Restaurant names that need to be explained to make any sense are either cleverly exclusive or deeply annoying. It depends, I suppose, on whether you’re in the know. C5 opened last month at the Royal Ontario Museum, tucked up under the soaring, pointy eaves of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. The name sounds like buttons you push on a jukebox or vending machine, until someone explains it’s short for Crystal Five, a clearer reference to the restaurant’s location on the fifth floor of a structure shaped like five interposed polyhedrons. But as those who remember JK ROM will attest, the museum has a fetish for acronyms and abbreviation was inevitable. Which is a shame. C5 is such a blandly forgettable name for a room that is anything but.

I first saw it in mid-May, when there was still scaffolding up and our little group of chefs and administrators had to wear steel-toed galoshes and hard hats (the latter providing protection from a stray pigeon that had found its way into the space). I was drawn to the angular, slanting windows and the unusual view of the metal roof on the original 1914 building (future plans include a terrace for outdoor dining) and, beyond it, the top storey of the Royal Conservatory of Music’s own dazzling renovation and new concert hall. But C5’s chef designate, 33-year-old Teddy Corrado, stood with his back to the light. He only had eyes for the plastic-wrapped open kitchen, gazing at his Thermomix and brand new chrome-topped plancha grill like a father watching his newborn through the nursery window, desperate to establish a rapport.

It is an exceptionally well-equipped place to cook, but it pales beside the vast kitchen in the basement next to Food Studio, the museum’s new cafeteria. That facili­ty was completed last summer to service not just the cafeteria, but also to fulfill all catering needs for parties of up to 4,000, and to handle C5’s basic prep. Corrado has been working down there for the past eight months, while the museum’s renovations were being completed, experimenting with ingredients and perfecting recipes for C5’s menus. This, he admits, is the opportunity of a lifetime, handed to him by Connie MacDonald, the ROM’s senior director of hospitality, restaurant and retail services, and by Restaurant Associates, the savvy New York company MacDonald brought in four years ago to set up and run the restaurants.

Back then, I remember wondering whether a big American corporation was quite what the museum needed, for I have a great affection for the ROM. I first stepped through its noble stone entrance almost 30 years ago, escaping the rain and with a couple of hours to kill. I loved the rotunda with its gold mosaic dome and the totem poles in the stairwells, though I don’t think I penetrated very far. The mineralogy gallery just to the left hijacked me—so many splendid specimens organized in a traditional Victorian way, packed close to impart the maximum amount of know­ledge. In those days, people still thought of a museum as an intellectual resource rather than a place of entertainment. Space was to be filled with as much of the collections as possible, not left empty as some kind of architectural self-indulgence. But that was before the great dumbing down of the 1990s, before the ROM decided its target audience should no longer be adults but children with alarmingly curtailed attention spans.

The ’90s did see one improvement to the museum: the opening of JK ROM. The kitchen was small and under-equipped and the lack of its own street entrance meant evening events were a logistical challenge, with extra security needed to usher guests through the museum. Still, Kennedy achieved a great deal, putting the museum on the city’s culinary map, and bringing his ecologically aware, pro-organic activism to the menus. JK ROM lasted almost nine years, serving its last lunch on April 30, 2003. Soon after, the wreckers began to make way for the Crystal, and the museum entered a new culinary dark age, with the only food available coming from a Druxy’s franchise in the basement. MacDonald, meanwhile, was not sitting idle. “I was on a committee of senior management and we tendered the business,” she recalls. “There was little response from Cana­dian companies. Maybe people were scared by the size of the undertaking—large events, the restaurant, the 350-seat Food Studio. Jamie Kennedy thought about it for a long time, but it felt too big. In the end, Restaurant Associates was the perfect choice. Jamie came to New York with us to meet them. He said he couldn’t leave us in better hands.”