Business View Magazine l January 2023

165 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 12 soon followed by three more restaurants, Table 17, Hi-Lo Bar, and Ascari Enoteca. In 2017 Gare de l’Est Brasserie opened, and a few years later, Rahil Hoque joined the company, eventually moving to the role of Partner and COO. Today Ascari Hospitality Group has three restaurants, Ascari Enoteca, a small neighborhood pasta and wine bar, Gare De l’Est which Hoque describes as “a modern French Brasserie, rooted in simple, done incredibly well,” and Ascari on King, larger than the first Ascari, with daytime service available. They also have a wine and food boutique, Mercatino E Vini which is a brick-and-mortar and online store, and an events and catering division. A new project will see Ascari Hospitality Group partner with Devil’s Glen Ski Club, taking over the food and beverage department. When Ascari Hospitality’s restaurants first closed during COVID, it was quickly realized that takeout was not an ideal option, as the food was not traveling well. Thinking outside of the takeout ASCARI HOSPI TAL I T Y GROUP container, the company started offering take-home meals that were 90% complete. “You would finish the final 10% of it with John Sinopoli on zoom with you. We would have upwards of one hundred people on a call with corporate partners, or to our client base, we would sell them a full experience that was almost finished, but you still had to do a couple of touches at home,” Hoque elaborates. “We put together wine kits with a small food component, and then our wine director at the time would go on and do a virtual tasting with you. We were delivering as far as St. Catharines. It really pushed our boundaries. We couldn’t have done that with takeout, our radius would have had to have been two or three kilometers at the most.” Opening Mercatino E Vini was a whole new concept for the company, as no one had experience with an online shop. Hoque recounts, “We set up a Shopify ecosystem and it was all hands on deck. We all had to learn logistics and operations and supply chain, and we started promoting it to the neighborhood.