hoosing the rising stars of the restaurant world is tricky business indeed. The new crop of chefs are the ones who will have to do all the hard work. They are the new breed of young, eager and hungry cooks. Chef Don Letendre, who heads the kitchen at Vancouver's Opus and star chef in his own right, knows that concept well. The chef has spent much of this year executing the kitchen at Koko, Opus Montreal's dynamic new restaurant.

Over the course of the past six months – and still to this day – his time was divided flying between Montreal and back to Vancouver where he is still active back at the mothership. The mission was to create a signature Pan Asian menu for Koko, and seek out an upcoming chef to execute the kitchen.

Enter Chef Felix Turianskyj, who was on the hunt in both Montreal and Toronto for locations for his own little eatery. This chef had recently returned from a European journey, and was itching to get back into he scene. This would certainly happen. But rather than opening his own spot, a call from Letendre brought him to the Opus Montreal.

Turianskyj has a tunnel vision for perfection that is very rare in any chef today.

Today Turianskyj is renowned as the executive chef at Opus Montreal - and the all-important grazing menus of precisely calibrated Izakaya plates, a concept that is being heavily watched by other local restaurateurs. With a menu created by Letendre, Turianskyj has become his head chef overseeing the most important kitchen in his empire. And with an Izakaya shared plates style, there was a bit of a learning curve.

But the chef has an instinctive palate and a self-determined level of focus, a tunnel vision for perfection that is very rare in any chef today. Indeed, ask him about the restaurant being heavily watched by every chef in the city, and he's completely unfazed.

"The restaurant is still very much a baby," he says. "Because the restaurant is so new, it's too early for change. But, as the shared plates concept has really taken off, we had expected that restaurateurs would be catching closely." Ahhh yes. There's no better buzz.

Turianskyj's passion for food began at an early age. With a French/Ukrainian father and a Taiwanese mother, he learned to appreciate the simplicity of ingredients, which translated well to his own philosophy of fusion cooking.

"If you focus on the flavours and lose the pretense, you are no longer cornered into serving up one certain meat with one certain veg. These are just barriers that society has put up for us. With social dining, where dishes are shared amongst the table, a group can sample several plates of trans-ethnic flavours."

Channeling Jean Georges' Spice Market and Chef Masaharu's Morimoto has certainly paid off. Weekend tables in the restaurant are now booked weeks in advance and all the other services – Koko does catering and handles the food and beverage service for the hotel - are regularly booked too. That's how he likes it.

Under Turianskyj and Letendre's direction, Koko is all polished and proud, with its designer furniture, signature fruit martinis and monstrous concrete patio setting. “But it’s all restaurant,” insists Turianskyj, “Koko is not a supperclub. The scene-addicted masses (once past the reigning door constabulary) drink and dine within a mesmerizing designer-tweaked temple of mod, complete with treats from Turianskyj's finely tuned kitchen.

It will be interesting to see how the menu with transform over the next few months, or even years. But for now, an unaffected clientele has taken the sharable plates menu in unforeseen numbers, making Koko an ideal space to chat and chill.