As I walked into Colborne Lane on its opening night, hoping to like it but also prepared to find the ambience alienatingly hip, it took me by surprise to hear the music of my youth. It was the strumming acoustic hallelujahs and hare ramas of George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord,” and it Prousted me right back to several life-changing parties in the early 1970s. No need to bore you with that fizzy montage of memories, and anyway, the song was clearly for Colborne Lane, not for me: the invocation of a gentle, ecumenical blessing on the newborn restaurant.

I dragged the poor old brain back into the moment, just in time to shake hands with co-owner Hanif Harji. Dapper in a pinstriped jacket, V-neck sweater and cashmere scarf, he had been hovering by the bar, trying to look inconspicuous. First-night nerves are understandable, but Harji is not much of a self-promoter at the best of times—always quick to praise partners and collaborators in his gently soft-spoken way, attributing his own success to luck, hard work and humility. Ten years ago, he was running his family’s small variety store at the corner of Greenwood and Danforth; today, at 35, he co-owns two highly regarded restaurants—Blowfish and Kultura. Colborne Lane, however, has the potential to lift him into a different gastronomic league, for his partner here is renowned chef Claudio Aprile.

This is a seminal moment in Aprile’s career, his first restaurant as co-owner, and his legions of fans from Zoom, Bali Sugar (in London) and the last six years at Senses are eager to see what their hero proposes now that he has a place of his own.

They might also want to know why Aprile walked away from a long and fruitful relationship with hotelier Henry Wu to go into partnership with Harji. The room—with its youthful ambience, its almost edgy informality—provides much of the answer. “We want to create a space of ironies,” Harji had told me a week earlier, “where nothing is obvious, where we match modern and ele­gant and old and tattered.” His designers, Commute Home’s Hamid Samad and Sara Parisotto, have done just that, taking the 114-year-old walls back to brick and plaster, distressed post and beam. Industrial grunge is tastefully represented by a rusting fire escape in one corner, dim light bulbs hanging from pulleys and chains, and the vista of a grimy old alley outside the rear picture windows. Luxurious banquettes, intriguing art on the walls and other details lend balance, but there are no cloths on the polished wooden tables and prices are astonishingly low. As a frame for Aprile’s meticulously realized, always delicious food, it could scarcely be farther removed from the hush and heavyweight hotel linen of Senses. As a stylistic statement, it reinforces Toronto’s hottest dining trend: that haute cuisine and a casual environment go together like steak and eggs.

The other thing that persuaded Aprile to team up with Harji is simply friendship—though there’s nothing surprising about that. Everyone who has ever met Harji seems to thoroughly like the guy. One might have expected the creator of the very cool Blowfish and Kultura to be something of a party animal, but the reverse is true. Harji’s reputation is that of a clean-living bachelor whose philosophy of hard work and keeping his head down could almost sound platitudinous if it weren’t so heartfelt. “There’s nothing cool about me at all,” he says. “I’m just lucky to have great partners.” But that in itself is a talent, especially when it coincides with a more or less instinctive gift for seizing the moment.

Harji was a toddler when his family left Tanzania in the early 1970s and settled in Toronto’s Flemingdon Park. His parents bought the Greenwood convenience store and his father worked for the TTC, moving empty streetcars from one depot to another. To pay his way through a history degree at the University of Toronto, Harji started small businesses of his own, selling cowboy boots and gathering all the university club and frat house T-shirt printing endeavours under his own umbrella. His uncles were all entrepreneurs and gave him advice, but then his father fell ill and Harji had to take over the family store. “I realized it wasn’t going to keep my attention,” he remembers. “I had studied the history of coffee and saw how successful Starbucks had been, so I sold the store, took all the family’s savings and bought a Second Cup at Dundas Street and McCaul. That was in 1997, just when specialty coffee was starting to take off in Canada… I was 26.”