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DaNico isn’t just a restaurant, it’s designed like a curated art gallery woven into a fine-dining space, with pieces from globally recognized artists and bold local artist contemporary works.
A striking bronze sculpture—often described as a "melting clock"–style piece—anchors the dining room. It acts as a surreal focal point, blending classic luxury with avant-garde art.
Local Toronto artists works dominate the walls: textured, crystal-embellished canvases that shimmer in low light. The style is abstract expressionism meets opulent, almost baroque glamour.
A striking original oil on canvas that reimagines an iconic historical figure through the artist’s unmistakable street-art lens. Layered with bold colour, texture, and contemporary energy, the piece introduces a rebellious modernity that sharply contrasts the surrounding classical works.
Adds a conceptual, contemporary art edge to the collection. The work is characterized by shifting, pulsing layers of color and abstract shapes. Bright dots of heavy impasto cover the entire surface of the canvas. Hirst has cited Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism as influences for his Veil series.
Don Alfonso 1890 is built around a few highly symbolic, statement artworks—with one dominant centerpiece that defines the entire space.
This large bronze-and-white patina skull sculpture with butterflies sits at the heart of the dining room. It's positioned so the entire room "orbits" around it, making it the visual anchor of the restaurant. The piece plays on contrast themes: life vs death (skull + butterflies), fragility vs permanence, and classical elegance vs contemporary art. This sculpture is not just décor—it's the conceptual core of the restaurant's design philosophy.
Toronto-based artist Max Jamali contributes 24k gold and diamond dust butterfly acrylic sculpture. This acts as an echo to the butterfly motif from Pasqua's sculpture.
It's a painting on flexible sheet metal referencing Jackson Pollock in action (a meta nod to artistic creation and plating), while also subtly connecting culinary artistry with fine art, reinforcing the idea that the food itself is part of the gallery.
These are the closest thing to "abstract colourful art" in Hirst's work. Built from real butterfly wings arranged into symmetrical, mandala-like patterns, they're extremely vibrant using hues such as: neon pinks, electric golds, and reds. They were inspired visually by stained glass windows and sacred geometry.
Blue Bovine is more of a fully integrated art + design environment—where architecture, sculpture, and contemporary artworks all blend together. The pieces inject bold colour, typography, and street-art energy into an otherwise dark, polished interior.
This is a signed pattern stencil created during a live artwork installation, capturing the spontaneity and energy that define the artist’s work. Set against the venue’s dark, moody interior, the piece acts as an unmistakable visual focal point, vibrant, expressive, and impossible to ignore.
This piece is a layered mixed-media work that combines newspaper clippings, expressive paint splashes, and collage imagery into a visually charged composition. Raw, chaotic, and deeply intentional, the piece captures the fast-paced energy of modern culture while inviting viewers to pause and interpret its many layers.
Local Toronto artist, commissioned, abstract, non-representational composition. There is a heavy use of colour pigments and resin textures — a thick, layered surface. It also has a rich colour palette featuring black, deep blue, and pink to accent the Mr Pink Brush piece.
This piece adds a human / emotional layer using recognizable superhero characters in Bay Street suits. It draws people in because of recognizable characters then holds attention with distortion and detail. The artwork bridges street art and fine art painting, as it pops with clean color fields against the dark, heavy architectural detailing of the space.
A bronze sculpture acts as an exterior icon for the restaurant, designed as Toronto's interpretation of the Wall Street bull.
Soft-Stone clad columns artfully carved with animal forms inspired by Indigenous art. These function as both structure and artwork.
Created by sculptor Olivier Bertrand, these 1.5x life size sculpted cardboard samurai figures showcase and reinforce the Japanese influence (sushi, Wagyu program).
Hand-burnt wood (yakisugi technique), laser-cut metal, and ceiling installations. These are treated as art pieces, not just finishes.
BlueBlood is arguably the most "blue-chip art collection" restaurant in Toronto—closer to a private gallery inside a castle than a typical dining room. The art program was intentionally curated with museum-level names and historical references to match the grandeur of Casa Loma. It combines old-world European nobility (castle, marble, antiques), museum-level modern masters (Dalí, Warhol), and contemporary street art (Mr. Brainwash). The idea was to curate art that Sir Henry Pellatt (Casa Loma's original owner) might have collected—if he lived today.
It blends pop culture, Canadiana, and luxury symbolism. Includes multiple lithograph works, such as "Cow" (Iconic Warhol Print) and portraits of Karen Kain (personally signed 1 of 2) and Wayne Gretzky.
A refined interplay of sculpture and heritage anchors the space in its early 20th-century aristocratic roots. At the entrance, 1920s marble lions stand as enduring symbols of nobility and quiet grandeur, setting a tone of stately arrival.
Original antiques and artifacts from Casa Loma are seamlessly woven throughout, their patina and provenance adding depth, texture, and a sense of lived history.
"Henry the Moose," a historic-style taxidermy piece, offers a more whimsical note, an homage to Edwardian collecting traditions, balancing refinement with a touch of eccentric charm.
A curated collection of custom, site-specific works introduces a bold contemporary counterpoint to the castle's historic fabric. Pieces such as "QE2"—a subversive portrait of Queen Elizabeth II reimagined with a spray can, and "Purple Reign," a tribute to Prince, embody a refined street-art sensibility. Together, these works layer modern irreverence over heritage, creating a deliberate tension between aristocratic tradition and present-day cultural expression.
A commanding work from Daniel Mazzone's celebrated Women in History series, this piece reinterprets iconic female figures through bold, contemporary portraiture. Known for merging high-gloss pop aesthetics with painterly precision, Mazzone elevates familiar subjects into something both striking and introspective. Vivid colour, confident linework, and layered expression create a visual language that feels at once modern and timeless, transforming cultural icons into emotive, almost mythic presences. The result is a sophisticated take on luxury pop art, where surface brilliance is matched by a deeper sense of narrative and reverence.
The artwork at Powder Room Yorkville isn't just decoration—it's a major part of the experience, especially inside the bathrooms (which is the whole concept behind the name).
A rare early work by Banksy, Monkey Queen (2003) is a limited-edition print, approximately 750 impressions, drawn from a formative moment in the artist's rise. Recasting the visual language of royal portraiture, Banksy replaces the sovereign figure with a simian surrogate, rendered in his stark, economy-driven stencil technique. The result is both satirical and precise: a quiet dismantling of authority, class, and inherited symbolism.
Discreetly installed within the powder room corridor, almost concealed among the stalls, the work embodies a deliberate tension between placement and pedigree. Museum-calibre in provenance yet encountered in passing, it reflects a philosophy of unexpected luxury: cultural capital delivered without ceremony, rewarding only the observant.
Rat Pack is an original silkscreen enriched with acrylic and diamond dust, a composition that seamlessly bridges mid-century glamour with contemporary notions of luxury. Drawing on the enduring mythology of the Rat Pack era, the work reframes its cultural legacy through a heightened materiality—surface, shimmer, and tactility become as significant as subject.
The artist, known for fusing pop culture iconography with luxury symbolism, employs layered textures and reflective finishes to elevate nostalgia into something more opulent and immediate. The result is a piece that doesn't merely reference glamour—it reconstructs it, inviting a dialogue between heritage and excess, memory and modernity.
Each powder room stall is conceived as its own distinct environment, no two alike, transforming the space into a series of intimate, self-contained installations. Thoughtfully composed with a curator's eye, these rooms elevate the everyday into something experiential, where design, art, and atmosphere converge. Deliberately crafted for visual impact, they invite interaction as much as admiration, spaces as suited to a fleeting moment of escape as they are to a perfectly framed photograph.
Walls draw from Dolce & Gabbana codes, leopard prints, saturated tones, and layered drapery, creating a distinctly fashion-driven backdrop rooted in maximalism. Rich fabrics and tactile finishes add depth and movement, giving the space a sense of dimension rather than flat decoration. The overall effect sits between a couture interior and a late-night setting—polished but provocative, with a clear emphasis on texture, contrast, and visual attitude.
