He plays endearing handyman Neil Fak on The Bear—and serves as an executive producer on the restaurant-centered FX show—but offscreen Matty Matheson has spent more than two decades building his career as a respected chef, restaurateur, and cookbook author.
Raised in Eastern Canada and Ontario, Matheson made his mark on the Toronto culinary scene, first at Le Sélect Bistro, then at La Palette, followed by the kitchens of the late Oddfellows and Parts & Labour.
Those restaurants, owned and operated by local practice Castor Design, exposed Matheson to the power of visual impact. “Restaurants are tables, chairs, and lights; it’s difficult to make them truly yours. I learned a lot of things about design like paying attention to lines, the music, the vibe, and how to truly put yourself into a space,” he says.
A cantilevered canopy hovers over the bar at Prime Seafood Palace in Toronto
Today, as the visionary behind Our House Hospitality Company, a nod to his childhood home that teemed with well-fed visitors, Matheson relishes his multipronged role as owner, approaching restaurants from a 360-degree perspective.
The playful concepts, including Prime Seafood Palace, Matty’s Patty’s Burger Club, and Cà Phê Rang in Toronto, as well as Rizzo’s House of Parm in Ridgeway, Ontario, and the condiment brand Matheson Food Company, are all imprinted with conviviality—a hallmark of the Blue Goose restaurant Matheson’s grandfather helmed on Prince Edward Island.
“Going there as a kid was magical for me,” says Matheson, who aims to “recreate the feelings of happiness, excitement, and fulfillment” that gripped him every time he caught a glimpse of the Blue Goose from the Trans-Canada Highway.
Prime Seafood Palace was six years in the making and is the star of the portfolio. Fueled by Matheson’s love for steakhouses, it opened in the West Queen West neighborhood in 2022, showcasing classics balanced with seafood dishes and vegetables grown at the Blue Goose Farm in Ridgeway—a callback to his grandfather’s restaurant—that Matheson founded with chef Keenan McVey.
Prime Seafood Palace’s main dining room sits underneath wood slat vaulted ceiling
For the ambitious Prime Seafood Palace, Matheson reached out to Toronto- and Halifax, Nova Scotia-based Omar Gandhi Architects via Instagram. “I wanted somebody who had never designed a restaurant. Omar was making beautiful homes, cabins, and cottages, and it caught my eye,” explains Matheson.
Over a breakfast meeting, it became clear to Gandhi that Matheson desired a design rooted in Japanese and Scandinavian minimalism that also paid tribute to the architecture found in rural Canada, “so we treated it like a house,” he says.
From the outset, Matheson was deeply involved in the design process, weighing in on everything from leather to wood grain to cutlery. “Matty moved his team of people who were going to help right next to us. We shared a wall and spent a lot of time on each other’s couches. Even when I wasn’t there, he was in our studio all the time bouncing ideas back and forth,” adds Gandhi.
Matheson was keen to transform the structure into “a wooden cathedral,” as he puts it, and layer it with details that reminded him of his grandfather’s restaurant, wanting it “to always look like magic hour,” he says.
Vertical brass screens softly filter in sunlight while providing a sense of intimacy for diners at Prime Seafood Palace
Gandhi and his team responded with elements of surprise throughout, enveloping the warm space in white maple and vertical brass screens. Diners sit underneath a dramatic slatted vaulted ceiling; the bar is crowned with a cantilevered canopy; and food is cooked on cherry wood coals in the open kitchen. Custom furniture—made in collaboration with Mississauga, Ontario-based Coolican & Company—includes booth tables reminiscent of diner seating.
Even the bathroom stands out with a skylight that soars some 30 feet, a bespoke concrete sink from Ozark Mountains craftsman Brandon Gore that takes cues from a hydrological Lake Erie map, and swaths of Bianco Carrara marble.
“It was about building a crescendo moment, a dichotomy of the outer banal shell and the interior form, where you enter completely bewildered by what’s on the inside,” says Gandhi. “It’s fine dining, but in an atmosphere that doesn’t limit the influence that people and food have on the space.”
The rear of Prime Seafood Palace is crafted with a whitewashed pine that evokes an Ontario country cottage
This article originally appeared in HD’s July 2024 issue.
