Patrick Kriss is the chef and owner of Alo which topped Canada’s 100 Best Restaurants list in 2018 with its surprise multi-course tasting menus of seasonal contemporary French cuisine. The award citation said that, ‘Two years after opening, Alo is grander and more ambitious than ever, yet, even still, its grasp never exceeds its reach’, while The Globe and Mail called Alo ‘one of the most singular and daring and extraordinary new restaurants in Canada’. A native of Toronto, Kriss trained at the George Brown College Chef School in the city and began his career at Auberge du Pommier, a French fine dining restaurant in Toronto’s affluent York Mills neighbourhood. He moved to New York to work as Daniel Boulud’s sous chef at his two Michelin-starred flagship Restaurant Daniel. After three years, Kriss relocated to France to work for three Michelin starred chefs Régis Marcon and Michel Troisgros. He returned to Toronto to take up the position of chef de cuisine at Splendido, a fine dining institution in the city for 25 years before receiving rave reviews for his stint at Acadia, regarded as one of the best restaurants in the city at the time. Alo broke new ground in Toronto’s dining scene when it opened on the third floor of a building in downtown Toronto neighbourhood not previously renowned for fine dining. However, customers were soon flocking to the elegant space with its grey leather banquettes, air force blue designer chairs and six-seat kitchen counter for Kriss’s precise, technical and delicious dishes such as Hokkaido sea scallops with morels and fava beans, Venetian caviar with cauliflower bavarois, and Hokkaido sea urchin with fennel, yuzu and wasabi. But you should expect the unexpected when dining at Alo as Kriss explained in an interview with Global News: “We already started changing the menu after we got Top 100, just kind of elevating everything to keep it fresh for the customers who come back, so I don’t want people to think we’re complacent.” Alo has been awarded a rare four stars by Chris Nuttall-Smith, the influential critic of the Globe and Mail newspaper and in 2017 the restaurant became one of the few Canadian establishments to join the prestigious Relais & Châteaux association of independent hotels and restaurants. Kriss was named Outstanding Chef of 2017 (repeating again in 2018) by the Canada’s 100 Best publication. In 2017 he opened Aloette, a casual sister restaurant to Alo, and in 2018 launched Alobar in Toronto’s Yorkville neighbourhood.