“Al likes a fight and he’s having one.” Adam Vaughan, ward councillor

“Preserving the physical fabric isn’t just a question of preserving the architect’s work. It’s preserving the activities that are possible because of it.” Catherine Nasmith Toronto architect

It’s not exactly an image of a man under siege. At least not outwardly.

Al Carbone, paying the bills, settled in the front window seat-with-a-view at his Kit Kat restaurant on an obscenely cold Thursday evening. Looking relaxed and well fed in the comfort of his domain.

A Toronto fixture — Al, that is. The restaurant too. A joint with character. Masses of quirk.

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The crazy mini-French doors are blown open by prospective patrons who do not get the winter protocol of closing the outer door at street side first before entering the funny little place.

It’s 12 feet wide, tucked on the south side of King St. W., across from TIFF, that newcomer.

The kitchen is eight feet wide, max, situated dead centre of the resto, with an ailanthus tree growing right through the roof, its trunk substantially blocking the entrance end of the galley. Which is awkward. House rule: no fat chefs.

Al’s brindled dog is splayed against the far wall, deeply asleep until Al needs her to accompany him. She’s a service dog. What’s the service? He won’t say. What’s her name? He won’t tell. She’s a Dutch Shepherd, he’ll say that much.

There used to be a cat. Kitty Kat. Sometimes Kitty Kat wore a bow tie. Customers would call to make a reservation and ask if Kitty would be on that night. He worked for the place “off and on” for 14 years, Carbone says. What? Kitty had other commitments? He was clearly not declawed, judging from the fun he had on pillar and post.

No Name is seven. She’s “worked” here for six years.

This is a place that scores allegiances by Kit Kat lineage.

Joe DiSalvo, beefy and bald headed, tumbles in from the cold. Grey hoodie and toque. Always early for shift. Twenty years and always early.

What do you do Joe?

Human doorstop, for one. On subzero nights he stands interference, pressing his nose to those French doors and instructing theatre goers to pull that outside door tight. When you have only 65 seats in a restaurant, and eight of them are in the line of the gale, you pay attention to such matters.

Joe’s a food runner — the prep kitchen’s up a challenging flight of stairs. Up. Down. He clears tables too. A “utility man” Al calls him. “I’m a go getter,” Joe says.

Joe goes sideways between tables to take a seat beside Al for a few minutes, tearing up on the very first question, as in, how did you end up here? Right away he’s talking about his father, Gerry, who used to run DiSalvo’s up on Avenue Road, produce purveyors. Joe can’t talk about Gerry without his eyes welling, tapping his chest in a gesture of sorry, sorry, and how Al gave him a job two decades ago at, it sounds like, Gerry’s urging. Al rubs the back of Joe’s neck in a fatherly way.

Al has a wide embrace for members of his family.

Ward 20 Councillor Adam Vaughan not so much.

“We don’t talk anymore. He doesn’t like me for speaking up. And I don’t like what he’s doing either.”

Then he wonders: “Did you talk to him? He’s going to tell you I’m a troublemaker.”

Not that Al takes issue with that description.

What he takes issue with is the threatened transformation of this block of King Street, which he says will remake it from the vibrant and historically distinct “Restaurant Row” of brick-fronted, two and three-storey heritage buildings to a corridor of towers rising above a windswept canyon of coffee cup tumbleweed.

Vaughan says that won’t happen.

Al says the precedent has been set.

The Kit Kat family frets. Ravi the chef frets. David the front of house guy frets. Al’s brother John frets.

The precedent in Al’s mind, and he’s obsessive about this, is the approved high-rise development a few doors to the west. Kit Kat resides at 297 King Street West and is notable in part due to the split halves of an artful Holstein that protrude from the brick façade. The ass end was partially dislodged due to recent high winds but has since been reattached.

The highrise, which will undoubtedly be more sedate in nature, was initially proposed by developer Dani Cohen, who owns multiple properties on the block, as a mixed use building rising 39 storeys. The proposal was premised on the demolition of four properties, which leads to an instructive lesson about heritage preservation.

Two of the targeted properties, the Gardner Boyd Buildings, were constructed in 1885.

In innumerable staff reports the city notes the buildings’ architectural features — “decorative stonework”; “classical detailing” — while documenting the character and rhythm of the neighbourhood in which they were established. The original Toronto General Hospital had been built just across the street. The provincial legislature and Upper Canada College were resident too. Their relocations led to what the city describes as a reversion of the area from institutional to commercial uses. Low-storey brick buildings with commercial businesses on the ground floor and residential units above the storefronts popped up on the empty lots on the south side of King. The streetscape was much like we still see today along avenues such as Roncesvalles.

The properties were listed on the city’s inventory of heritage properties which is as it sounds — simply a historical record.

Not until the fall of 2011 did a spooked council seek at least some protection by having Restaurant Row designated under the Ontario Heritage Act.

Dani Cohen made his initial application in the spring of 2010.

Councillor Vaughan is on the line.

He does not say that Al Carbone is a troublemaker. He will say that the restaurateur is “grumpy” and also akin to a dog with a bone. “Al likes a fight and he’s having one.”

So Vaughan recounts his “move to designate” as soon as Cohen’s application landed. “We couldn’t stop Dani Cohen’s application coming forward but we found a way to settle it, to respect the heritage (of the to-be-developed properties) and to protect the rest of the heritage (of the rest of Restaurant Row.)”

The now approved development calls for a skinnier, taller building – 47 storeys — on a larger site. “We forced them to buy a new piece of property next door to give even more security to the heritage on site,” Vaughan says.

That property, 321 King, is one of the original buildings of the four-lot Hughes Terrace, built in 1855. The widow Anne Hughes purchased lots 12 and 13 and the Hughes brothers Patrick and Bernard, who ran a dry goods and hardware store down the street, the adjoining two. 321 and 319 King are the two originals extant, deemed by the city to be “a rare surviving example of urban row housing in Toronto and among the oldest building complexes in the city.” Today 321 is the Fred’s Not Here restaurant. In the mid 1890s it was Thomas Tintzel’s tailor shop.

Under the deal with the city the developer pledges to reconstruct the Hughes Terrace façade. The Gardner Boyd front will be restored to its original three-storeys. The building that today houses Z-teca restaurant will be completely demolished, and will serve as the open mews entrance to the tower, which will be set back three metres from the heritage fronts. (Other stipulations in the deal include $600,000 in so-called Section 37 monies for city improvements, chiefly for street improvements on John Street, and the setting aside of a smattering of the 304 condos to be offered at affordable rents for a period of 20 years.)

Al thinks it’s a sorry compromise.

John thinks this façade notion is a joke: “You might as well paint it. Get an artist to do a rendition. What’s the difference? If the spirit and the people inside are gone, there’s no heritage.”

Phil Goldsmith is the heritage architect retained by Dani Cohen for the project. He speaks to our “loss of sense of time in the core as more and more condos come along, completely replacing the Victorian city. It’s a struggle to find a way to replace a Victorian city that gives us this memory and humanity, if I could put it that way.”

The historic preservation of these facades, he says, will keep familiar what the pedestrian touches and feels. “The retention of that street wall is really critical to layering history as a part of the future experience of the street,” he says, noting that the north side of the street — TIFF — has none of that.

Al will not be placated. He hired a lawyer — fought the deal the whole way.

And lost.

It’s really no wonder he’s grumpy.

So in or around 1979 he was working as a waiter at the Imperial Room under the tutelage of famed Maitre’ D Louis Jannetta. One day he was headed back to Niagara Falls on the bus — mom still lives there at 88; Al is 60 — and he noticed a “For Lease or For Sale” sign in the window of a tiny shop on a not very vibrant stretch of King Street.

He wasn’t exactly a kid. But he was in need of reinvention. “I got out of there,” he says of Niagara Falls. “It was a dead end town, right?”

Yes but there must be more to that story. “I had an insurance agency. I worked in insurance for five years. I had a partner who screwed me. He was a lawyer . . . So I wanted a change and the best way was to get out of town.”

He rented the main floor spot in the King St. building for $350 a month, papered over the windows and slept in a bed on stilts to give himself more floor space. “My mother was so disappointed in me for living here she wouldn’t come and visit. I didn’t have to impress anybody.”

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In 1988 he registered his first long-term lease on the entire building. Buying it would have been a better idea, but he couldn’t raise the $174,000 asking price. He started running what was more or less a convenience store and sandwich shop with his partner, Cathy Horvath. (“She won’t marry me. You can say that. It’s kinda fun, puts a twist on it.”)

For a time he barbecued Italian sausages on the street (“My slogan was ‘Bigger Wieners are Better.’ My cousins used to make them on College Street. The Porco brothers.” He says he was shut down by the “hot dog police.”) Now he’s selling one-and-a-half inch thick 14-ounce grain-fed veal chops with a fig and cognac demi-glace for $39.95.

Highlights of the in-between years include erecting an unpermitted sky light over the back end of the restaurant — that landed him lengthily in court and was testimony to his bullheadedness — and deciding that the exposed brick along one rear wall should serve as a canvas for patron signatures, which it colourfully does to this day, and keeping the tree.

“If they had seen that tree I would never have got licensed,” he says of the city. “Ten years later they came back and said, what happened? Where’d that come from?”

Point being that when Al says that he would never be able to launch a Kit Kat today, what with all the rules and regulations, he’s undoubtedly right. He’s currently stressed about the “harmonization of boulevard café bylaws,” which he fears will squeeze his existing space to near non-existence. “Harmonization” is not really an Al word.

A more positive development was a recent trip to New Orleans with Kit Kat chef Ravi Anandappa and the two guys who run The Local Kitchen over in Parkdale. A great deal of shrimp boil was consumed and homage was paid to Leah Chase, who, at the age of 91, was tracked down by Al in the kitchen of Dooky Chase’s Restaurant peeling sweet potatoes. Dooky has passed on now but Leah still runs the place, which started out as a sandwich shop and lottery ticket outlet in 1939. Today dinner is served at the Treme restaurant one day a week. Friday. 5 to 9. Obama eats there.

The eccentricity and character of independent businesses isn’t easily equated with sky-high condo development. Catherine Nasmith is a Toronto architect and heritage rehabilitation expert. “Preserving the physical fabric isn’t just a question of preserving the architect’s work,” she says. “It’s preserving the activities that are possible because of it.” Keeping main street business intact “preserves a way of life . . . As the city gives over more and more of the ground floor of our city streets to bigger scale developments we really lose the ability to have those independent businesses.”

Observing the way of life at Kit Kat.

The seafood guy has dropped a box of smoked salmon, 30 pounds of calamari (frozen — the restaurant goes through 20 pounds a night) and 10 pounds of arctic char (fresh) in the prep kitchen and is pelting down the steep front stairs leaving the words “Quick quick quick today’s the $150 parking oh my goodness” in his wake.

Donna Bourque is cleaning the mirrored wall across from the bar, installed to make it the joint appear larger than it is, and stopping to talk about her summer time passion, fishing in Algonquin Park. Evening manager Joanna Dionisopoulas lowers the lights and is interrupted by Al, who would like her to find someone with the Shazam ap so he can pinpoint the music that’s playing, which elicits an “I don’t have enough to do, right?”

It’s Ella Fitzgerald. Al riffs on Ella. “I met her at the Imperial Room. I looked after her. She’d have a green room . . . BB King was one of my favourites.”

Most conversations at Kit Kat quickly huff off onto various sidings. Like when Justice Miller comes in and there’s his trademark jesting with Al about how much he wants Al’s dog. This is not to be confused with Justice Rivard who, over the skylight battle, “threw the book at me.”

Meanwhile, No Name, undoubtedly sensing that she is being talked about, raises herself up at 5:57 p.m., checks to see that her master is there, turns her rear to the door and collapses under the last empty deuce in the place. By 6 o’clock it’s a sellout.

Stories. Freddy LoCicero ran the kitchen briefly. He liked his drinks. “He would call them wobbly pops,” John says. There used to be a magnum of olive oil near the kitchen til Freddy came out and, maybe tottering, knocked the damn thing over, an estimated seven litre slick. Al can name at least one customer who never came back after that.

Brendan Shanahan would hug the waxen trunk of the ailanthus tree for good luck. Said he would bring the Stanley Cup in and have a party if the Red Wings won the cup. Which they did and he did.

Kevin Spacey preferred to sit at the back of the restaurant alone. Luigi from New York would come in once a month for lunch, order a veal chop and a bottle of wine, and fall asleep with his legs sticking out into the aisle.

Waiter Kevin Gosselin (13 years service) could easily preorder for some of the regulars, he knows their habits so well. “Charles F — had fish. And if there was a butter sauce he wouldn’t have the butter sauce. He didn’t even like fish. His doctor told him to eat skate. Well, that didn’t go over too well. Poor Charles. The look on his face. He was white as a ghost when he saw that skate wing come out.”

Listening to Adam Vaughan, there’s no immediate threat to Al’s idiosyncratic contribution to the entertainment district — which Al helped found, by the way. The negative effects from the 321-333 project have been mitigated, he says. The bad news ends here. “Did I encounter a neighbourhood that had very weak zoning? Yes. Have I changed that? Yes. Does that protect Restaurant Row now? Yes.” But then: “Can a future act of council overturn it? That’s always a possibility.”

King St. pedestrians may be confused. A few doors over from Kit Kat is posted a large sign for a development proposal. The application seeks to construct a 42-storey commercial building — office, hotel and retail — that would absorb the properties from 305 to 319 King Street, which would make it contiguous to the development that has already been approved.

Number 319 is the sister property to 321, the second of the original Hughes Terrace buildings. Today it houses La Fenice.

Number 315, where St. Tropez is, was purchased by Joseph Devlin for $4,000 in 1883 and was built and occupied at least by 1887. As with the already approved Cohen project, the façade of the Devlin building would be retained.

In May, Dan Nicholson, senior planner with the city, submitted his preliminary report on the application. “We have some very significant concerns about the project as it is currently proposed,” he says. The chief concern, he goes on to say, is that the plan provides for no setback on the eastern property line. “If you live in a tower you should be able to look out the window and not have somebody else looking at you from, you know, some very close proximity.”

He says discussions are ongoing with the applicant on revisions to the proposal.

Asked if height was a consideration, Nicholson responded: “It is a consideration. It’s not the overriding consideration. Obviously this is a tower neighbourhood.”

And precedent does matter. “Now that we have one tower approved on Restaurant Row it’s certainly conceivable that there could be others as well. That’s a fair comment.”

Not the words that Al wants to hear. “One bad precedent leads to another bad precedent,” he says. “It’s all one bad precedent after another.”

Architect Phil Goldsmith did a heritage impact assessment on the project. “It’s in the middle of approvals . . . I can’t say much about that one.”

Adam Vaughan is adamant it will not go forward. “We have said we’re going to refuse it and we’re not going to touch the heritage because Restaurant Row is not to be encroached upon any further.”

In the fall of 2012 a study was launched to determine whether the King Spadina area warrants a Heritage Conservation District designation. That, says Vaughan, will provide more power to say “no” should such protections be adopted for Restaurant Row. He says he has further protections in the works. He won’t say what.

“The reason I’m bringing all those rules in is in exact response to Al’s concerns that his restaurant is about to be demolished. It will not be demolished.”

The strip will change radically with the new development. There’s no doubt about that. And Al has zero security: the gent who owns the Kit Kat property is elderly, and Al seems vague on the owner’s intent.

Good friend Bill Ballard owns the property immediately to the east, so that’s comforting. Immediately to the west is another property owned by Dani Cohen, so that’s worrying.

James McGee, realtor, built the brick threesome in 1876. Four years later they were occupied by a druggist, a confectioner and a stationer. Architects might note their cornices, or corbelled brickwork. They are not steel, they are not glass, they are not tall, and they would be right at home in the cooler neighbourhods of Boston or New York.

Kit Kat’s packed, so it’s time for Al to give up his table. Joe DiSalvo is cracking fresh pepper over a caprese salad at the adjacent table. John’s trying to keep the door closed.

Al is looking contemplative, staring out that window. “It’s been an interesting time down here,” he says. He’d like 25 more years at it.

STEVE RUSSELL PHOTOS / TORONTO STAR

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