Fifteen years ago, Jen Agg led a Toronto restaurant revolution, ripping the stuffy white tablecloth out from under high-end dining with her chalkboard charcuterie mecca, the Black Hoof. Ten openings, one bestselling memoir and a million social-media spats later, Agg continues to innovate. Her new baby, General Public on trendy Geary Street, is her most ambitious project to date—two stories, open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., with a menu that centres neither pizza nor tacos. “The last few years have been so precarious, but I really want to see Toronto menus moving away from playing it safe,” says Agg. Here, she tells how the restaurant business is only getting harder and explains her updated approach to handling rude customers (who may or may not appreciate her humour).
You’ve opened a lot of restaurants over the past 15 years. How is this one different? It’s a 100 seat beast—vastly bigger than anything I’ve ever done before, so that’s been a challenge just in terms of comparing it to the much simpler task of getting a handle on a 40-seat space with a smaller team. And we’re doing lunch service: we’re open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., which is new for me. I just felt like there weren’t a lot of places to go for a nice, fancy lunch, so I wanted to do that American brasserie thing. You can order the seafood tower at 3:30 in the afternoon, and we do a happy hour burger from 4 to 6 p.m. Oh, and this is the first time I’ve had a pastry chef, which is something I’ve always wanted to do but never had the space or budget for. There are so few pastry chefs left—I feel lucky to have found Gabi Araujo, who makes the most amazing butterscotch pudding. I know it sounds like I’m trying to plug all of the different reasons to come to my restaurant, but what I mean is that there are many moving parts. It’s a lot. That said, we’re three weeks in now, and things are going so much better than I thought they would be on day three.
What happened on day three? Everything fell apart. The garde station—where we have the seafood, the salad prep—got really slammed and fell behind, and from there it was just a domino effect. You think that, after opening 10 restaurants, you know how to do it, but the reality is that every single restaurant is different and in a lot of ways you’re learning and teaching in real time. I remember thinking, Oh god, we are in for it. But then things started to improve really quickly, and we got to the point where maybe only one customer has a longer wait time than they should, and hopefully they’re chill. One guy really wasn’t.
Now’s your chance to call him out. I already did that on Instagram. Not by name or anything, but he really was being so ridiculous. Ten years ago, I probably would have comped his tab and kicked him out, but instead I dug deep into my hospitality bag of tricks, and he just wasn’t having it. At one point he said, “The only possible explanation for the wait would be if someone in the kitchen had lost a finger.” I told him that someone actually had, just to lighten the mood, but my jokes really weren’t landing.
Related: What’s on the menu at General Public, Jen Agg’s gorgeous new restaurant on Geary
The name General Public feels at odds with the refined atmosphere. Where did it come from? I’ve said this a million times: my restaurants are for anyone, they just might not be for everyone. And it’s a pub. Obviously not a pub pub, but I was thinking a lot about high-end British pubs during the design process. We have a lot of warm wood, and it’s a custom colour—not too red, not too orange. There is religious iconography in the arches behind the bar, which feels Old World. And the barstools are classic captain chairs that spin.
Your restaurants are known for the vibes as much as for the food. Is there any specific inspiration behind this one? I tend to get a lot of inspiration from the original spaces. At Grey Gardens, there was a concrete floor, so there was this idea of concrete as a grey garden. With Bar Vendetta, I wanted to erase the history of the Hoof, which had been in the space before, so we did the oak glass canopy and a totally new colour scheme. In the past, things have always just come together, but with this restaurant we were eight or nine months into the build—the concrete was being dug through, the HVAC was being considered—and I still had no idea what colour the walls were going to be. I had this vague idea of a throwback to ’80s grandness, sort of a peachy cocaine dream. I wanted peach marble for the bar, but that didn’t seem to exist.
How did you get around that? I went to this beautiful stone warehouse looking for peach marble, and I came across what ended up being our bartop. It’s called quartzite, and it’s the most beautiful shade of green. It literally stopped me in my tracks. The New Order song “Everything’s Gone Green” started playing in my head, and suddenly I saw everything: the banquettes, the walls, crystal fixtures, mirrors on the ceiling.
And just a touch of Golden Girls? Oh, definitely. The rattan, the flamingo mural.
Is it harder to open a restaurant now than it was 15 years ago? It’s hard to compare. When you’re young, you don’t know what you don’t know or what you can’t do. I built the Hoof with my husband and friends, with our own hands, for only $70,000. I had so much to learn about restaurants and about being a leader, but at 32 you’re so willing to jump off a cliff and assume the parachute will open. It’s definitely a lot more expensive to open a restaurant today—even just compared with five years ago, when I launched Grey Gardens. Our hot water tank at General Public is double the cost: same size, same tank, twice as much money. Food costs have gone way up, as I’m sure people realize when they go to a grocery store to buy a box of cereal and it’s $9. It really is everything, and I don’t think the general public—no pun intended—necessarily understands that. We try very hard to be good value for what is essentially a luxury experience. We think a lot about value and perceived value.
What’s the difference? We have lobster and sweetbreads on the menu, and the price is in the high 60s. I happen to think that it’s a spectacular dish—but if I’m talking to a table about it, I want to make sure they don’t think they’re getting a huge portion based on the price. If you care about a perfectly cooked piece of lobster claw and delightful sweetbreads in a Pernod-inflected sauce, then the perceived value will be high. But, if not, you can have our popcorn clams and mussels, which is a lot more affordable and still very delicious. It’s funny because people talk about upselling, but we make a better margin on our french fries.
You mentioned a happy-hour burger. You’re doing only 21 a night. How come?
Burgers are awesome and fun, and I wanted to do one. But I didn’t want to become a “burger restaurant,” which can happen. The Harbord Room—a restaurant Roland and I used to go to all the time—did an amazing burger, but then that’s all that people wanted to order because it was delicious and one of the cheaper things on the menu. So we decided on 4 to 6 p.m., which is not generally a very busy service time. I’m calling it a restaurant burger because it’s a little more refined: thicker, cooked medium rare, not smashed.
Do I detect some smash shade? No, not at all. I love a good Rudy’s burger. I just felt like Toronto has a lot of that already.
Is there a current Toronto restaurant trend that you would like to see dead and buried? I don’t know if this is a trend, but it really bugs me the way that Toronto gets so excited about shiny new things. That doesn’t mean I don’t want people to come to my restaurant that’s shiny and new, but if people don’t support middle-aged restaurants that are still doing it well, those spots will cease to exist. I don’t think people realize how precarious restaurant culture is right now. People in the business don’t want to talk about it because it’s ugly and we only want to talk about nice things.
Your restaurants are self-financed. Is that by choice or necessity? Probably a bit of both. Nobody has offered me a pile of money, but I’m not sure I would accept the strings that come with having investors. Being self-financed gives me freedom. And it allows me to build the restaurants that I want, the way that I want to, without being beholden to the bad taste of someone who doesn’t know anything about this industry.
Is there an aspect of General Public that you think wouldn’t have flown with a financier? I have no idea. I don’t want to know. Would I be able to post about Palestine if I had some money guy or gal holding it over me? I want to be in charge of myself, but it means that I’m surviving on prayers and loans. Everything I earn is rolled in. My husband likes to ask me, “Are we ever going to make money? Because you keep taking the profits and putting them into the next project.” I guess I just like doing this.
During the #MeToo movement, and then again during the pandemic, there was a lot of talk about the toxic nature of restaurant culture. Has anything changed? Well, I don’t work in other restaurants, so it’s hard to say. I think maybe for a while people were a little more embarrassed at being called out for their terrible behaviour—but then you also had a big #MeToo backlash. I can say that, at my restaurants, we work very hard on culture and on keeping bad people out. I sat in on every interview for General Public, and there were hundreds of them. The culture at a restaurant is top down, so I think it’s up to me to set the tone and the expectation. I don’t want to treat hard-working people badly. I do want them to rise to the occasion. Do I think I’m an easy boss? No. Do I think I’m an asshole? No.
You also landed in the crosshairs of the anti-vaxxers, who staged protests outside of your restaurants based on your support of vaccine passports. Is the blowback ongoing? Nobody is yelling outside my restaurants anymore, but they left a lot of fake one-star reviews for Vendetta and Grey Gardens, which makes a difference. I think now that we don’t have a lot of professional food criticism in Toronto, Google reviews are where people look first.
How does the dearth of restaurant criticism affect your work? It sucks. I think there’s a beautiful relationship between criticism and art where they uplift each other. It’s really sad to me to have poured everything into making this deeply personal, quite beautiful space—every detail from the menu to the Instagram page—and to not have that evaluated by someone who is ostensibly an expert. It’s very If a tree falls in the woods… When you perform onstage or on film, you get criticism.
Related: Jen Agg doesn’t play nice
I guess food selfies on social media don’t quite fill that void? I mean they do because they have to. I don’t have any problem with TikTok. And I’ve read some very thoughtful reviews on Google. But then there are others that read like they were written by someone who came to the restaurant specifically to hate f***. I feel like that may be a uniquely me experience.
Do you mean people who want to see you fail? I think there are people who want to gleefully see it all go wrong. It’s people in the restaurant industry—people who aren’t known for liking me—who choose to come in on day two because they want to see the wheels fall off. Maybe I’m wrong about that, but I would never go to a friend’s new restaurant that early unless I was invited. I would give them a few weeks out of respect. Anyway, it’s a small number of people. People have mostly been delightful and sweet and incredibly complimentary. For the first couple of weeks, I really was living on compliments, so that mattered a lot.
What’s a good one you’ve gotten recently? It actually came from my very close friend Jake Skakun, who’s also our wine director and does not throw compliments around willy-nilly. His parents were asking him why our restaurants have been so successful when so many others didn’t make it through Covid. He said, “Jen is hypercritical and never stops the constant pressure to keep improving and making sure we don’t settle for mediocrity.” Hearing that from someone who knows me well is so meaningful. I’m saving it in a Notes file called “Nice things my real friends said about me.” So far it’s the only entry—but I just started the file.
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