Member Work/Life: David Schwartz
Some restaurants feel like entering a 3D mood board: a hodgepodge of ubiquitous design references where food is “beside the point,” functioning more as photo studios for content creation than a dining establishment. The economy is too volatile to sacrifice a good meal for a bad Instagram, but thankfully, David Schwartz offers diners both. With his growing empire of wildly popular—and truly great—restaurants, the Toronto-born Schwartz has proven to be both an inventive chef and a hospitality savant. In addition to his Chinese restaurants MIMI and Sunnys, Schwartz’s mini-empire includes Linny’s, a deli-inspired steakhouse, and a second MIMI in Miami—all under the banner of his restaurant group, Big Hug Hospitality. And while each concept is unique, they all reflect Schwartz’s personal obsessions (vintage radios, for example) and instinct for atmosphere (convivial, relaxed, never annoying.) But he’s given us just a taste of what’s to come.
What are your earliest memories of food?
⎯⎯⎯ I'm not a Massimo Bottura-eque chef where I hung out underneath the table and my Nonna made tortellini that fell onto my head. I do remember the very first thing that I ever cooked that got me excited about cooking was a stir fry at a day camp when I was six years old. It was a purple cabbage stir fry, and we ate it out of a Dixie cup. That’s a core memory. I went to Western [University] and while I was there I knew a few people who were in a food and beverage management program [at Fanshawe College], and anytime I'd hear them talk about it, I'd kind of get jealous. I always said to myself, ‘Okay, I'm gonna take this political science degree and parlay it into law and then bring that into food in some way,’ but that never actually meant anything, and there was no clear path. And so one day, I just said, ‘Fuck it. I'm gonna just go and do this food and beverage management program.’ At that point, I was just cooking recreationally—all I was thinking about was what I was going to cook when I got home—but I still didn't have the confidence to just jump straight into the kitchen. So I did the food and beverage management program, which wasn’t really geared towards cooking. Everyone else in my class hated cooking; it was their least favourite part of the program. I was the odd one out there. Then my first gig in a restaurant was as a food runner.
What are the different paths for people working in kitchens? Did you always want to be an entrepreneur?
⎯⎯⎯ I was not the kid who had a crazy entrepreneurial spirit that was, like, selling prom tickets in high school, but I always knew I wanted to do something on my own. Originally, it was something music-related. I wanted to be a talent scout. I think when it comes to chefs and kitchens and cooking, there's definitely the creative artist chef—the chef that cooks creatively and perfects their technical skills forever—and then there's the chef that puts that on the back burner to a degree and goes the entrepreneurial route. I was at that fork where I had to decide, like, am I going to go cook abroad in Europe for a decade, hone my skills and become a better chef than I know I currently am, or am I okay with my current bag of skills not being as good as I know I could potentially be, and pursuing it entrepreneurially, and I kind of went that way.
Are you mostly self-taught then?
⎯⎯⎯ I learned a lot in school, for sure, but a lot of it was self-taught. A lot of cooking at home. I have a lot of respect for home cooks because of that. Restaurants, school, lots of reading, lots of YouTube, lots of eating, all definitely played a part
Where did the idea for MIMI come from?
⎯⎯⎯ I put MIMI together the same way that you would put any other business together: I formulated a really well-fleshed-out business plan and then pitched it to different potential investors, some of whom I cooked for. Obviously, I ended up finding the right partners, but it took time to get there. I had ideated the concept for MIMI over seven or eight years. The first person I called was Braden Chong, who’s now our executive chef. We met ten years ago, and I asked him to come and join the team right away. It was very much a passion project born out of my keenness for regional Chinese cooking and creating a space where we could celebrate the vastness of regional Chinese cooking, and the depth of its history.
What's the best part of your day?
⎯⎯⎯ My title is creative director and culinary director, and so I really enjoy the curation and creative components to what we do. I lead our teams on the culinary end. We have a lot of meetings with all of our teams in each restaurant, just to make sure that I have my finger on the pulse. I review the menu changes, but my favourite thing is definitely going into the restaurants and tasting the new food that I didn't play a direct role in, which is really nice. We have chefs who ideate, and then I'll come in and I'll weigh in on the menu. Last night I went to Sunny's, and it was really, really nice to try four or five new things that one of our chefs there put together and leave thinking like, ‘wow, that was amazing.’ I loved everything that I ate and I had nothing to do with it—directly at least. So that's a fun perk of the job. I also really like just being in the room during service and feeling the energy of the dining room.
What is the secret alchemy there? How do you create that energy?
⎯⎯⎯ Our thesis [at Big Hug] is that hospitality is as much about the employee experience as it is about the guest experience. That really has a foundational impact on how the dining room feels for guests because our team is proud of what they do. They want to wear the fact that they work in our restaurants. They enjoy working in them. They feel good about it, and in turn, so do the guests.. We also put a lot of effort into the small details. At face value or on a granular level, they don't matter, but those are the things that matter the most to us, because each small detail adds up to the total package. I get very into it. If you came into my apartment for the six months working up to Linny’s, it was Linny’s everywhere. When you go, you'll see there are all these vintage radios. One of them I got in Palm Springs, one of them is from eBay, one of them I pulled out of a guy's barn in King City. And one of my best friends, Jack Lipson, designed the space with me, and we really considered every single detail in this restaurant: the cutlery, the linens that we use, the uniforms—we put a partnership together with Tiger of Sweden. I think the level of care that we put in is what makes our experience feel the way that it does, and that being a congruent feeling across our spaces, even though conceptually all of our restaurants are so different. A lot of people say they’ll go to MIMI or Sunny’s or Linny’s and while they're very different, the energy, for whatever reason, feels the same. The type of service that we provide, there's a beat to it.
And what’s the hardest part of your job, something that you didn't anticipate?
⎯⎯⎯ I think understanding how to work with so many people, and manage them. We have 155 employees now; we had 70 in November. Every single person has their own life and set of circumstances, and just understanding how to engage with that, and also maintain the function of the business. It's hard.
Which of your restaurants would you eat at every day?
⎯⎯⎯ They all serve a different purpose, and that's what I like about them. I think when we originally opened Sunny's people were hesitant to tell me, ‘Oh, I like MIMI more’, or ‘Oh, I like Sunny's more.’ And I would always say the same thing: ‘It's great that that's your answer, because the person next to you, their answer was the opposite.’ And if everyone had the same answer, then I shouldn't have opened both of these restaurants. So I feel similarly. It depends on the day of the week, depends on my mood, it depends on who I'm with, or what I'm looking for.
What’s next?
⎯⎯⎯ I can’t say for certain, but we’ll be opening a sandwich shop at the front of Linny’s in the next several months. Beyond that, I can't really speak to what we're going to be doing yet.
Do you have a community of industry people in Toronto?
⎯⎯⎯ Yeah, and that's a big part of why I like living in Toronto, is that community. I eat at Dreyfus and Bernhardt’s a lot. So Zach [Kolomeir] and Carm [Imola] are good friends of my wife and I, and I love their restaurants. Suresh Doss is a guy that I eat with relatively frequently—I'm going for lunch with him tomorrow. I think he plays a really important role in showing people how interesting the food culture of Toronto is outside of high-end dining.
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