michelin starred restaurant called La Subita Cirque, which is run by a young man named Micha Cirque, who's taken over this winery and inn and restaurant from his parents. And it was a legendary meal, but they have hundreds and hundreds of bottles on the wine list there that probably come from, like, 10 kilometers away. Not only is it only Italian, if not only Italian, 10 kilometers from there is Austria, and 10 kilometers from there the other way is Slovenia, and 10 kilometers from there the other is Friuli. And so they have these styles of wine that are hyper representative of where they are Mhmm.
Ryan Donovan:Regardless of border. So it's not even about border. It's really just about location. So continuing to travel, I think, is really important for me still because there's lots of lessons out there. I think Ontario's still a young wine region, and the winemakers are doing a really excellent job.
Ryan Donovan:And the winemakers need the support of restaurateurs. And I put myself in that category. They need restaurateurs like us to understand how the wine and the food all fits together and then to support those wines on the wine list. And there are great examples of that in so many old world and new world wine regions. So there's lots of lessons out there to learn, lots of rocks to turn over, and I like doing that stuff.
Alex Abbott Boyd:I love it. That's one of the things I love most about wine is that I can study it forever, drink a new bottle every day, and travel the world, and I still won't know half of it.
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. And when you do, there's still another vintage. Yeah.
Alex Abbott Boyd:Well, amazing. Thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure to speak with you.
Ryan Donovan:Yeah. My pleasure. Thanks for having me.
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