Three decades of building. Now, advising.
Yannick Bigourdan is a Canadian hospitality and leadership advisor and the founder of KLTY Hospitality Consulting. The practice is the next stage of a thirty-year career spent building restaurants, training teams, and learning — slowly — what the human experience of a brand is actually made of.
He was born in the South of France into a family that had been in food for four generations. A great-grandfather, a grandfather, a father, and an uncle — all of them cooks, restaurateurs, or men whose working day ended after the last guest had left. Restaurants were not a career to be chosen. They were the room you grew up in.
The grandmother he is closest to in memory was named Lucie. Her conviction — that feeding people well is among the most important things you can do — became, much later, the namesake of a restaurant in downtown Toronto.
He left France for the École hôtelière de Lausanne assuming he would return to the family trade. He returned by a different route. After Lausanne he joined Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, first at the Regent Beverly Wilshire in Los Angeles as Dining Room and Bar Manager, and later at the Four Seasons Toronto as Director of Restaurants and Bars. The decade inside Four Seasons gave him the training that has shaped every engagement since: the discipline of luxury service done at scale, with rooms full of guests who notice everything and remark on very little.
Toronto turned out to be the place. He acquired Splendido on Harbord Street and ran it through the years that earned it Toronto Life's Best Restaurant in 2005 and the top of Wine Access's Top 100 Canadian Restaurants in 2007. In 2008 he opened Nota Bene with David Lee — a 7,500-square-foot room in downtown Toronto that earned Best New Restaurant from Toronto Life and enRoute in the same year.
The Carbon Bar followed in 2013. Amano Trattoria and Amano Kitchen with Mike Angeloni and Adam Teolis. The Berczy Tavern. A catering company. A retail and wholesale arm. An e-commerce platform. Three luxury men's footwear stores across the GTA. Ready-to-eat and consumer-packaged sauces and spices that landed in Pusateri's, McEwan, and thirty-six Longo's locations.
In 2023 he opened Restaurant Lucie, a 4,000-square-foot French restaurant in Toronto's financial district, named for his grandmother. Lucie is recommended by the Michelin Guide. The same year he opened Slice Baby Slice. In 2025 he added Carbon Snack Bar and TheSocial460. Notte Ristorante is in build for 2026.
Across twenty-two business start-ups and the businesses around them, he lived through full cycles of growth and pressure — the cycles, more than the openings, are what produced the working understanding of how brands actually behave in front of the people they serve. The Ontario Hostelry Institute recognized that record with the Gold Award in the Independent Restaurateur category.
KLTY is the practice he built to spend the next stage of his career on the other side of the table. The restaurant work earned the right to do it. The work itself is higher-altitude: heritage brands, luxury houses, and well-travelled founders who recognize that the human experience of their business — how it hosts, how it serves, how it makes the people in front of it feel chosen — is strategic territory, not a soft layer applied at the end.
The practice is selective. The engagements are long. The bench is small. The convening work — bringing the operators, founders, and brand leaders shaping Canadian hospitality into the same room — is the slow part, and over time the most important.
He still keeps a hand in the room. He believes the standards a person can teach are the standards they are still living by. The advisory work is the older self consulting the younger one, and offering it forward.
- Guide Michelin
- Award OHI Gold
- Featured in Inside the kitchen of Yannick Bigourdan, owner of Lucie and the Carbon Bar
- Featured in "FOMO is real": Why one-night-only restaurant collaborations are taking over Toronto
- Featured in Why The Carbon Bar is so much more than just a barbecue joint
- Featured in Lucie — a love letter to French fine dining in the Financial District
- Featured in 'I thought the world was against me': How this leading Toronto restaurateur navigates the ups and downs of business
- Featured in Carbon Snack Bar Activates Heritage Building in King West's Retail Evolution
- Speaking E83 — Beyond the Plate: Yannick Bigourdan's professional journey
- Speaking Becoming the best in French cuisine — Restaurant Lucie
- Trained at EHL Lausanne
- Built with Four Seasons