Black + Blue: Bring on the seafood towers and Kobe cuts — there’s a new steak house in Toronto, and Emad Yacoub’s at the heart of it

“We are spending a million just on the patio,” Emad Yacoub was telling me the other week, giving me a peek of his soaring new resto on what used to be the TSX trading floor in Exchange Tower, on Toronto’s King Street West.

From stocks to steaks! That’s right.

Taking me up to the second floor of what is Black + Blue — amidst the whir of chain saws, the shuffle of construction dudes — the gregarious Egyptian-Canadian, with a vast restaurant empire already on the West Coast, guided me to windows giving a ritzy view of the Mies van der Rohe TD Centre edifice across the way. Looking straight down, a terrace taking shape — one Yacoub expects to have a wholly garden feel and is counting on a state-of-the-art system to keep going 10 months out of the year. Upstairs. Downstairs. Patio. Private dining room. Another one upstairs. 9,000 square feet. Seating maxed at about 250, he mused.

By all accounts, this is the biggest opening of the spring in town, restaurant-wise, and the most ambitious project in terms of scale and oomph in the Financial District since — I reckon — the opening of Bymark 21 years ago. Certainly it bucks the trend of smaller restaurants, at least on the higher end. The pressure: on.

Pointing out this, nodding to that, Yacoub brings up an important light fixture that is stuck in Spain, but is promised to arrive the following week. He gets animated talking about the dollar notes that will adorn the walls, becoming art work in the upscale meatery — an ode to the monetary hijinks that once went on in the space. At another juncture, he walks me into his pièce de résistance: an empty-for-now, fully glassed-in Himalayan salt-lined meat locker that will enjoy primo real estate in the centre dining room.

A version of the locker that he has at his Black + Blue in Vancouver, Yacoub explains that strict temperature and moisture controls allow salt air to penetrate the meats. Crystalizing.

“It is nice to be home,” he confirms sometime later when we sit down to talk some more. With self-deprecation, he adds: “I have tried to come home for the last 10 years and I have been joking that home does not want me.”

Meaning: even though he started his life in restaurants, here in Toronto — going back to when he was 19, landing in Canada from Cairo a few years after Anwar Sadat’s 1981 assassination, uncertainty shrouding Egypt then — the right location and deal for a marquee spot in Canada’s largest metropolis had long eluded him. This, despite the fact that his Glowbal group of restaurants have been a hit in Vancouver forever — joints like Coast practically part of the terra firma there, a magnet for both business types and gourmands. No shortage of celebrities, too — everyone from Matt Damon to Halle Berry. Ryan and Blake. Shakira, too.

“Friday the 13th, 1984,” he announces. The precise date he arrived in Toronto. You do not forget a date like that. While he had been studying to be an accountant back in Egypt, he swiftly went to work at a McDonald’s. Then the Westin Harbour Castle, where his job involved squeezing boxes and boxes of orange juice. “I started competing with myself to be the fastest orange squeezer. I was crazy when I was younger,” he laughs.

Doing the job faster meant he had time to hang around the kitchen, where he picked up other skills and got to know Marc Thuet, a chef on the rise. Thuet got him chopping mushrooms. “It really opened my eyes for the business. I was struggling with my English, but I was trying hard: they all saw that.”

One thing led to another, which led to a gig working with Franco Prevedello, one of the legends of the Toronto fine dining scene during the 1980s and ’90s. “I was the chef at the super-chic Aqua (not far from where we are sitting now). Downtown then, there was Aqua and Jump. Those were it. This was before Canoe.”

Around that time, he also spent a stint as chef de cuisine at the King Edward Hotel — “when King Eddie was the place.” Later, British Columbia came calling (even though his siblings continued to live here).

So, yeah, when Yacoub thinks of his newest steak house opening here in 2023, during this crest in his life, as a full-circle moment, you can definitely see it. Ironically, the pandemic provided an opportunity in that, when many had pulled out of projects and/or stalled, he and his partners saw this space come up in the Exchange Tower and leapt at it. “We closed a deal on Aug. 20, 2020 and kept it hush-hush.”

The anticipation now is clearly rife, especially with an April 19 opening party on the calendar. “I have 800 on the list already and I have barely started making the list,” he crows. The opening not only portends a new gust of social life in the Financial District (which has had its challenges since COVID), but also is expected to be quite the East Coast-West Coast mash-up, with a sizable crew from Vancouver also flying in for the bash.

Back and forth himself now between coasts — his wife, back in B.C., is an investment banker — Yacoub has settled in new digs at University Avenue and Dundas Street West. To get things operating at his first spot in Toronto — he calls the momentum of launching a restaurant such as this “like operating a train” — he is also bringing eight front-of-house staff and four of the best back-of-house types from his staff in Vancouver. The total staff numbers at about 175.

He says: “I told my team: we are not going to take a short cut. Our guests in Vancouver will forgive us if we are not perfect on the first day, because we have had a relationship for years.” In Toronto, admittedly the stakes are different. He is introducing himself to the city.

So, yes, bring on the seafood towers and the Kobe cuts. There is much to do, much to prepare.

Kitchen-wise, with things being led here by executive chef Morgan Bellis, Yacoub tells me that the most important is not to “f–k up the colour of the steak. Y’know, when every table has one blue, one rare, one medium-well. This is a lesson we learned quickly.”

The secret? “Timing is the thing, but it is also the feel. Steaks change from the shape — strip loins, for example, vary. A 15-ounce can be looking differently from another 15.”

Finally, he gleams, “You learn by doing. No other way. It is a matter of instinct and eyeballing.” A metaphor for the kitchen, and for life.

Shinan Govani is a Toronto-based freelance contributing columnist covering culture and society. Follow him on Twitter: @shinangovani

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