Best of Fall 2012: three of the season’s hottest restaurant openings

CARL HEINRICH
The 27-year-old Top Chef Canada champion has invested his $100,000 prize money into Richmond Station, a 3,000-square-foot farm-to-table resto-lounge—that peculiarly Toronto phenomenon—in the centre of the Entertainment District. He’s brought along Ryan Donovan, a celebrity butcher—that other peculiarly Toronto phenomenon—from their alma mater, Marben. The two will be serving the kind of fancy-homespun dishes that won Heinrich the competition: roast beef with brown butter hollandaise, for instance, or smoked trout with green beans and gussied-up ranch dressing.
Open. 1 Richmond St. W., 647-748-1444.

DANIEL BOULUD
The celebrated French chef and culinary imperialist (he owns restaurants in New York, Montreal, Beijing and Singapore) will add Toronto to his list of conquests this October when he opens Café Boulud, the Four Seasons’ million-dollar fine dining room. The menu, executed by chef de cuisine Tyler Shedden (formerly at Daniel in New York) will combine Ontario ingredients with Boulud’s high-French and Mediterranean recipes. The catch-all concept offers something for everyone, including diners who like their upmarket burgers served with white linens and crystal stemware.
Open. Four Seasons Hotel, 60 Yorkville Ave., 416-964-0411.

BASILIO PESCE
After eight years at Bymark and the Oliver and Bonacini power restaurants Bymark, Canoe and Biff’s, Pesce has gone rogue. Porzia, his forthcoming restaurant, is a 60-seat Parkdale room he gutted over the summer and named after his mother. It will be scruffier and edgier than the conservative O&B world, with church pew seating and LCD Soundsystem on the stereo. The short menu—12 or so daily dishes that top out at $20—will draw on his family’s Italian recipes, like handmade rabbit tortellini and hearty Italian wedding soup. But if Pesce’s precise, luxury-loaded cooking at Biff’s is any indication, this Italian food will be far from rustic.
Opening soon. 1314 Queen St. W.