Half an hour before midnight, the line of people waiting in the rain still stretched along Dundas and halfway down McCaul. Like figures in a Lowry painting, they queued patiently, determined to see architect Frank Gehry’s renovated Art Gallery of Ontario. That first day, November 14, the gallery had expected maybe 7,000 visitors. Fifteen thousand came, and another 38,000 over the weekend. Unlike the Royal Ontario Museum, with its controversial Crystal, the AGO reopened on a tide of goodwill and enthusiasm, fuelled by the gallery’s own determination to broaden its appeal beyond the art-loving elite and engage with the city.

The same democratic mandate was clearly apparent on the opening night of the gallery’s restaurant, Frank. At one of Gehry’s rainbow-hued tables, men in suits and ties sat with their fashionably dressed wives. At another, four students in jeans and hoodies seemed equally at home. Given the recent plunge in the economy, the restaurant’s decision to avoid formal fine dining looked like a touch of genius. But a more casual style had always been part of the overall plan. Frank is built on a framework of contradictory tensions: a restaurant that is an integral part of the gallery, but also independent of it; a place smart enough to satisfy members of the board of directors with guests to entertain, but easygoing enough to please art lovers seeking brunch.

At first glance, such opposites seem irreconcilable. “I know,” agrees the AGO’s executive chef, Anne Yarymowich, with a smile. “Will it work? You can never be sure. In the end, you just open and see what happens.” Her nonchalance is unconvincing. A massive amount of time and thought has gone into Frank, starting with the most basic questions about who would create it. The gallery’s executives didn’t have to look far to see the different ways in which other cultural institutions had recently answered the need for a restaurant. The Gardiner museum invited an outside chef, Jamie Kennedy, to build an independent operation on the new building’s third floor. The ROM brought in a highly respected American giant, Restaurant Associates, to create its food and beverage program from scratch—including C5, the pricey fine-dining restaurant under the Crystal’s dramatic pinnacles.

The AGO, however, was in a different position. Since her arrival in 1996, Yarymowich had proven an invaluable asset. The first restaurant she opened there, Agora, was a triumph. More importantly, she was an expert at the other side of the AGO’s food and beverage program: the banquets, catered parties and special events that not only brought in annual revenue to the tune of $3 million, but were also used to inspire and reward generosity during the endless fundraising campaigns. Gallery management renewed her contract, so that she could stay on as part of the team to renovate the gallery, to create Frank and the café on the floor below, to work on projects as vast as the new banquet kitchen and as small as the fifth-floor espresso bar or the snack menu in the members’ lounge.

“It was gratifying to be asked,” recalls Yarymowich. “A vote of confidence.” Never­theless, the prospect of spending the next two years in an office instead of a kitchen was less than alluring, and headhunters were tempting her with other opportunities. “But in the end,” she says, “I have an incredible emotional attachment to the AGO, and it was too hard to walk away from the chance to be involved in this huge new vision.” There is something satisfying about the continuity, a feeling that remains intangible until you read Frank’s menu and recognize her style. It adds extra resonance to the excitement that crackles through every corner of the new gallery.

It would be hard to think of a chef better suited to the AGO job. Yarymowich has a degree in fine arts from the University of Ottawa, and she was a painter when I first met her, some 25 years ago—though, coming from a large Ukrainian family, she was already an accomplished cook. She took the two-year culinary management course at George Brown College and discovered a different medium for her artistry. In the late ’80s, she was chef at The Parrot on Queen West. In 1990, she opened Mildred Pierce, the whimsical restaurant owned by Donna Dooher and Kevin Gallagher. Over her six-year stint there, she established her reputation as a chef with a particular talent for contemporary takes on comfort food, as a generous mentor and as Toronto’s queen of brunch.

Moving to the AGO, her food became more refined, the flavours more elegantly balanced—and there was often wit on the menu, especially when she began creating dishes that reflected the gallery’s temporary exhibitions. I loved the line of hard-boiled quail’s eggs topped with different kinds of caviar that she created to mirror the taste of the Russian court during the Treasures of the Hermitage’s sojourn.