In 1993, Toronto restaurateur Peter Oliver, BCom’71 and chef Michael Bonacini helped transform their city’s dining and the local hospitality industry by opening high-demand, high-end restaurants, such as Jump and Canoe, in Toronto’s downtown financial core.
Together, they built Oliver & Bonacini Hospitality, an empire of over 30 premiere restaurants and event spaces.
The most recent chapters in O&B’s history have largely been authored by Peter’s son, Andrew Oliver, BCom’06, the president and CEO of Oliver & Bonacini Hospitality since 2012. And some of those chapters have been a little more suspenseful than he would have liked.
Andrew Oliver has put his own stamp on the company by playing a key role in the expansion of O&B into other cities including bars and restaurants in Montreal, Calgary and Edmonton. After joining the company as director of its fledgling events and catering business in 2010, he also led O&B’s major expansion into the events sector in Ontario, Quebec and Alberta, where its venues are involved in more than 10,000 events a year.
His biggest challenge, however, was in leading O&B through the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic.
‘Vowed to go on fighting’
“Sadly, people got crushed in our industry by COVID,” says Oliver. “Toronto and Montreal had 450 days of pandemic lockout, and the entire restaurant and hospitality industry was effectively bankrupt. I tried not to think ‘woe is me’ and vowed to go on fighting to live another day.”
Oliver lost 25 pounds due to the stress associated with the pandemic’s first 30 days. He ended up losing 100 pounds in the first year – but most of that weight loss was the result of a personal resolve to get healthy.
“It’s easy to be unhealthy in this business,” says Oliver. “I was depressed and suddenly had free time. I started weightlifting and became a crazed Peloton bike user. That saved my life.”
The pandemic hit O&B hard. Oliver remembers having to shutter 26 restaurants and eight event venues in 72 hours. “My job became how do I save jobs by looking ahead to a time after the lockdown phases,” he says.
He turned to large commercial landlords like Cadillac Fairview, Bentall Kennedy, KingSett Capital and RioCan REIT, pitching them a creative plan that would help keep the company afloat and enable O&B to develop new dining and event destinations for the future.
“Sadly, people got crushed by COVID. The entire restaurant and hospitality industry was effectively bankrupt. I tried not to think ‘woe is me.’”
Andrew Oliver, president and CEO of Oliver & Bonacini Hospitality
The novel idea called for O&B to partner with landlords and leverage its hospitality expertise to build spectacular new restaurants and event spaces as amenities to help attract and bring office and retail tenants back to the downtown core.
“We had to partner with [landlords] and get rid of fixed rent. The landlords had money and we had zero money, either for rent or to pay for building new restaurants and event spaces in places like Eaton Centre, The Well and Scotia Plaza,” explains Oliver, who drew on his early deal-making experience in private equity (pre-O&B) and longstanding relationships with commercial real estate investors to strike innovative cost- and revenue-sharing arrangements with property owners.
“I became a master of begging with our landlords and our bank, RBC, and they were very supportive of our vision,” says Oliver.
He succeeded in keeping O&B afloat and his plans are now bearing fruit.
Oliver was recently included in Toronto Life’s annual list of the 50 Most Influential Torontonians, in part for his role in launching Queen’s Cross Food Hall, an upscale food court in Cadillac Fairview’s Eaton Centre inspired by London’s iconic King’s Cross food market.
He also partnered with Scotia Plaza owner KingSett Capital on a deal for O&B to manage and operate SixtyEight, a 20,000-square-foot luxury event, bar and dining space located on the Scotia Plaza’s top floor (it’s Canada’s second tallest building), set to open in June.
As a student at McGill in the early 2000s, Oliver says his ambitions were not at all targeted towards O&B.
“When I chose McGill to do a commerce degree, I wasn’t planning to go into the family business and the hospitality industry. I picked McGill because of its international reputation and my plan was to go into finance and investment banking.”
After graduating, Oliver worked for four years in private equity at a TerraNova Capital, a wealth management advisory firm, where he gained valuable experience in deal-making.
The family business beckons
“I had always wanted to do my own thing, but didn’t have enough capital to launch my own private equity fund. Lee Chung, TerraNova’s CFO, became CFO at O&B in 2008. Peter and Michael had just started the events and catering side of the business and asked me to look at its viability and potential,” recalls Oliver.
He analyzed the events and catering sector and was excited by its growth potential. “Our main competition in this sector is hotels and other caterers. This was an opportunity to do what we do best. We develop unique dining concepts. Our core emphasis is on high-end food, offering our guests great value and service, and delivering a unique experience.”
Oliver started working part-time for O&B in 2008. “Peter and Michael were thinking about succession and that was a testing ground to see what I could do with the events business,” says Oliver. He proved he could successfully launch and grow it.
Like many second-generation business owners, Andrew has complementary but different strengths than his father. “Peter was much better with people, and I was better with numbers. It was a good match,” he says, noting that “every year my father would spend a week writing personal Christmas cards to each of our employees, with his arm in an ice bucket, even when O&B had grown to almost 1,000 employees.”
Today, Oliver is emulating his late father’s entrepreneurial boldness through ambitious ventures including Aera, La Plume and The Dorset, three sleek new restaurants that O&B recently opened and operates in the Well, a new upscale, three-million-square-foot mixed-use development in Toronto’s west end.
In the throes of the pandemic, Oliver called up the Well’s developers to say he would take every single available restaurant lease in the complex.
“I said, I’ll do all or none of them. We think the restaurants will be more efficient with one operator. We were the only hospitality company crazy enough to do that,” says Oliver, who convinced the developers to redesign the Well’s entire penthouse 38th floor, planned as office space, to build Aera, a swish steakhouse aiming to rival Canoe as a new jewel in O&B’s crown.
Oliver learned from his father that people are the lifeblood of the hospitality industry.
“Our business is about human connection, and Peter inspired all the people I work with. I feel proud and fortunate that so many senior staff from the years of Peter and Michael have stayed with the company. One reason that O&B has to grow is because we want to keep the best people and offer them new career opportunities to go up and up,” he says.
“Despite the challenges and heartaches, the hospitality business is fun,” says Oliver. “I believe the best years are ahead of us.”
