Pickle Barrel
Claudio Aprile arrives at our interview looking more like a movie producer or a musician with indie street cred than one of Toronto’s top chefs. He’s decked out in the artist’s uniform of jeans and black boots with a leather jacket over a fitted black long sleeved shirt.
“You need to know tradition before you can really progress,” the 37-year-old Richmond Hill resident says in the bar of his business partner Hanif Harji’s hot new King St. restaurant Kultura. Their new venture, Colborne Lane, which is opening next month, is still a construction zone. It’s the first restaurant Aprile will own.
“I spent the first half of my career learning tradition,” he says. “The past six years I’ve progressed.”
I first met Aprile in 2002 when he was the executive chef at Senses at the Soho Met. His food at the time was contemporary and combined Latin American influences — he was born in Uruguay — with classical techniques in surprising, delicious ways. Over the years his cooking has developed an experimental bent with the use of gels and foaming agents, unique presentations and surprises. For all of its avant garde flourishes, after all, Aprile is known as much as a chemist as a chef, the progression always felt natural. At Senses, the flavours became even more focussed and assured.
“You have to have an affinity for real, natural ingredients and a curiosity for modernism,” he says. “Plus a basic understanding that a chef will never win against nature.”
Aprile was in a comfortable position at Senses where owner Henry Wu gave him carte blanche freedom to follow his muse and cook the food that inspired him. A rarity in the sometimes parochial confines of a hotel kitchen. Nonetheless, after six years at Senses, Aprile has finally decided that it is time to move on.
“I felt that I was no longer really making a significant contribution,” he says, “and in order to realize my own potential I needed to strike out on my own. When I was in Toronto Life’s top 20 restaurants, that was a bit of a catalyst, because I looked over the list of winning chefs and I saw owner, owner — not an owner.”
He leaves on good terms with his previous employer and will bring some of the lessons learned there with him to his new role as owner, “Henry runs a very efficient organization,” Aprile acknowledges. “He’s a real visionary and I realized through him that I want to be a visionary company.”
Although he is now considered one of the most dynamic chefs in Toronto, Aprile’s beginnings in the kitchen were less than illustrious.
“My first job was in a doughnut shop,” he recalls. “I was 13-years-old and would work from 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. on Friday and Saturday. I began changing fillings, mixing them together in different ways and playing around with stuffing, overfilling them until they were ready to burst.”
He says that’s where he first got the thrill of having direct contact with people through food, but may have taken his experiments too far. “I’d love to see the reactions to these bursting doughnuts,” he says. “So, yeah, I was fired.”
But the fascination with food and experimentation stuck and Aprile has continued working in restaurants ever since. He says there isn’t an area of a professional kitchen that he doesn’t know intimately: “The dish pit at the Keg?” he says. “Hell.”
Aprile has moved well beyond doughnut shops and dishwashing, having worked in some very illustrious kitchens including North 44, Patria in New York, as well as Charlie Trotter’s in Chicago and Alinea, which was just anointed by Gourmet Magazine as the best restaurant in the United States.
Aprile moved to Richmond Hill in 2002 because he was looking for a safe, clean, comfortable place for his son to grow up.
“My son was born on March 5, 2002, and I bought the house on March 6,” he says. “What I like about Richmond Hill for raising a family are the open spaces and the privacy.”
Aprile and his business partners have taken over the space at 45 Colborne Street that for the past 30 years housed Café Du Marche. They have enlisted the services of Commute Homes, who also did the interiors at Kultura, to design the restaurant.
“We wanted to do something complementary to the building,” Aprile says, “but not contrary to what we’re doing with the food.”
Aprile says Commute Homes will do things like take old wood floors from a barn and turn them into tables. “I like the way they mix recycled materials,” he says. “I think it’s a good fit with my food.”
Among the most coveted seats in Colborne Lane will be the chef’s table, right in the kitchen. The designers took the old marble baking tables from the bakeshop and turned them into a table for eight. This addition was crucial to Aprile who feels that direct contact with his customers is important, both for his own enjoyment, that of the guests, and for the chefs that work with him.
The food at Colborne Lane will continue in the experimental vein that Aprile began exploring at Senses. “I’m reinterpreting sashimi right now,” he says. “I’m working with liquid nitrogen and freezing soy sauce and turning it into a powder that is great with fresh sashimi. I’ve been working with these scientists from the University of Guelph, one of them has a PHD in ice cream technology!”
In addition to blenders and stoves, Aprile’s kitchen will be outfitted with homogenizers that turn liquids into sheets of gels, cryovac machines and dehydrators. He is quick to point out, however that “alongside that we’ll also have duck confit. I don’t have this elitist thing that it all has to be intellectual and serious. It has to be a fun environment, stress free.”
Indeed, for all of his scientific interests, Aprile is reluctant to put a label on the food. “I don’t like the word molecular,” he says. “It doesn’t sound appetizing to me, it doesn’t sound edible. For me to say I’m a food scientist is a complete joke, I’m a chef who likes to play with food.”
Nonetheless, there is an affinity between his cooking and that of chefs like Ferran Adria, Heston Blumenthal, Pierre Gagnaire and others considered central to the so-called molecular gastronomy movement. Chefs he openly admires and respects: “They’re taking huge risks and there’s no art without taking risks,” he says.
Even the working environment in the kitchen will be different from most kitchens. Instead of having a brigade of chefs responsible for single components of a number of dishes, Aprile’s staff, some of whom have been with him for 10 years, will be responsible for five or six complete dishes. “That way,” he says, “you achieve complete consistency.”
Inevitably, discussion turns to music, a subject about which Aprile is passionate. The music at Colborne Lane will be as much a part of the ambiance as the décor and it is a subject the chef has given considerable thought to. “I don’t like the music in most restaurants,” he says. “While I’m home working on my menus I’ll have my iPod playing and a song will come on that I think will work in the restaurant, and I’ll add it to the ‘Colborne Mix.’”
For Aprile, it is crucial to balance his experimental bent with a fundamental grounding in the basics. “I think of a raspberry or an apple,” he says. “And that’s genius. You can’t get any better than that.” 
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