Charred

Twenty bags of charcoal, 300 chickens and countless 50-pound bags of potatoes are the typical inventory that Charred, Mark Morgenstern’s chicken rotisserie restaurant, goes through in a week. The son of Hungarian-Jewish immigrants, Mark is an unintentional restaurateur, though his entrepreneurial spirit has a long lineage. His parents opened a store in the same spot on the same street in 1968, and Mark owned his own retail clothing business for 40 years before inspiration struck to open a restaurant after his manager mentioned that her brother could cook a good bird.

Charred was a five-year labour of love in the making. Between wading through the red tape of city hall, and convincing his brother and sister — silent partners who Mark explains thought he was “nuts” — to agree to a mortgage, “nothing was simple,” says Mark. But nothing deterred him from opening a restaurant that offered what he humbly describes as “simple and good food where everything is made in-house.”