It was around the Chinese New Year, with the incoming Dog promising 12 months of change (according to my Chinese neighbours), that a cluster of restaurant announcements made the trend hounds prick up their ears. Marc Thuet had just reinvented his fine-dining restaurant as a bistro-cum-bakery. Chris McDonald was closing Avalon, long a temple of haute cuisine, and opening something much more casual. J.P. Challet had left the splendidly luxe environs of The Fifth to help Le Sélect debut in its new premises. The Fifth’s owner, Libell Geddes, would not replace him with another big-name chef but planned to simplify and democratize her menu, concentrating on the grill.

“A trend! A palpable trend!” barked the pundits, and indeed the evidence did seem impressive. In a city with barely a dozen truly high-end gastronomic contenders, suddenly losing three could certainly be construed as a calamity. But was this really a reflection of some anti-elitist surge in the zeitgeist or just a small knot of coincidences?

My first reaction was to credit the latter. I distrust the notion of trends—they oversimplify truth—and make it a general rule to question generalization. Besides, the three restaurants were so different in ambience and the three owners so different in temperament that it seemed unlikely they would all have succumbed to the same malady. It’s true that Avalon, then almost 11 years old, and Thuet Cuisine, a precocious infant of nine months, had both struggled to find enough customers every night of the week. Their reputations were high, but both were seen as destination restaurants, places to go a couple of times a year on special occasions—birthdays and anniversaries. That was not true of The Fifth, however, where filling the seats had never been a problem.

“And that’s how I want it to continue,” said Geddes last February, when I ran into her by chance in a bookshop. “I have often noticed that our Terrace, with its simpler grill menu, attracts a much broader range of customers in terms of age. Inside, the clientele is mostly over 40.” When younger people did dine at The Fifth, she continued, she got the impression that by the time the sorbet came, halfway through the meal, they felt they had been sitting and eating quite long enough. It had nothing to do with money or status—it was more a matter of attention span.

In November, therefore, when J.P. Challet announced he would be leaving in the new year—the parting was polite—Geddes decided not to go hunting for another French superstar. Come January, she closed for two months of renovations, put a fine new grill in the tiny kitchen, and handed the chef’s job to the restaurant’s hard-working young sous, Scott McDonough. His menu dispenses with the prix fixe format in favour of a structure more reminiscent of a steak house. Indeed, steaks outnumber all other mains, with side dishes, sauces and such additions as foie gras or a half lobster tail to complete the carnivorous experience. It seems determinedly macho, but Geddes has impeccable taste. I have no doubt The Fifth’s new gastronomic mood will be as gracefully civilized as ever—and more appealing, perhaps, to citizens in their 30s.

So, maybe I was wrong. Maybe the decisions of these owners and chefs are a reaction to social change. The generation of Torontonians who discovered the joys of serious restaurant dining in the late 1980s is now getting long in the tooth, and its successors are looking for a different, less formal kind of experience. The immediate popularity of the new incarnation of Le Sélect would seem to bear this out, though part of that was the sympathy factor. The owners had faced a nightmare nine-month gestation of bureaucratic problems before moving to the dazzling new premises on Wellington Street West—zoning issues, a four-month delay on a building permit, the wrong gas meter connected, demands that they wall off the back patio and show receipts for wine purchased decades earlier. The publicity added to a predictable curiosity, and what was intended to be a quiet, soft opening in mid-January turned into a zoo.