The guy who invented foie-gras Pop Tarts is opening a restaurant with a (partial) health focus

After debuting earlier this month at the Toronto Underground Market, Thoroughbred caught the internet’s imagination with its fatty, in-your-face food, like the foie gras–stuffed pastry pockets shown above. But that’s not what the soon-to-be restaurant is really about, at least according to co-owner and chef Ariel Coplan, who should know. Coplan’s fellow co-owners are Jason Fox and Aaron Zack, one of the founders of board-gaming cafe Snakes and Lattees. The three of them are in the process of renovating a space at 304 Richmond Street West—smack in the middle of the Entertainment District—and are hoping to be up and running by mid-July.

“When I go out, I like to order big salads,” Coplan told us. “The menu at Thoroughbred is going to be health-conscious. We’ll have some larger salads—and healthy cocktails.” Coplan is still the in process of finalizing his food plan, so he wasn’t able to share too many other details, except to say that the focus will be on “nostalgic flavours,” and the menu may include a play on bagels and lox made with tea-smoked trout and whipped crème fraiche.

As for the restaurant itself, it will really be three venues in one: a casual ground-floor snack bar, a second-floor dining room and, eventually, a private dining space on the third storey—a multi-tiered configuration similar to the one at 416 Snack Bar’s new spin-off restaurant, People’s Eatery, as well as Chris Kalisperas’s new Danforth restaurant, The Forth. As for the goose-liver pockets that wowed everyone at TUM, Coplan is pretty sure they’ll be a part of the mix. “Yeah, probably on the ground-floor snack menu. And maybe we’ll serve them with ice cream.”