“Dedication, love and respect” flow through every aspect of the new Tremont Cafe.
by Natalie Goldenberg-Fife // photography by Anya Shor
The story of the elegant new 70-seat Tremont Cafe is filled with a cast of characters embracing vibrant multiculturalism, a deep affinity for enlightened hospitality, and the unwavering pursuit of excellence.
The Tremont Cafe is located just off the lobby of the revitalized Dorchester Hotel, a luxury boutique hotel on Collingwood’s main Hurontario strip. Both properties are owned by the Creemore grass-cutting and real estate entrepreneurs Chris and Tammy Millsap, and were ambitiously designed by the local agency AG Designs.
With custom furniture from Italy, impeccable glassware from France, a giant 64-by-42-inch photograph of Sophia Loren pouring Dom Pérignon, clean-cut servers dressed in black ties and aprons, and a Mediterranean-focused menu with dishes like shankleesh (a spreadable Lebanese cheese) and falafel, this version of The Tremont Cafe looks a lot different than the original.
Opened in 2010 by the wife-and-husband entrepreneurial duo Wispy and Christophe Boivin, current owners of the Nottawa General, the Boivin Tremont Cafe was a French-style bistro with classics like French onion soup, mussels and fancy burgers. The restaurant had a beautiful rustic vibe and was located on Simcoe Street in Tremont Studios, a revitalized heritage building from 1889 in the Collingwood Heritage Conservation District.
In 2017, The Tremont Cafe was purchased by two second-generation immigrants in their mid-30s who went to the same high school in Mississauga and met while sitting at the same table in the cafeteria gambling and playing Brisk, an Italian card game.
Enter Imad Abou-Challa, a Palestinian refugee from the Christian side of Beirut, born in Abu Dhabi after his parents fled Lebanon, and Vasilis “Billy” Vastis, a Greek whose parents hail from Karyes, Laconia, in Southern Greece. Abou-Challa has a background in finance and film production and graduated from the Institute of Culinary Education in New York. Vastis grew up working in restaurants his entire life. Both are hardcore restaurant lovers and aficionados.
“The word restaurateur is from the French word restaurer, meaning ‘to restore.’ We take that position to heart.”
Abou-Challa and Vastis had spent years looking for the right location in Toronto to fulfill their shared dream of opening a Mediterranean-inspired restaurant.
“We tried to make plays on a bunch of locations but none of them worked out,” says Abou-Challa. “Collingwood definitely wasn’t part of the original plan. Then someone we knew pointed out that The Tremont Cafe was for sale. It was six years old and had a decent reputation. We had nothing to lose so we drove up and looked at it and thought, ‘Wow, this place has a lot of what we want to build visually.’ We also weren’t going to need to take on any investors. So we took the leap and moved up to Collingwood.”
“The move made sense for many reasons,” Vastis remembers. “Financially the numbers worked and the town was beautiful. Every time we drove up to Collingwood from Toronto and went north of Mulmur, the air would get cleaner and we’d start sitting a little higher in our seats. We’d see crystal clear waters and go swimming in the Bay. People are also happy and excited when it’s wintertime here.”
Even though Vastis and Abou-Challa had a plan for a modern Mediterranean restaurant in homage to their Lebanese and Greek backgrounds, they decided not to make any big changes right away.
“That was a tough decision because when we were trying to open in Toronto, we had chosen a brand, a logo and a name. But The Tremont had its following. It had a revenue stream that we needed to start things off, so we decided to be calm and protect the revenue. We didn’t change the menu at all when we first started,” says Abou-Challa.
“The Tremont had been around for a little while and was successful. We didn’t want to alienate people who felt it was their place. Whether you like it or not as an owner, your guests also feel a kind of ownership of the place,” says Vastis.
Another crucial move in the acquisition of The Tremont Cafe was to sit down with its chef, Joshua Fevens, whose work and talent both Vastis and Abou-Challa respected.
A pivotal three-hour meeting at a nearby Boston Pizza solidified their connection.
“We hit it off right away. We shared aligned goals on business and family. We got to know each other as people to see if it would work together.
I could tell right away that these weren’t just a couple guys trying to make a buck. Hospitality mattered to them,” says Chef Fevens, who runs the kitchen team alongside his right-hand chef, Aidan Coyne.
In a plot twist, three months into the 2020 pandemic lockdowns, the Simcoe location was forced to move due to a major dispute with the landlord and the expiration of the lease.
The move and purchase of a new location on Pine Street opened up the chance for Abou-Challa and Vastis to finally express their cultural roots more explicitly on the menu.
“We rebuilt the restaurant and used some design elements from the original location but also elevated the look and feel into a bright and more elegant look. After a lot of reflections on how we could redefine our identity, increase our cheque average, and deliver a more elevated product, that’s when we took a big turn from a French bistro menu to a Mediterranean menu,” says Abou-Challa.
To ensure their kitchen team had the best training in cooking Mediterranean food with passion and techniques infused with deep wisdom, Amal Abou-Challa and Sotiria Vastis, Imad and Billy’s mothers, were invited into the kitchen as mentors.
“Our mothers would just be in there cooking with them providing inspiration and introducing them to new flavours and techniques they’d never worked with before. My mom is a great cook,” says Abou-Challa. “She was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Dbayeh, Beirut. Her roots are Palestinian but she was more exposed to Lebanese culture. She had a café feeding people in refugee camps, which they eventually lost in the war and had to move. That’s how we ended up in Canada. Food has always been in our hearts. If you come to our house for a gathering, food is always the centrepiece. Billy’s mother is the same way. She’s an old-school Greek mom. She spends most of her day making food and figuring out what to shop for.”
“I learned to cook early on working with my mom at home and grew up in the kitchen with my mother. Food is central to us,” says Vastis. “My mom worked in cafeterias serving hundreds of people. In the early days of my hunt to open a little 30-seat restaurant, I was planning to have a hot table with my mother during the day and have a more sophisticated bar program at night.”
This unorthodox move to put the owners’ mothers in the kitchen to mentor The Tremont Cafe chefs paid big dividends.
“I spent time with both their mothers, and it was a kind of rebirth for me,” says Chef Fevens. “I started to work with flavours and ingredients I’d never worked with before, like Aleppo pepper—a richly flavoured, mildly spicy chile pepper from Syria—and za’atar, which is a Middle Eastern spice blend. The main thing I learned was simplicity: lemon juice, salt and pepper can take you a very long way—and to replace butter with high-quality olive oil. These are ingredients you will see all over our menus now.”
While the second Tremont Cafe on Pine Street thrived, the opportunity to partner with the Millsaps on The Dorchester Hotel arose and was too good to pass up.
“This romantic and beautiful hotel was looking for a restaurant partner to be the main restaurant of the hotel. They approached us because they liked what we did. Our clienteles aligned so we made a deal,” says Abou-Challa. The arrangement involves a 20-year lease and Abou-Challa and Vastis still own the Pine Street building.
This partnership with The Dorchester allowed Abou-Challa and Vastis to build the restaurant of their dreams: “We went for it to the maximum in terms of what we wanted. Like little kids. Let’s do the best of the best. Let’s have the best espresso machine, the best equipment, the best furniture.”
“I started to work with flavours and ingredients I’d never worked with before, like Aleppo pepper—a richly flavoured, mildly spicy chile pepper from Syria—and za’atar, which is a Middle Eastern spice blend. The main thing I learned was simplicity.”
Back in the day, Vastis designed a clothing line called DLR—Dedication, Love, Respect. Abou-Challa would buy everything he produced so those words are a big connection piece for these two. So much so that the words hung from a sign outside the Pine Street location and are etched onto the closing page of the restaurant’s menu.
“We’ve attached this affirmation to the business, and it drives everything we do. For example, when we make a cocktail, we have steps we don’t stray from. We press our fresh juices every day and make all our sugars from scratch. We even filter the water for the ice,” says Vastis.
“Even the pricing model of our Old World wine list is not as heavy as most traditional restaurants. People who know their wines usually appreciate the sale prices because the markup on most of our wines is around two-to-one, which is half the markup of most other restaurants,”
says Abou-Challa.
“We embody true love for this business, the love for the hospitality industry, the love of food and drink, the love of people, being around people and nourishing people. The word restaurateur is from the French word restaurer, meaning ‘to restore.’ We take that position to heart. We want you to leave in a better place than when you came in, whether it’s mentally, physically or psychologically. That’s the point of this business,” says Vastis. “Going out for dinner is an escape where you can nourish your soul a little bit. Some days the world beats you up and you come into a place like this and everything we do here is set up to make you feel like a million bucks when you leave.”
