Lakeview Restaurant is going retail with a new Dundas West store
For Fadi Hakim, co-owner of the Lakeview Restaurant at Dundas and Ossington, having a joint retail space and eatery is a restaurateur’s dream. He had that arrangement with Queen Street’s erstwhile Citron, and now the fantasy is about to come true on Dundas West. He and his co-owners have purchased the adjacent convenience store, in which they’re installing Lakeview Storehouse and Catering, a grocery–convenience store hybrid set to open by the first week of December.
“For anyone who’s in restaurants, it’s the Holy Grail,” Hakim says of running the resto-retail combo. “It’s a closed-loop system where there’s absolutely no waste.” The ends of vegetables, for example, become sellable stock instead of garbage. Excess pesto is packed up and sold. The sous-chef’s baconnaise gets put in a mason jar and sold as culinary kitsch.
In addition to prepared foods, the Storehouse will sell fresh produce, nuts and condiments—“anything that you need to cook with,” says Hakim. Following in its older sibling’s footsteps, it will do business seven days a week and stay open late (until 3 or 4 a.m. on weekends, and possibly even 24 hours).
In the back, the Storehouse has a prep kitchen to help with catering, or for making takeout items and restaurant dishes (the owners have just invested in a meat smoker). As such, the opening of the Storehouse will coincide with a revamped Lakeview menu that takes advantage of the added prep space.
All these changes come hot on the heels of new openings and closings within a stone’s throw of the Storehouse. Stay tuned for a whole new vibe at one of Toronto’s most quickly evolving intersections.
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