Celebrity-backed restaurants are gaining traction in Canada, according to JLL’s latest Celebrity Restaurants Report.
Many celebrities have invested in opening restaurants, with a notable surge in 2021. Tied with Chicago and ahead of New York, Toronto has emerged as a top destination for celebrity restaurants in North America.
In Canada, celebrity chefs, athletes, and musicians account for more than 80 percent of the celebrity restaurants that have opened. These restaurants are located predominantly in retail and office properties, as well as in shopping centres.
Here are four key takeaways about celebrity restaurants from the report:
- 361 celebrity restaurants opened in five years in the U.S. and Canada by famous folks from 2019 through 2024. This includes celebrity chefs, actors and musicians;
- Celebrity restaurants are tourist attractions. Celebrity restaurants are often driven to popular tourist corridors like Las Vegas Boulevard and Nashville’s Lower Broadway;
- Openings took off in 2021 as celebrity restaurant openings doubled from 2020 to 2021, at a time where overall U.S. restaurant openings only increased by 13 per cent;
- Chefs and actors opened 69 per cent of celebrity restaurants. 37 per cent of the restaurant openings in the study were made by celebrity chefs. 32 per cent were backed by actors.
Jordan Sleep-Tulloch, an Associate with JLL with a former career in food and beverage, said in the tourist destinations in the U.S. celebrity restaurants are more prevalent than in Canada “because the U.S. has more markets like that to draw people from all over the world globally.”
“You get a higher concentration in the U.S. than you get in Canada,” he said. “The restaurant names if they are sort of aligned with the celebrity or the celebrity chef that sort of draws your guests into the door and then as an operator it’s your job to maintain a certain level of consistency to keep them coming back.”
Paul Ferreira, Senior Vice President with JLL, said the restaurant business has always attracted celebrities to a certain extent.
“There was always an allure to the restaurant business and the bar business and they always felt that it was a great place to leverage their profile and monetize it a little bit. So I think it’s always been a part of the industry,” he said. “You can go throughout history. There’s always been an element of that. And I think we’re just seeing it today with the latest crop of celebrities who now have extra ways to do it.
“If you think 20 years ago, they would attach their name in the marketing of that restaurant. Today you can get a celebrity attached to your concept that has a large social media following. A few posts and all of a sudden they can be effective just in that in addition to their names. So their ability to influence the success and the awareness of these concepts using the social media following only brings more strength to associating a concept with one of these celebrities.”
Sleep-Tulloch said the restaurants are using the celebrities as a marketing tool to extend their reach.
“When you look at some of the restaurants they’re involved with, the celebrity’s following is much larger than the restaurant’s following on a percentage basis,” he said.
Fast casual, followed by full-service, is the preferred concept among celebrities, according to JLL. Matty Matheson, LeBron James, and Drake are responsible for a significant portion of the celebrity restaurant openings in Canada over the past five years.
Celebrities tend to adopt more traditional concepts, often focusing on popular dishes like pizza, burgers, and chicken. Recent notable opening announcements include Kevin O’Leary’s partnership with Mitch Marner and Nick Di Donato to open the full-service Blue Bovine Steak and Sushi House in downtown Toronto’s Union Station, and soon-to-open Gordon Ramsay Steak in Richmond, B.C., added JLL.
Ferreira said there is also a broadening into larger entertainment concepts such as T-Squared Social in New York that has an involvement of people like Tiger Woods and Justin Timberlake.
“It’s part of this movement towards entertainment concepts with better gamefied. This one in particular has golf simulators, it has bowling, it has other activities in it. So it’s an activity based entertainment concept,” he said. “But whenever anyone talks about it, you just always hear it referred to as Tiger Woods’ concept.
“So while they are involved, they’re obviously not the only shareholders, they didn’t come up with the concept themselves. I’m sure they had influence. It just shows that generationally there’s always a benefit of having somebody connected to your brand just to create awareness instantly.
“The other thing is it creates expectations. People have a certain expectation of what Tiger Woods is all about and Justin Timberlake is all about and I don’t think they’re looking to them to have any culinary involvement with what the food is but at least an F&B concept that’s associated with their names is going to reflect what those two individuals are all about. So I think celebrities to a certain extent look at what they associate themselves with at the same time.”
