In the quiet back corner of a Yorkville restaurant that no longer exists, Alfredo Rodriguez once watched in horror as his very first live music experiment went terribly wrong. The five-piece band he’d hired was driving customers straight out the door, their volume overwhelming the intimate dining space. As the musicians packed up early—paid in full but dismissed before dessert—Rodriguez noticed the keyboard player and had a moment of inspiration that would define his restaurant for the next decade and a half.
“Can I talk to you?” he asked as the musician was leaving. “Have you played by yourself somewhere?”
“Actually, that’s what I do,” replied John Campbell. “I play piano in different places.”
“Would you like playing here?”
“Sure.”
That impulse decision, born from necessity rather than any grand vision, is emblematic of how BLU Ristorante has operated for its entire 17-year existence. Now, as the acclaimed Italian restaurant prepares to leave its longtime Avenue Road location for new quarters in Toronto’s Theatre District, Rodriguez remains guided by the same pragmatic philosophy that has earned BLU multiple recognitions as one of Canada’s top 100 restaurants.
“I wish I could say that I had a vision,” Rodriguez admits, leaning back in his chair during an exclusive interview with 6ixRetail. “I think I learned during the first year what I actually wanted to offer. It was basically trial and error.”
The restaurant—which closed its Yorkville doors on February 23rd and aims to reopen at 214 King Street West by early-June—wasn’t even meant to be Italian. Rodriguez originally dreamed of opening a fine dining Mexican establishment, nearly two decades before restaurants like Quetzal would finally bring that concept to fruition in Toronto.
“Back in the day in Toronto, the Mexican cuisine was perceived more as ethnic type of cuisine,” Rodriguez explains. “Whereas back then already in New York, in Chicago, in LA, there were beautiful, amazing fine dining Mexican places.”
A business partner convinced him to pursue “something safer,” and BLU was born—though not in the purpose-built space with Mediterranean-inspired blue décor that inspired its name. Instead, the team signed into an existing restaurant at 17 Yorkville Avenue that, ironically, contained no blue elements whatsoever.
“We already had the design, we already had the logo,” Rodriguez says with a laugh. “We ended up using it because we had registered it, we had already done all the paperwork.”
The Calculation Behind the Move
As BLU prepares to transplant itself to King Street, Rodriguez isn’t making decisions based on sentimentality. The relocation is a carefully calculated business move, prompted by changing client patterns and the limitations of the Yorkville space.
“A big chunk of our business comes from corporate,” he explains, estimating that roughly half of BLU’s revenue derives from corporate events and business diners. “We have been losing some people because they were saying, ‘We found this other place that is closer to the office.'”
The new King Street location places BLU at the geographical heart of its client base—banks, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and insurance firms whose executives previously made the trek to Yorkville for private dining experiences.
Those private events have become increasingly central to BLU’s business model, yet the Avenue Road location presented significant operational challenges. Without dedicated private dining rooms, staff would laboriously construct temporary walls using floor-to-ceiling soundproof panels each day, manually reconfiguring the space to accommodate private parties.
“Now with what we’re doing, we could actually have three private parties going on on any given night,” Rodriguez says of the new location, which features a dedicated private room for 40 people and a main dining area with sliding doors that can partition the space into multiple configurations. “To us, that’s doubling our business.”
The mathematics are straightforward: The new space offers a legal capacity of 170 seats compared to the Yorkville location’s 120, potentially allowing for 300 covers on busy nights instead of 240. Even accounting for the loss of the celebrated Yorkville patio—ranked among Canada’s 100 most popular outdoor dining spots in 2023—Rodriguez sees the year-round benefits of additional indoor seating as a net positive.
“The patio was good for four months. And that’s if you had good weather,” he points out. “Even if the summer is not as crazy busy as it used to be, we’ll be fine because we have now 12 months to utilize these extra 50 seats that we couldn’t do in the past.”
Crafting Experience, Not Just Food
Throughout our conversation, Rodriguez repeatedly returns to a key insight that has guided BLU since its earliest days: “I didn’t want to sell food and alcohol and the product. My idea since the beginning was to sell an experience.”
This philosophy manifests in numerous ways at the new location, from the innovative sliding-door system that transforms the dining room to the careful consideration of how to serve theatre-going patrons with time constraints.
Rather than offering a standard pre-theatre fixed menu, BLU plans to create a four-course tasting experience that can be executed within ninety minutes—a more ambitious approach than the typical three-course theatre menu offered by competitors.
“We thought of doing a four-course tasting menu that we can execute in an hour and a half,” Rodriguez explains. “That way we are not offering the three-course typical menu like this, this, and that—something a little more adventurous, but you can still execute it in that short period of time.”
This balance of innovation and practicality extends to BLU’s approach to its new competitive landscape. Moving from a relatively isolated position on Avenue Road to the restaurant-dense King Street corridor might intimidate some operators, but Rodriguez maintains the same focus that has sustained BLU for nearly two decades.
“Yes, it’s good to know what people are doing, what your competitors are doing,” he acknowledges. “But I think concentrating on what you do and putting all your efforts into your business without getting too distracted with outside noise… that has been our key to stay in business and be successful over the years.”
Carrying the Soul of the Restaurant
Perhaps most remarkable in an industry known for high turnover is Rodriguez’s commitment to maintaining staffing continuity through the transition. As the restaurant makes its move to King Street, nearly the entire team will be making the journey downtown.
“That’s our key success. It’s our employees,” Rodriguez says with evident pride. “They are literally the ones running the business. I’m the guy in the background, but they are the heart of BLU.”
The sentiment isn’t merely nice-sounding rhetoric—it reflects a clear-eyed business perspective: “Without them, it’s not BLU anymore. It would be a completely new restaurant.”
This continuity extends to Campbell, the pianist whose solo performance salvaged that disastrous musical evening years ago. He continued playing at BLU until 2024, his keyboard eventually upgraded to a proper piano after Rodriguez decided the original instrument “doesn’t look too good.”
As for whether the piano will make the journey to King Street, Rodriguez confirms with a smile that it will indeed be traveling downtown, maintaining at least one physical connection between BLU’s past and future.
The Moment of Truth
When construction begins in late March under the supervision of Tyler Fraser, Managing Director of Abeco Building Group, it will set in motion the final phase of a transition facilitated by The Behar Group‘s Juan Angeles representing BLU and Rob Eklove acting for the landlord. By early-June, Rodriguez hopes to welcome the first guests to BLU’s new incarnation.
For a restaurateur who has navigated nearly two decades of economic cycles, changing tastes, and the particular challenges of operating just outside Toronto’s most exclusive retail district, the measure of success remains disarmingly simple.
“At the end of the night or at the end of each table standing up and seeing their faces and seeing their reactions,” Rodriguez says, describing what he’ll be watching for on opening night. “I can tell at this point when someone genuinely leaves happy or when people leave and they say, ‘Yeah, it was good, it was nice.’ When you hear those things, they’re like, ‘Oh, yeah, we are not doing well. We are mediocre.'”
He pauses, then continues with quiet confidence: “I’m hoping that opening night a big percentage is people being really happy and genuinely leaving happy. That’s when we will know that this is a new chapter and that we are in the right direction.”
As our conversation concludes, it becomes clear that Rodriguez’s greatest strength may be his blend of clear-eyed business pragmatism with an unwavering focus on the human experience—both for his staff and his customers. In an industry where concepts and trends often overshadow substance, BLU’s relocation represents not just a physical move, but the continuation of a philosophy that values authentic connection above all.
“I used to care a lot about articles and the media and it really affected me,” Rodriguez reflects on his earlier years in the business. “I was really young. Over the years I realized that there are so many articles out there and some are very negative. A few articles focus on the positive.”
He smiles, having long since found his centre in the tumultuous restaurant industry: “At some point I just stopped actually even reading because I’m like, you know what, I better concentrate on what I have control over, and the things I have control over is within my business. That’s all I can do.”
Dustin Fuhs is the Editor-in-Chief of 6ix Retail. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of Retail Insider, Canada’s most-read retail trade publication. He has over 20 years of experience in the retail, marketing, entertainment and hospitality industries, including with The Walt Disney Company, The Hockey Hall of Fame, Starbucks and Blockbuster.
Dustin was named as a RETHINK Retail Top Retail Expert in 2024 and 2025.