Inside Chef Matty Matheson’s New Toronto Restaurant, a Striking “Wooden Cathedral”

A step into Prime Seafood Palace creates a much different impression than its exterior. “It’d be really easy for me to make like some crazy sports bar that serves chicken wings, like some crazy Mega Matty World,” Matheson tells AD, explaining precisely what he didn’t want to create. Though a hypothetical Mega Matty World filled with neon signs and flat-screen TV sets would certainly be memorable, Prime Seafood Palace takes a different approach to make an impression. Going into the project—and into his first meeting with architect and fellow Canadian, Omar Gandhi—Matheson knew that he wanted to make “a wooden cathedral,” and this is, indeed, what diners can expect.

Like a church in a repurposed storefront, walking into the restaurant from the all-white facade feels like you’ve been let in on a secret. Refined, thin strips of maple wood cascade into an arch at the top of the double-height space and spread horizontally across the front and side windows to let filtered, natural light indoors without bringing the undesirable bustle of the street in, too. The space is essentially monochromatic and this extremely refined color palette helps maintain a sense of calm. Those creamy tones may seem prone to stain and easy wear in a space meant for indulgent meals of seafood and steak, but all of the materials were chosen to specifically gain character from use.

“There’s this kind of gentle, yellow hue to everything. With both the brass and the leather, we picked materials that are going to age beautifully and develop a patina. You can’t really do that with unnatural, synthetic materials,” Gandhi says. “People are going to touch it [the wood] and sit on it and things are gonna spill a little bit and whatever, but it’s just going to build this beautiful layer over time that just becomes more and more beautiful. That was really kind of the driving force behind those materials.”