The door of the men’s room at Fring’s bears the only visible proof that the Toronto restaurant is co-owned by Drake: a hand-lettered sign in flowery cursive that reads “6 Gods” — a reference to a track on Drake’s mixtape If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late and the rapper’s self-selected sobriquet.
Otherwise, the upscale eatery, founded last month with local chef and restaurateur Susur Lee, is quite indistinguishable from many of the city’s less momentous dining hot spots. Or so it may seem to the untrained eye. Fortunately, I am equipped with deep reserves of Drake expertise. I can see things. Every napkin and lampshade, every amuse-bouche and aperitif, has some concealed Drake meaning, some hidden Drake touch. I sense his impress in everything at Fring’s.
Fring’s appeared on the club-rife King Street in Toronto earlier this fall with the suddenness of a surprise album: one heard the morning after of an all-night opening party that boasted Jaden Smith and Serena Williams among its guests of honour. The name, for the record, remains somewhat contentious: eagle-eyed Canadians have traced it to a combination fry-onion ring called a “fring” served by the Harvey’s fast-food chain in the mid-90s. Others assume it’s a tribute to Gustavo Fring, the chicken-purveying villain from Breaking Bad.
It wasn’t until last week, in any case, that the restaurant, the subject of much speculation, opened to the public for business. Within hours of the announcement that reservations could be claimed online, it became virtually impossible to get one; a table for two at 7pm isn’t available, at the time of this writing, until the end of December.
Rarely, even at Toronto’s most popular restaurants, does demand so rapidly dwarf supply. One can only credit Drake’s gravitational pull for this triumph: the city is finding itself drawn to the place in record numbers.
On to the place itself. Those expecting the pastel pinks of Hotline Bling to exert an influence on the decor will be disappointed to find a more understated aesthetic; the ink-black tablecloths and gilded accoutrements so memorably furnishing Take Care’s album art are nowhere to be found here, either. Drake’s fondness for the ostentatious manifests itself in more characteristically idiosyncratic ways: neon lights lining the ceiling above fur-trimmed leather chairs and the most comfortable booth seating I’ve ever experienced, complete with lavish granite table.
In the early 2000s, John Updike described the New Museum of Modern Art as “breathless of unspared expense”. The same principle applies here. The dining room at Fring’s is as sumptuous, as costly and as lush as the beats devised by Drake’s in-house producer Noah “40” Shebib.
My dining companion and I were shown to our table by a dark-suited manager and thereafter served by Jeff, a waiter who managed, with astonishing discipline, to refrain from making Drake jokes or puns of any kind. (He never once insisted we “thank him later”, which I would have thought would be in the training manual.)
To begin with, Jeff was kind enough to recommend one of the house’s signature cocktails. I had the Proper Ting — already a “really famous” drink, Jeff explained, of the restaurant’s own invention — and it was suitably Drake-like in its modest flamboyance: served in a long, squat champagne coupe, it was frothy with egg white and topped with a black cherry and a patterned drizzle of grenadine. It was the sort of drink I could well imagine Drake sharing with a few nice girls.
Jeff described the Fring’s menu as “sort of New Orleans meets Europe meets Asia”, which struck me as just the sort of eclectic, globetrotting identity Drake would demand of his restaurant’s cuisine — though I’m not quite sure from which of these cultures the kale Caesar salad we ordered is traditionally derived.
I didn’t ask the origin of the ricotta toast — an inexplicably spicy mound of oozing lukewarm cheese sprinkled with pomegranates and smeared across a mildly burnt piece of bread — before swiftly returning it to the kitchen. Frankly, I’m surprised the man responsible for such remarkably cohesive albums as Thank Me Later and Nothing Was the Same would allow such a dish to pass muster. Even his tossed-off diss tracks are immaculate. Where are the standards that yielded Right Hand and Back to Back?
But when we received our main course, my confidence was summarily restored. The house speciality — I suspect conceived by Drake himself, though the kitchen denies it — is a plate of perfectly fried chicken breasts served alongside a rich, dulce de leche-like maple sauce. It’s the kind of dish reputations are built on; it’s the kind of dish you rave about and go out of your way for. In other words, it’s the hit single. My evening dining under the unspoken direction of Drake concluded, naturally, with the last hurrah of a dessert and the denouement of an after-meal drink. It would have been too on the nose, I imagine, for things to end with a pound cake — Pound Cake being the glorious final song on Nothing Was the Same.
Instead it was a molten chocolate cake: indulgent, yes, but with the flair of a classic. The 20-year tawny port our server recommended with it was the grace note — the touch of sophistication that has always been one of Drake’s best features.
Drake is not customarily a singles artist. He works in albums: his keen sense of the flow and structure of a 60-minute record is perhaps his most enduring contribution to contemporary hip-hop and is one of the virtues even his detractors are usually willing to grant. I could discern that instinct guiding my meal at Fring’s. Even where the consistency was lacking — the ricotta toast as the track you tend to skip — I could sense an internal logic at play, a notion that, much as an album should be a kind of journey, a night out at a nice restaurant should follow a compelling arc. This, plainly, is the genius of Drake. And it’s the aspect of eating out at Fring’s that most assuredly distinguishes it as the product of his incomparable mind.