Ambitious food in a heavenly location

Even for a pop-up restaurant, this is an unusual location. And it was an unusual set of circumstances that led to chef Colin Bebbington even being aware that this building on the campus of the Atlantic School of Theology exists.

In 2003, Bebbington was a student at Halifax Grammar School when Hurricane Juan tore off the roof. Grammar students decamped to the AST campus, and studied there while repairs were completed.

Bebbington, in Grade 9 at the time, always remembered those weeks.

“I knew of the building, knew what it was like and the location, and that’s what I thought was interesting when I rediscovered it a year and a half ago, and I thought it would be a killer idea if they would allow it,” he said.

Bebbington has been popping up here and there since the pandemic sent him home from London, where he was working at Claridge’s.

His first foray was in the back room at Charcuterie Ratinaud on Gottingen Street, followed by a summer in a store near Peggy’s Cove.

Both went very well, and his new 35-seat operation on the Northwest Arm certainly has location going for it.

“I don’t think anyone in Halifax has ever had the opportunity to have a consistent dinner experience on that side of the Arm, or near Point Pleasant Park. It’s never been used as a restaurant, so we’ll find out,” said Bebbington, who hopes to open in a couple of weeks and hit the ground running, taking advantage of the momentum he generated last summer, when many nights were sold out. “It’ll follow the … concept I was using in Peggy’s Cove, dealing with the handful of farmers that I have locally, staying in season and offering a four-course dinner experience, where we change the menu constantly according to what’s in season and what’s available.”

Bebbington has been installing a commercial kitchen in his new space over the last couple of months, and said when he opens, he will continue to rely on suppliers like farmer Ted Hutten and his spectacular vegetables.

“I don’t want to define it as one cuisine. As long as I can get inspiration from ingredients, and those ingredients are locally sourced,” he said. “At the last (pop-up) a lot of our guests liked that some four-course dinners felt like they were getting four different cuisines.”

Bebbington’s spot on the arm will be open for seven weeks, until he takes a threemonth sabbatical to attend pasta school in Bologna, Italy.

“We’ll be back up and running come August 1st, all the way until the end of December.”

And then it gets real. Bebbington this week signed a 12-year lease with Jim Spatz’s Southwest Properties to run one of several restaurants inside the Cunard development on the waterfront. It’s another project that has its roots in high school.

“It goes back to Grammar School. Colin went to school with Jim’s son Avram and Jim was well aware of Colin’s story. So, when Colin came back home at the start of the pandemic, Jim knew he was here, they chatted a little bit … and a lot of people from the office went to Colin’s pop-up at Ratinaud, and loved it,” said Gordon Laing, who was the president of Southwest Properties when talks began with Bebbington.

“That’s where it started, we realized he had the potential to bring to Halifax some world-wide cuisine that there would be a market for, so we started to cultivate that relationship. He’s a very driven, confident young man and we knew we wanted him to be part of our portfolio somewhere.”

Bebbington, 33, succeeded on Gottingen Street and in Peggy’s Cove. But even for a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America, a highly visible restaurant in a multimillion-dollar building on the waterfront could give one pause.

“It feels good. Now,” he said. “It was a process of almost a year since we started the conversations, and I think the biggest thing I learned was to take my time with it. This is like a weird romance for me for the last 10 years now, of almost every day thinking about the opportunity one day to open my own restaurant.”

It won’t open until the spring of 2024, but Bebbington already knows how many seats he’ll have to fill (35) and how he’ll cook.

“It’s going to focus on wood-fire and charcoal cooking, and that’s as far as I want to define the cuisine,” he said, not divulging details of the lease except to say he’s never paid rent like this. “It’s not what you expect when you’re young, but there’s no opening a restaurant for five years and being successful. For any restaurant to be successful, it has to be long-term. At first, 12 years did scare me, but as I thought about it, the goal isn’t to open for five.

“I’ve worked in a lot of other restaurants in a lot bigger cities where rent is a lot more scary than it is here.”

Bebbington says he can use the time until 2024 to be ready to open, but he has a front of house manager already lined up, and the goal is for his restaurant to be the best place in the province to work.

“When you accomplish that, staffing becomes easy for you and you can just focus on the guest experience.”