Michelin Men

It starts with a tomato. A tomato that’s perfectly round, perfectly plump, perfectly perfect. Of a glowing red that seems to break the colour spectrum. A tomato of rare pedigree, coddled and hand-picked in a secret greenhouse in southern Japan. A tomato of such pure sweetness its genetic code must take a chromosome or two from cotton candy.

In the three months since the uptown restaurant LSL opened, that little tomato has become its calling card. Here’s how they improve upon perfection: poach the tomato for a couple of seconds, peel off the skin, scoop out its innards and stuff it with a hash of bluefin tuna dressed with olive oil, tarragon, thyme, a zing of dried yuzu peel powder and, for a touch of heat, fermented chili. The LSL tomato sits primly in the middle of its plate in a coulis of more tomato and tarragon oil, wearing a cap of French caviar and a fleck of gold leaf. It looks vaguely ridiculous, so cute it begs to be photographed and posted. Those photos don’t capture the pleasure of slicing that perfect tomato in half and taking a bite that marries the fatty richness of the tuna with the salty extravagance of the creamy caviar and the tomato’s uncanny sweetness. The LSL tomato is both Japanese and French, fresh and complex, decadent and as simple as if it were freshly plucked from a vine. It’s new, strange, a thrill.

That tomato is why LSL is the first fine-dining restaurant in a long time to send a jolt through the city’s food scene. The fact that LSL even exists defies logic. Instead of one notable chef, it has three, the restaurant’s name an acronym of their surnames. They are Didier Leroy, the Frenchest of Toronto French chefs; Masaki Saito, of the exclusive six-seat Yorkville sushi restaurant that bears his name; and, for reasons that grow more curious by the day, Christian Le Squer, the head chef of Le Cinq, the poshest of the posh restaurants in Paris’s Four Seasons Hotel George V.

A skeptic has questions, including: Why locate LSL at Avenue and Lawrence, in an Ozempic-thin storefront wedged between a cigar seller and a day spa, instead of in Yorkville or, really, anywhere downtown? Why three chefs when most of the world’s best restaurants get by with just one? And can a restaurant—a restaurant with three chefs!—make money with only one sitting a night of 10 people, five days a week?

The man to answer those questions is William Cheng, who is behind LSL as well as the uptown omakase palace Shoushin, Sushi Masaki Saito, MSSM Yorkville and MSSM Ossington (two less-pricey Saito sushi restaurants), and a soon-to-open Yorkville ramen spot (also a Saito spin-off). Cheng is private-jet rich and seems to spend most of his time on his hobbies, which include eating, travelling to eat and collecting chefs. These three are his latest pets, and he has burned through millions to open LSL.

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The talk among the friends and influencers Cheng invited to soft-launch dinners was that LSL would be Toronto’s first restaurant to earn three Michelin stars. It was Cheng, along with Charlie’s Burgers dinner series founder Franco Stalteri, who first approached the Michelin organization about coming to Toronto, arguing that the city had restaurants that deserved those coveted stars.

With LSL, Cheng has stacked the chef deck. Saito has two Michelin stars; Le Squer has three. By that math, LSL is a shoo-in. It could work. Leroy, Saito and Le Squer proved with their tuna tomato that they can make magic together. Now they just need to do it night after night.

One way to get ahead in the fine-dining world, as has forever been the case for artists of all kinds, is to have a rich patron. Cheng’s company, Premier Candle Corporation, has a 260,000-square-foot facility in Mississauga. It’s the Canadian offshoot of Universal Candle, which Cheng’s parents founded in 1979 and now operate in Hong Kong, Vietnam and mainland China.

Cheng, who was born in Hong Kong in 1979, moved with his parents and two sisters to Vancouver in 1993, ahead of the Chinese handover. While studying business at UBC, he met his future wife, a Chinese Canadian named Stephanie Sek. Today, the couple keep homes in Toronto and Vancouver and a pied-à-terre in New York. Cheng and Premier’s CEO, Joanne Lee, helped expand the company by signing deals with Costco as well as upmarket brands like Kate Spade and Ralph Lauren. They also work on collaborations with celebrities like Céline Dion, Billie Eilish and Drake (whose candle replicates the scent of his personal cologne). After his parents returned to Hong Kong in 2016 to run Universal, Cheng stepped back from the day-to-day of Premier’s business, assuming the position of chairman. He’ll meet and schmooze clients but rarely sets foot in his factory or worries about the finer details. “I let smarter people run the company for me,” he says.

Cheng is athletic and bouncy, with a high hairline and a cherubic smile. He wears head-to-toe Louis Vuitton, gets invited to the label’s fashion shows and selects his daily outfits from a two-storey leather-and-ebony-wood-lined closet. He starts his days late—he takes meetings only in the afternoon—and mainly seems to schedule his life around meals: which restaurant he’s eating at, with whom, in what country. He tends to select friends based on the adventurousness of their palates. His eating buddies include Live Nation Canada president Erik Hoffman, Universal Music Canada CEO Jeffrey Remedios, optician Josh Josephson, and assorted past and present Raptors like Kelly Olynyk and Cory Joseph. Even his charitable work is food-oriented: Cheng sits on the Sunnybrook Foundation board and organizes an annual fundraiser called Chef’s Circle. At least once a month, he flies somewhere for business or, more often, for pleasure, taking his friends along on eating excursions. His top five restaurants are a foodie fantasy tour: Le Cinq in Paris, Kikunoi in Kyoto, Dani Maison in Naples, SingleThread Farm in Northern California and Tempura Mikawa Zezankyo in Tokyo.

Six years ago, the Chengs knocked down a bungalow near Avenue and Lawrence and built a storybook French mansion with a mansard roof, rows of soaring mullioned windows and a view of the Don River just beyond the backyard pool. It’s where they’re raising their three daughters, who range in age from a toddler to a high schooler. “My kids all love to eat. They have great palates,” Cheng notes, taking credit. Framed and signed Raptors jerseys line the hallways. Much of the basement is devoted to Cheng’s 2,500-bottle wine cellar. The cellar, like his closet, was designed by Quintessential, the same company that outfits his restaurants. For their music room, the Chengs commissioned an installation of hand-blown glass maple leaves, which are suspended from the ceiling as if fluttering in a breeze. Cheng likes to point out the coincidence—he’s a big believer in signs and luck—that the leaves number 97, the year China took back Hong Kong.

The Chengs’ home staff include a doorman-slash-bodyguard, an assistant-slash-driver, housekeepers and groundskeepers. They also have chefs on retainer, including Wing-Hong Wong, who was the sous-chef at the now-defunct Richmond Hill restaurant Judy Cuisine and currently cooks for the Chengs four days a week. “We have the number-one Cantonese chef in Canada,” Cheng insists. “I keep Chef Hong for myself. He’s not going anywhere.”

Cheng opened his first restaurant, Shoushin, in 2016, because he wanted a place nearby where he could get great omakase sushi like he’d enjoyed at New York’s Sushi Ginza Onodera. He asked Quintessential to find a slab of Japanese hinoki wood for Shoushin’s bar—the same wood used at Onodera. He installed Jackie Lin, a protégé of Seiichi Kashiwabara, the sushi master at Markham’s Zen, as chef. Three years later, Cheng planned to open an even-higher-end sushi showcase in Yorkville for Lin’s executive sous-chef, Tsuyoshi Yoshinaga. But, at the last minute, he instead offered the position to Michelin-starred New York chef Masaki Saito, who was tempted by the challenge of a new city and Cheng’s promise of his name over the door. Yoshinaga would work for Saito as sous-chef. Cheng made the switch because of Saito’s talent, but he was also operating like a ruthless marketer: he needed a name to draw customers to what was then his biggest restaurant investment. At $680 per person, Saito’s fancy fishwork would redefine prestige sushi in the city.

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In Cheng’s view, Chinese is the world’s absolute best cuisine, with French and Japanese tied for second. Some 20 years ago, his favourite local French restaurant was Didier. The midtown spot was a distillation of everything Toronto Francophiles crave: foie gras, steak frites and a flawless comté omelet, though light on classic French sauces. “My wife and I showed up at Didier,” Cheng says, “and I instantly loved it, so classic French. This guy is so old school. I felt touched by the flavours, and then I saw all these candles burning there—and I make candles—so the next day I sent, like, 600 candles, a whole pallet, enough for a year.”

Leroy had a loyal following. He had arrived in Toronto in the ’80s, fresh from cooking in some of the finest kitchens in Paris, and almost single-handedly introduced Toronto to the seasonal Mediterranean ingredients of nouvelle cuisine. He was head chef at some of the trendiest restaurants of the ’90s: Opus, Acrobat, Provence and the Fifth. In 2004, Leroy decided the moment was right to open his own place. The timing, however, was lousy: the 2008 recession made dining out in luxury restaurants less than fashionable. Then Leroy’s landlord jacked up his rent from $10,000 to $17,000. After Leroy paid his suppliers and employees, there was nothing left. He settled his debts by remortgaging his house (“I didn’t want to declare bankruptcy and make other people pay for my mistakes,” he says), and in 2013, he sold the business.

Leroy spent the next decade as a consultant for Carens Rosedale, the Muskoka J. W. Marriott, the Fifth and other restaurants. He also became a regular private chef for the Chengs. If Cheng ever wanted to open a French restaurant, he knew where to turn.

But, before the origin story of LSL truly begins, another key character needs to enter, stage left: Niv Fichman.

Fichman is a TV and movie producer, most recently of the HBO series The Sympathizer and the feature film BlackBerry. He’s also a long-time Japanophile who has visited the country more than 100 times, often for work but mainly to eat. Some friends cajoled Fichman, a committed downtowner, into trekking north for the sushi at Shoushin. At the omakase counter, he fell into a conversation with, he says, “a lovely Chinese man and his wife.” They talked about their favourite places in the world for sushi and how the couple was interested in sourcing tatami mats. A charmed Fichman invited them for dinner at his condo, which he’d renovated in a Japanese style, complete with tatami. It was only at the end of that meal at Shoushin that Fichman discovered Cheng was the restaurant’s owner.

Fichman soon became one of Cheng’s dining buddies. They’ve since taken eating trips to New York, Las Vegas, LA and Japan. On their most recent excursion, they got seats at a renowned and remote farm-to-table restaurant called Naz in Nagano, followed by four nights of dining and karaoke in Seoul. Fichman has also leveraged his Cheng connection to host group dinners at Sushi Masaki Saito.

In 2022, he asked Cheng if he could hold a private dinner at Sushi Masaki Saito for Yo-Yo Ma, who had a stop in Toronto during a world tour. Fichman has been close to Ma since the ’90s, when he produced a film series about the musician. Two days before the dinner, Saito had a medical emergency. Cheng immediately called Leroy, asking if he could step in. There was one catch: he’d need to cook using the rare and pricey Japanese ingredients that Saito had ordered for the occasion.

Leroy had less than 48 hours. He looked at the bluefin tuna, the wooden box of uni and those special little Japanese tomatoes. He’d travelled in Japan several times and admired the country’s culinary techniques, the strong discipline and tradition behind them, but this was the definition of foreign territory. He was a French chef, period. His solution for the dinner was to cook with French techniques that highlighted rather than interfered with Saito’s exquisite Japanese ingredients. Ma, he reminded himself, may be a globe-trotting musician who, like Cheng, has eaten in the world’s best restaurants, but he’s also a French citizen. Maybe it would work out after all.

That night, Fichman sat on one side of Ma, Cheng on the other. Leroy and his sous-chef served them each course over Saito’s counter, omakase style. Things seemed to be going well. “I kept seeing smiles,” says Leroy, “and more smiles.” Then, Cheng says, the most remarkable thing happened. “Yo-Yo was on the verge of tears. He was so emotional, and he said to me, ‘William, you’re the director, you directed this. To have this meal is special.’”

The dish that made Ma cry? A tomato stuffed with bluefin tuna and topped with caviar. Leroy had invented it for that night.

That Yo-Yo Ma moment sparked something in Cheng. He asked Leroy if he would recreate the concept—Japanese ingredients, French techniques—at a dedicated, permanent restaurant. Leroy would be the executive chef, and Saito would be his chief supplier—he’d recommend fish and produce, taking advantage of his relationships with Japanese exporters. There would be no more than 10 seats—Cheng firmly believes that any restaurant with more means the chef isn’t producing the best for their guests.

Leroy took a few days to respond. While he didn’t want to relive the often hellish experience of running his own restaurant, this time he’d be the executive chef, not the owner. He’d grown to trust and admire Cheng. And when would another opportunity like this come along? He said yes.

Cheng, who was on a wining-and-dining trip in Napa, called his real estate agent and asked him to find a property near Avenue and Lawrence. He wanted his newest restaurant to be within a five-minute drive of his home. Site unseen, Cheng bought the location that would become LSL. Back then, just over a year ago, they planned to name the restaurant LWS, an acronym of Leroy With Saito—or, to those in Cheng’s circle, Leroy William Saito.

Cheng decided his chefs needed inspiration. He took Saito and Leroy to Paris, where they ate at all the finest restaurants. They were especially wowed by Le Cinq. Tuxedoed servers arrive at the tables in choreographed formation to lift domes off guests’ plates. The dining room is the picture of pampered opulence, with champagne and chocolate trolleys and everything trimmed in silk, marble and gold. Le Cinq chef Christian Le Squer is a modern breed of French cook: highly academic, chasing after pure flavours and playing coy tricks on his audience—like a signature dish of a trompe-l’œil stone, meant to evoke Brittany’s rough shores. When sliced open, the stone reveals itself to be foie gras that’s been poached in miso broth and coated with charcoal miso. Leroy, Cheng and Saito were star-struck when Le Squer, upon hearing that there was a table of chefs from Canada in the room, came out to greet them and carried on a rambling chef-bonding conversation, in French, with Leroy.

Back in Toronto, the trio agreed that the benchmark they wanted to aim for was Le Cinq, if Le Cinq had access to Saito’s Japanese treasures. As renovations began, Cheng and Leroy went on a buying spree. They commissioned a range from the storied French manufacturer Molteni, which makes each professional unit to the customer’s specifications (it’s said that no two are alike). Leroy wanted two burners, a generous flat-top, a big oven, a plate warmer and a charcoal grill—he imagined his menu would sometimes include Wagyu and yakitori—with a convenient box to store the grill’s spent ashes. Price tag: $125,000.

Cheng’s only guideline for LWS: everything needed to be the best. Leroy flew to the Royal Limoges porcelain factory, where he selected the restaurant’s dishware, each piece special-ordered and handmade. Flatware would come from Christofle, stemware from Baccarat and Zalto. Cheng’s Quintessential designers would clad the restaurant’s walls in Venetian plaster, the hood over the range in copper and the wall behind the range in sheets of book-matched Orobico marble. The building’s façade would be covered in layers of microcement panels that evoked rippling waves. In the restaurant’s entrance, guests would be greeted by a six-foot-tall solid-bronze sculpture by a Seattle motorcycle welder turned artist named Matt Adams.

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Cheng wants people to make pilgrimages to Toronto just to experience this restaurant

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The narrow room would be set up like an omakase restaurant, with seating along a bar that faced the open kitchen. Cheng wanted the bar made from a single slab of hinoki—the same cypress wood his designers had installed at Shoushin and Sushi Masaki Saito. Hinoki is traditionally used to construct Japanese temples and palaces and is prized for its therapeutic fragrance. The new restaurant’s slab, at 23 by two feet, with not a knot in sight, was the largest of the three and the most expensive, at $150,000. Because the long slab was fragile and extremely susceptible to cracking, it would need to be shipped across the ocean in a climate-controlled container, then carefully carried into the restaurant by a small army of installers. Once in place, the wood would require more attention than a newborn: a daily sanding and moisturizing rub with water and milk. After service, the cooks would need to rub it down again and wrap the bar in cling film to prevent cracks and maintain the wood’s velvety feel. The final renovation bill for a restaurant that seats only 10 would exceed $2 million.

As the interior took shape, Leroy began recruiting cooks. He handed his card to the pastry chef duo of Zagros Leung and Sarah Sulistijo, whose desserts and breads he’d admired at Toronto’s Four Seasons. He asked Elvio Wong, who had interned at Langdon Hall and whom Leroy had met at their Bloor West cultural centre (they’re both practising Buddhists), to serve as an apprentice. He found another young cook, Yoshi Murakami, working at Alobar Yorkville and was struck by his resumé (he’d done stints at Alo and Quetzal), by his being a native Japanese speaker and a French-trained cook, and especially by his preternatural calm. Murakami agreed to be Leroy’s junior sous-chef. For Leroy’s sous-chef, his final brigade member, Cheng recommended a man named Phi Chinh, who had worked for a year and a half at Sushi Masaki Saito.

But then something awkward happened. Leroy cooked a series of dinners for Cheng and a small group of his friends, each time showing the latest iteration of the yet-to-open restaurant’s menu, with the tuna tomato as the recurring star. Last December, while on another eating tour in Japan, Cheng started to worry. He decided that Leroy’s dishes were good but not heart-stopping in their singularity. He wanted to elevate their restaurant to the upper echelon that he travelled the world to experience—for people to come to Toronto for this restaurant the same way he made pilgrimages to SingleThread and Le Cinq. “I called Didier,” Cheng recalls, “and I said, ‘How do we accelerate this?’ ” With the bluntness only a rich man can get away with, he suggested: “Why don’t you call Christian Le Squer? Remember that time he talked to us at Le Cinq? Maybe he’d be open to a consultation?”

It’s not unheard of for a restaurant to hire an outside chef to give expert feedback. But, in this case, Cheng had explicitly hired Leroy as executive chef—meaning Leroy was responsible for creating the restaurant’s debut menu, for putting his stamp on the restaurant. He was the lead talent, the name on the marquee (albeit sharing some of the limelight with Saito). When I asked Leroy how it felt to share control of the restaurant with another chef, he responded by ruminating on his kitchen philosophy, which he described as an old-fashioned one, with a responsibility to pass his knowledge to the next generation of cooks. (He also likes to complain, at length, about how few cooks coming out of chef schools know how to listen and learn.) Leroy recognized that Le Squer operated on another level—an eminent, celebrated chef who had twice been awarded three Michelin stars. It was Leroy’s responsibility to learn from him. He picked up the phone.

Cheng is giddy when he recounts the events that followed. Le Squer was already on another call, but when he recognized the voice of his Canadian acquaintance, he promptly hung up on the other guy. They fell into a friendly chat, and Le Squer, to Leroy and Cheng’s surprise, didn’t reject the idea of a consultation, though he made no commitments. The minute the call ended, Cheng, seizing the opportunity, ordered Leroy to book himself and Murakami, the junior sous, on the next available flight to Paris. Later that week, when the pair arrived at Le Cinq, Le Squer brought them straight into the kitchen—a rare privilege—and treated them to a greatest-hits tasting menu, revealing his tricks. After service, Le Squer ushered them into his private office with several bottles of wine. Murakami, not a French speaker, sat back and watched as Leroy and Le Squer bonded over their cooking histories and their idyllic childhoods. (Leroy is from the farming centre of Amiens; Le Squer is from Brittany.)

Leroy remembers this episode as two cooks following kitchen tradition: “He said to me, ‘I coach you and you coach me.’ This is the old way of French cooking.” By the end of the day, Le Squer had agreed to a formal consultation.

The wildest fact about these events is that they unfolded just weeks before the restaurant was originally scheduled to open this past winter. In March, Le Squer paid his first-ever visit to Canada. He praised the kitchen set-up, especially the Molteni range. Leroy cooked the LWS menu for Le Squer, Cheng and Saito. Afterward, Cheng invited everyone to his house for wine.

The Canadians in the room weren’t prepared for what came next. “The first thing Le Squer said to me was, ‘William, your restaurant will do amazing, but why don’t you put my name on it too? I want to be part of this.’ And that was it. ‘Okay,’ I said, ‘let’s do this.’ No more LWS. Now it’s LSL.”

I should explain that Cheng was telling this story in early May at a 10-person table in his kitchen, the Don River flowing past the window and Chef Hong preparing a late lunch of Cantonese delicacies at the Chengs’ range. Cheng instructed his staff to bring Bordeaux glasses—he’d selected a bottle he fancied from his cellar. Leroy, expressionless, watched Cheng like he’d heard this version of events several times and could see it taking on the time-worn shape of myth.

Cheng speaks about LSL as guided by his vision, even if it sounds like it mostly came together by happy accident. “I have three top chefs,” he said. “Saito and Christian are in two different worlds, and I have Didier in the middle to bridge it.” Translation: Saito, who is already flying in hyper-seasonal Japanese fish and produce and speciality ingredients twice a week for Sushi Masaki Saito, will also send some to LSL. Le Squer, who has his own high-profile job in Paris, will remotely mastermind the LSL menu in collaboration with Leroy. As the restaurant took shape, it was unclear how much of it would replicate what Le Squer is known for at Le Cinq and how much would come from Leroy’s mind or be shaped by the strict limits of what’s seasonal in Japan. Leroy, as the only chef on-site, would do all the work. It would be his job, as Cheng’s appointed bridge, to make the best use of the costly products coming from Saito and guarantee that Le Squer’s ideas are executed at the standard he is known for. If Leroy could pull it off, he’d make Yo-Yo Ma—or a suitable stand-in—cry every night.

I asked Cheng a dozen different ways how any of this makes sense, logistically or financially. On the most basic level, how can these three chefs understand one another when Saito, a native Japanese speaker, has only limited English; Leroy speaks in heavily French-accented English (and often slips into French); and Le Squer speaks only French? They just understand one another, he replied, and some of Leroy’s cooks can act as translators. But how will Le Squer collaborate with Leroy if he’s six hours ahead and running Le Cinq? Cheng dismissed this as a small hurdle: “They Zoom.” But how can LSL make money if it’s serving only 10 guests a night and paying the salaries of five cooks, waitstaff, a sommelier, dishwashers, and three (three!) chefs? It’ll take a while to find the right balance, he said, but it’ll work out, just like his other restaurants. He wouldn’t divulge how much he was paying Saito, Leroy or Le Squer. “Let’s just say it’s a bargain,” he said. “They’re not doing this to become rich; they’re doing it for the love of the idea. They love the idea!”

Cheng spoke through mouthfuls of Chef Hong’s food. LSL, he proclaimed with finality, will be one of a kind. “There’s nowhere in the world that I know of,” he said, “that has chefs of this calibre collaborating on a restaurant. You have pop-ups, but you don’t have ongoing collaboration at this level. And the only way this can work is for the three chefs to have no ego.” He paused and stressed this last point, as if to make it a reality. “And they all have no ego.”

Two weeks later, Le Squer was back in town for his second visit—a quick weekend consultation session and then back to Paris. The renovation was nearly complete: the copper still needed to be installed on the range hood, and the building’s façade hadn’t been covered in those promised panels, but the hinoki bar had been set in place (zero cracks!), and the Molteni range was fired up.

The plan for the day was for the three chefs to review the menu, refine some dishes and make final decisions before LSL opened. Cheng reminded me that Le Squer’s time is precious, that they’re lucky to have him in the building—this was the moment the creative geniuses would truly collaborate. Then why did I feel like I’d stumbled backstage at a high school musical where the cast disagrees about who’s the lead, everyone brought a pal (or three) for emotional support, and instead of insisting they learn their lines the director is preoccupied with the font in the program?

For a start, there were too many people in that slender room. It was a warm day, and Cheng was wearing Louis Vuitton shorts, a Louis Vuitton T-shirt and Louis Vuitton sandals. He was accompanied by his two eldest daughters and his assistant. Saito, looking mildly hungover in the corner, sipped a takeout iced coffee. He was wearing Louis Vuitton sunglasses despite being indoors—though, as the action built, he’d perch them on his forehead like a second set of eyes. Two of Saito’s assistants hovered beside him, one carrying his bags and the other his phone. One assistant with a better command of English whispered simultaneous translations to him. Meanwhile, Leroy’s team of five cooks waited for requests for pans and spoons, and David He, the restaurant’s sommelier, counted the stemware in a built-in cabinet. Leroy wrapped a white bandana around his forehead like he was preparing for a karate fight. Le Squer, in an ultramarine Lacoste tennis shirt, khakis and a leathery tan, could have arrived from a yacht club. Whenever he couldn’t recall a step in a dish or needed a reference photo, he called his kitchen staff in Paris, who were finishing their own service, and shouted his demands over speaker­phone. He and Leroy had been calling each other every day for the past month, and they’d already developed a shorthand that seemed to exclude everyone else in the room.

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Cheng kept saying, “This is like a crazy reality show! So much talent in one room!”

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The three chefs soon reached an impasse. They couldn’t agree on which fish went best in a Le Cinq dish with fermented milk. Le Squer was already disappointed by Canadian dairy products, which were much less rich than what he was used to in France—the LSL cooks had to reduce cream and buttermilk to achieve the right balance of sweet and tang. Saito had supplied Japanese hamadai and Sakura salmon, which were available only for a brief spring window and cost a couple hundred per fish. Le Squer, looking grim, plated each poached fillet on the fermented milk, spooned caviar on top, and offered them to Saito and Cheng, who each took a taste. Cheng’s daughters also took forkfuls. Le Squer explained to Didier, who translated for the room, that he preferred a meatier fish like a Portuguese turbot. Saito looked confused, so Cheng googled photos of turbot on his phone.

Le Squer noticed that Leroy had disappeared to the downstairs prep kitchen and yelled for him to return: “Didier, là!” As the two men continued debating the fish choice, Saito, still perplexed, leaned toward Cheng’s daughters and asked, “Do you understand?” To which they replied, no, they’re learning Canadian French. Cheng, looking thrilled by the commotion, said to anyone who would listen, “This is like a crazy reality show! So much talent in one room!”

Cheng and Saito agreed that they preferred the delicacy of the hamadai over the Sakura salmon. Le Squer turned to Leroy and asked him to ask Saito if he could find a smoked Japanese salmon, which in his opinion would be ideal—the exact opposite direction.

At this point, Yoshi Murakami, the junior sous, explaining to the entire room instead of directly challenging Le Squer, noted that the choice of fish, for Saito, is, yes, about what best complements the fermented milk. But it’s also about using only what’s seasonal—a Japanese chef who serves a fish that’s out of season is dis­respecting the fish and the people he’s serving it to. That chef wouldn’t know what he’s doing.

Cheng, remembering his Yo-Yo Ma–appointed role as director and suddenly alert to the tension and confusion among his cast, stepped forward and delivered a speech that was half rousing and half admonishing. “We have a communication issue,” he said. “We have all these great Michelin stars in one room, but they aren’t communicating. We are lucky that we have Yoshi, who can bridge both sides. This is a great opportunity for Yoshi. Do you know how many cooks would kill to be between these chefs? So, Yoshi, it’s now your job to keep them happy. I don’t want Saito-san or Chef Christian coming to me and complaining that they don’t know what the other is doing. No complaints!”

Everyone nodded and moved on. (But was there any decision about the fish? I later cornered Leroy. “They liked the white fish,” he said, as if it were ancient history. “We’ll use that.”)

Le Squer asked Leroy in French, who asked Cheng in English: “Will people have a menu at the table?” Cheng had detailed plans about this. He wanted a separate card produced for each dish, with its name and an explanation of how it’s made.

Le Squer shook his head: “Too long!”

“No,” Cheng replied, “this is important. With each course, we’ll take the last card away and place a new one. At the end of the night, we present the cards back to each person like a little book, tied with a ribbon. They’ll keep it in their library at home. People will come here for birthdays and anniversaries.”

Leroy, a divorcé, interjected: “But not for divorces!”

“This keepsake will help them remember the night,” Cheng continued, “and then they’ll want to come back. I get a lot of Louis Vuitton invitations, and I keep them because they’re personalized. That’s what I’m thinking.” Leroy translated for Le Squer, who shrugged: “Bon.”

Saito announced that he had to leave—he had an appointment at a jeweller. “I know my role,” he said to Cheng, and with that he was off.

It seemed like the menu experimentation part of the day was done. Cheng asked Leroy where he planned to take Le Squer for dinner. Leroy hesitated. He may have been looking forward to a quiet dinner alone with this still-new colleague, but he could see where Cheng was headed. Leroy said he was thinking of Opus or maybe Quetzal. Cheng, barrelling along, said Leroy should call Jason Cox, the Opus chef, and ask if he could get a table for—How many of them were there?—nine people. They should take the whole team. Cheng would go home and eat with his family first and then join them for a second dinner after eight. He’d bring wine—Leroy should ask Cox how many bottles Cheng should bring. A dozen?

It was going to be a long night.

A week later, LSL officially opened its reservations portal, which immediately booked up through the end of June. Every morning, staff would open another set of 10 seats, and in minutes they’d disappear.

I was lucky to get two seats on LSL’s second Tuesday. The façade remained unfinished, and there was no sign indicating what was inside, which contributed to the impression of entering a private club. As the other guests arrived, the lights suddenly went out—the entire block had lost power. LSL’s emergency lighting kicked in, but there was no ventilation system, and the heat from the Molteni grill was quickly turning the room into a sauna. Leroy looked momentarily stricken—Would he have to serve dinner by candlelight? (As luck would have it...) Then the lights flicked back on and everything was fine.

This is who books a $680-per-person dinner at Avenue and Lawrence on a Tuesday: two 20-something Hong Kong expat women who, if they aren’t influencers, definitely take a lot of selfies with dishes in the background; a lone guy, also in his 20s, wearing a Mickey Mouse T-shirt and a cardigan, too busy texting to take any photos; and two middle-aged Chinese couples, each celebrating birthdays. Although Cheng wasn’t in the room, everyone seemed to have channelled him and chosen outfits conspicuously adorned with French fashion house labels.

Instead of Cheng’s plan of individual cards for each course to be ribbon-bound into a book, servers had set each place with one card listing the night’s full menu—one side in English, the reverse in French—11 courses over two hours. The cooks all wore formal chef’s whites and tall toques, including Leroy, whose role was to direct their action, standing to the left of the range and deciding when a dish was ready to be plated. The long omakase-style counter and narrow chef’s galley didn’t always make for a smooth fit with the choreographed formal French presentation copied from Le Cinq. For each course, one cook stood in front of each guest and presented the completed plate, which often required some shuffling into position and the occasional summoning of someone from the basement prep area. Sometimes the timing wasn’t perfect, including when Leroy, plainly impatient and looking like he was watching an imaginary clock on the wall, waited for the full team to get into place to present a quenelle of pistachio ice cream melting into a piping hot lobster bisque—what Le Squer calls “Chaud et Froid.”

That dish, like nearly everything on the night’s menu, was lifted from Le Cinq’s playbook with small variations—­Canadian lobster, for instance, where Le Squer would have chosen a sweeter European lobster from Brittany. The idea was that LSL would gradually introduce more unique creations in the seasons ahead—and, implicitly, as the three chefs got better at collaborating.

Also included was Le Squer’s most famous and labour-intensive Le Cinq dish, which consumes most of the day to create: a “jewellery box” constructed from individually stacked spaghetti after the pasta has been cooked in a porcini broth that’s been reduced for four hours. The ­spaghetti box is stuffed with ham, more porcini, parmesan and comté, then dusted with shaved black truffle. That night, it arrived as course number seven and was so rich and filling that smaller stomachs might have given up. But there was still a filet of Wagyu (Grade 5A, the best) prepared on a yakitori grill and dressed with flowers. Next came two desserts, my favourite an especially delicious coconut panna cotta in a chocolate cup topped with a dice of Miyazaki mangoes and yuzu zest. Dinner ended with a finale of petits fours and pour-over coffee.

As the guests chatted among themselves in Cantonese, Leroy, searching for a break in the conversation to explain the complexities of each dish, and sometimes the importance of eating the various elements in a certain order, would look bewildered, like he’d walked onto a stage at the wrong time or maybe into the wrong theatre altogether. But, by the time we got to the Wagyu and the influencers were focusing less on taking photos and more on actually enjoying the food, he relaxed. He explained how this was a particularly special grade of beef, then joked that he’d picked the flowers in his own backyard and that the sauce accompanying the Wagyu was too involved to explain, so just enjoy. A toast around the room, and we all dug in.

After dessert, the guests took turns getting their photos taken behind the counter, posing against the Molteni range with Leroy and his cooks. (Try doing that with more than 10 guests.) When the couples were leaving, staff presented each of the women celebrating birthdays with a black bag containing a Premier scented candle.

Bringing Michelin to Toronto may have ultimately been self-interest on Cheng’s part, but it was also a gift to the city’s restaurant industry, which needed a boost after the lean years of the pandemic. The usual criticism of Michelin is that its processes and standards are too opaque, that it’s too snobbish, and that it favours French and Japanese cuisine over all others. But few restaurants awarded Michelin stars refuse them on principle. The next list of Toronto Michelin rankings comes out this fall. LSL will have been open for only a few months and will likely still be figuring out what it’s supposed to be, but it nevertheless stands a good chance of earning recognition—if not three stars.

The course that stood out the most that May night, even above the amazing feats borrowed from Le Cinq, was Leroy’s tuna-stuffed tomato. It’s a mystery how something so small can pack in so much pleasure. The touch of fermented chili was Le Squer’s sole addition to Leroy’s dish—he argued that it needed another layer, a little heat. But that tomato made me want to see what Leroy could have done on his own.

Leaving LSL that night, I kicked myself. Why the knee-jerk assumption that greatness is created by a single auteur? Leroy’s cooking is better because of Le Squer and Saito and no less because of his brigade of cooks. The story of LSL began with a tomato, but I sincerely hope it doesn’t end with one.

This story originally appeared in the August 2024 issue of Toronto Life magazine. To subscribe for just $39.99 a year, click here. To purchase single issues, click here.