The voluminous space inside St. Paul's Galtier Plaza has struggled over the years to be something, anything but leave it to David Fhima to try something as wildly adventurous in scale and scope as LoTo. According to Fhima, this new eating location in his fleet of enterprises is a marketplace restaurant. Not a place you'd dress up and go out to on a Friday or Saturday night (they call this a destination restaurant) but ore of a place for homies to drop in and nosh at morning, noon, or evening.
Following a Asian influence, the place tries to be and have it all -- deli, bakery, soups, sandwiches, coffee shop, bar, sit down restaurant and coming soon a wine and cheese store. You hope he can bring it all together as a stop-in joint for the lowertown loft dwellers but it might take some time to fine tune the concept. As it is, there are way to many details to pour over and things to go wrong. When your reach is so broad there can easily be things that you find exceed your grasp. This seems to be a pattern with the chef extraordinaire Phima but eventually he reigns things in, as his success shows, and is able to make his restaurants work.
Galtier Plaza certainly needs something that works!
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