For this episode, we had the pleasure of sitting down with the cofounders of Ascari - a Toronto based hospitality group that has evolved in the past decade+ from an experimental Izakaya into a portfolio of French/Italian restaurants, bar plus new retail concept.

Ascari cofounders Erik Joyal and John Sinopoli have been an innovative tour de force through the pandemic, managing not only to stay alive despite uncertainty but expanding their customer offering by focusing on what their team excels at.

*Recorded on October 8, 2021

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Qasim Virjee 0:28

Welcome back to the start. Well podcast. For this episode, we're sitting down in studio at start well on King Street West with Eric oil, and Johnson opoli, from the scary Hospitality Group. So, okay, so you guys start, you know, your partnership, you meet each other. The chef joins the front man, you found a Japanese is a guy in a city that was still finding its culinary, you know, interests. You were early or ahead of the game. And then 50 staff, suddenly, you're a whirlwind of operations nightmare with that restaurant. And when it ends very quickly, you find something that's a bit of a kind of a slower pace that's more manageable. And, and you start having fun, maybe a little bit more. It's

Erik Joyal 1:19

always fun. It was always it was always fun. There were there's different degrees of stress. And there's different degrees of challenges, right, I think managing table 17 Still had its huge challenges, even though it was a smaller team, they were just different.

John Sinopoli 1:34

I don't know. Yeah, I agree. I think that wouldn't mean is that guy was open for three years and had a lot of success. In many ways. I think that couple of mistakes we made were maybe the size, the neighborhood things that first operators if and the experience we provided in like year one was very different from the experience we were providing by the end, but but that time, I think the whole might have been a bit deep and the traction wasn't wasn't there. But with table 17 The motivation was do what you know, right? And we knew the food experience you're gonna provide there, like it was a very European continental cuisine that was rooted in Italian and French. And an experience that Eric and I are both very familiar and comfortable with, not that we weren't familiar with is a chi experience. We were because you lived in Japan, I did live in Japan. And Eric was very familiar with a similar concept in England when he lived there. And I think that the challenge was, how could we communicate that experience, where people are going to believe us that this is this was what people said, it was a lot easier because of our backgrounds and our roots. And so like, people

Qasim Virjee 2:45

walk into an izakaya. And it's a white guy saying, oh, and they're like, What the hell is going on? We

John Sinopoli 2:53

didn't have course, you know, very strong Japanese team in the back of house and the front and the front as well, like we had in to be honest, at the time, too, there was a fraction of the Japanese immigrants in Toronto than there are now like, now, there's a whole community of young Japanese people who own restaurants and do do that, and bring their culture here at the time wasn't the case. So we, I remember came to us like the Yeah, like, there was like one little five page Japanese newspaper in Toronto, you know, and, and they had us featured a couple times, and that helped us get some great employees. But table 17 was a change in pace in a few ways. Like we went to a neighborhood Yeah, we're making personal relationships, we relationships and connections with our clientele. Those were lasting relationships, very different from the St. Lawrence Market neighborhood experience, which was more touristy, more like, you know, daytime people and then they would leave and go home and there was a few