by Ivy Knight, Dec 2020, West End Phoenix

"Toronto’s restaurant industry had problems well before the pandemic hit. But if there’s hope, says Len Senater, who runs the collective kitchen Depanneur, it’s in a new style of business that puts people ahead of profits."

by Jonathan Bouchard, Aug 2024, CBC Radio-Canada

"Non seulement l’espace culinaire éphémère a permis de créer des liens, il a désormais une place permanente dans le cœur de plusieurs chefs et de membres de la communauté. Après tout, comme le dit son slogan, il continue d’être un endroit intéressant où des choses intéressantes s’organisent autour de la nourriture."

by Ian Coutts, Mar 2024, Zoomer Book Club

"For 10 years, founder and guiding light Len Senater played host to a rotating series of dinners, talks and events in a tiny converted variety store in west-end Toronto. Its style was shabby chic, with “an emphasis on the shabby,” says Senater, who hails from Montreal, but was raised in Toronto. The Depanneur, prompted by slim finances, dispensed with the tired concept of matching plates, cups and cutlery. The whole idea was to showcase “all of this remarkable culinary talent sitting in the city.”"

Annemarie Cutruzzola, March 2024, She Does The City

"The Depanneur was one of the coolest culinary gems in Toronto. What was once a tiny corner store on College Street transformed into a lively space where community and food come together, sometimes known as “A Place Where Interesting Food Things Happen”."

by Shannon Murphy, Feb, 2019, City Eats + Cottage Treats

“There’s nothing quite as motivating as sinking your life savings into something. That’s a great source of motivation. It’s also a lot of joy and fun and something I deeply believe in. I believe in the power of food, believe that food can generate community and connect people and doesn’t have to be fancy or luxurious – it is important to commit to something to push against the ever increasing polarization of people with money and people without. Trying to show it was possible to do things in a different way. It’s not just your job, it’s everything you believe in.”

by Rea Mcnamara, Jun 2012, Yonge Street Media

So what exactly is The Depanneur? Consider it a food hub or, in Senater's words, "a social experiment." In deliberately shunning the fancy, Senater is keeping things cheap, small and human-scale in order to pursue an atypical resto with a social enterprising mandate that includes inventive communal pop-up dinners and workshops. In serving food family-style on mismatched china, he's updating the home-kitchen-as-primary-source-of-nutrition tradition for the urban dweller whose familiarity with locavore practices may have first come from an episode of Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution.