Len Senater from the Depanneur (Ep32)

Celebrating 10 years in business, Len joins us to recount the foundation story of The Depanneur. His self-described 'interesting place where food things happen' has become one of Toronto's most applauded places to find unique experiences for those who love food, community and adventure. The Dep is where anyone who wants to cook for people can find a kitchen and audience - something which is uniquely honest and refreshing in a city experiencing crazy inflation and gentrification. A must-listen for anyone interested in food, social enterprise, bootstrapping and everything which makes Toronto diverse and amazing. [expand title="Podcast Transcript"] Qasim Virjee 0:29 So welcome back to another episode of The Star Well, Podcast. I'm Qasim and this time in studio with my friend Len Sen, who I haven't seen for. I don't know how many years, it's been a few, quite a few. In a previous life, we were working on projects, maybe 15 years ago, getting clothes that were like that were like web projects for all sorts of clients that you had at your studio, called hypnotic. And one of the anecdotes that I remember recounting to someone, when I was telling them that you're coming in today was that as a designer, you made at that time, and it still sticks with me, some of the most interesting and, shall we say, involved to implement designs, for web interfaces. This is a time when, you know, CSS was fairly new. And, and some of the interfaces you made like our camp Erawan, right, the local kids camp summer camp. And you really remember, you really kind of wanted to relate the camp experience through the interface. And there was a very cool design for the backdrop for the background, and how it worked into the contextualize the content in that design. And I remember when we worked on that project, it was it stuck with me as something that more people should be thinking in that way. And I'm sure it's gonna, that that idea of contextualization of human experience is going to work into our discussion today. Anyway, welcome to the studio lens. Len Senater 2:05 No, thank you very much. I mean, you know, in all fairness, I have to give credit to my business partner, Barry Martin, and our creative director at the time, Brian, how they were, that was that Erawan project, which was very, very beautiful. And I do think kind of ahead of its time really was their babies. So that wasn't a project that I had my fingers in too deeply. So I wouldn't want to take too much sure credit for that one. But yeah, I did have a tendency to I had my, you know, I had studied, I taught typography, and I had a sort of a real interest in design. And it was interesting as we got into web, you know, especially in the early days, it was, in some ways a step forward with interactivity. I had also been doing CD ROM development and other kinds of interactive multimedia stories. Qasim Virjee 2:48 Take a step back there. Did you say cd rom development? Len Senater 2:52 Oh, yeah. So I'll take a step away back, we can even we can come up to, to the CD ROM part. So yeah, originally, I studied commercial photography in Montreal. I was from Montreal originally. But I grew up here in Toronto. And then I lived in France briefly. And then I moved back to Montreal to keep my French from atrophying completely. Yeah, study, keep some original photography there. Back when it was on film. And then, towards the end of my studies, I got a demonstration of Photoshop one. And I was, you know, completely, completely smitten, I realized this is definitely where I wanted to go with that. And so I kind of dove in, I volunteered to work in a couple of places that had at that time, sort of high end back equipment, quadros, and stuff like that, and taught myself the early suite of tools as Photoshop before they had layers, even before they had multiple Anduze. So you had to get things right, and you had to understand how it all wo