Head of the table

Remembering OddFellows, the eatery that made Matty Matheson a rock star

- STUART BERMAN

In August 2009, chef Matty Matheson prepares the food for OddFellows from inside a Winnebago parked at the back of the restaurant.

Long before Matty Matheson had amassed 1.6 million followers on Instagram, he had an audience of 24. That was the seating capacity at OddFellows, the compact Queen West restaurant that hired Matheson as head chef prior to its 2008 opening.

Back then, Matheson was a Humber cooking school dropout who had received on-the-job training under chef Rang Nguyen at Le Select, before landing in the kitchen of Kensington Market’s La Palette.

But, by the time OddFellows closed in 2011, Matheson was the Toronto food scene’s resident rock star: a charismatic, heavily inked and hard-partying force of nature who could bring fine-dining enthusiasts and punks together under one roof.

That outcome was not something OddFellows owners Kei Ng and Brian Richer would have predicted when they hired Matheson. In 2008, the corner of Queen and Shaw was still a no man’s land between the traditional Queen West strip east of Trinity-Bellwoods and the Drake Hotel-led boom happening west of Dovercourt. The CAMH site located kitty-corner across the street was still a walled-off concrete fortress; nearby Ossington Avenue was just starting to shake off its reputation for crime-plagued karaoke bars and low-rent strip clubs but was still a few years away from becoming hipster central.

Taking over the site of Ng’s previous bistro, Kei, OddFellows was envisioned as part restaurant, part showroom for Ng and Richer’s nascent decor company, Castor Design, which repurposed industrial materials and everyday household items into eye-popping objets d’art.