Image Credit: Vanessa Heins

Claudio Aprile is fanatical about germs and hygiene. He hates shaking hands, which all of his cooks know never to try with him. If one of the kitchen staff at Colborne Lane, Aprile’s acclaimed restaurant on the eastern edge of the financial district, ducks outside for a smoke during a lull in service, he expects them to brush their teeth before they start work again. He hates it when cooks touch their faces. He makes them wash their hands if a finger so much as grazes an eyelid. He often speaks of managing his employees with “an iron fist in a velvet glove.”

Aprile also hates it when people interfere with his vision. Last fall, he hosted a special dinner for a credit card company at the restaurant, along with John Szabo, a respected sommelier hired by the event’s promoters. “He’s everything I’m not,” Aprile says the next day. “I don’t like to glorify the dining experience. It either doesn’t taste good or it does taste good. He’s just going on about minerals and tannins, and I can see everybody—” Aprile rolls his eyes. “He served a pinot noir with the Thai beef salad, and they’re expecting me to go on about, you know, the harmony. And I said, ‘I’ll be honest with you guys: the dish you’re having was a time-sensitive dish, and John wouldn’t stop talking so now the dish has gone to shit. And the wine you’re drinking with that dish doesn’t make any sense at all. You should be drinking beer, or champagne if you want to get all chi-chi, or an Alsatian, a gewurz, something that’s fresh and clean and forward. Not a red wine.’ And everyone liked that, they appreciated it,” Aprile says. “I call things the way they are.”

Aprile is so high-strung about his food and the way it’s presented that, until recently, he rarely felt comfortable letting another cook plate his dishes: the careless placement of a single dollop of toasted amaranth or a purple shiso leaf could drive him mad. This approach has worked well for him. Colborne Lane didn’t lose money during the recession, even as other high-end restaurants fell one by one; not even the private dining room, with its 500-pound art piece of a chandelier and $25,000 mother-of-pearl table, gathered dust. Since he opened Colborne Lane three years ago, Aprile has become known as one of the most relentlessly creative and driven Toronto chefs of his generation, second only to Susur Lee.

He’s also an ambitious entrepreneur. Aprile will open a second restaurant, called Origin, early this year, right around the corner from Colborne Lane, at King and Church. The chef refused to bring on any partners in the venture; the total project cost is expected to come in at $1.3 million. He put his family’s home up as collateral to secure a sizable loan from the Royal Bank. (Aprile and his wife, Heather, have two children: Aiden, who is seven, and Isabel, who is two.) But Aprile is learning that restaurant empires come with a catch: the more places a restaurateur runs, the less control he has.