A neighbourhood fixture since 1952, the Chinese-Canadian restaurant South Pacific still serves the classics, a style of cooking they call “humble and joyful”.
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At Taqueria el Pastorcito, Irapuato-style tacos are served alongside music from Los Aventureros, a four-piece mariachi band, if you stop in on the right night.
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At Xawaash, a Somali food blog-turned-restaurant, owners Leila Adde and Abdullahi Kassim consider their dishes a legacy for the next generation. “It makes us feel very happy, you know. That this has become a gathering place. Because for us, this isn’t just a business. It’s more like family.”
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Death metal bassist Miguel Angel Garcia recently expanded his made-from-home churros business into a commercial kitchen in the back of Steadfast Brewing, where he preps killer birria tacos, tamales and other Mexican street-food classics. When he works, he says, he’s always blasting music. “I like to feel like I’m at a party”
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My mom learned to cook Jewish to win over her in-laws. In the decades that followed, my dad, a newspaper man, spent decades clipping recipes and assembling them in big black binders for her - the best way he knew to show his thanks.
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We work in the sky, in an unfinished highrise. The ground floors are almost ready, but higher up, where there are no windows or walls, the building is open to the sky. We are deep in the belly of the beast, building towers in the financial district, building restaurants we can’t afford to eat in, condos we can’t afford to live in.
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In a playful series he produced for WEP, photographer Kotama Bouabane confronts his younger self’s longing for fast food and his older self’s impulse to clean up his act.
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Has there ever been a greater grab-and-go snack than the glorious Banh Mi? The bright pickled tangle – carrots, cilantro, tofu, pâté – tucked into a killer baguette is well-stuffed and built for strolling. There are many delicious Toronto iterations of the Saigon street food, but WEP readers have voted. Here, your favourites don their crusty, mayo-smeared crowns.
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A feel-good, nostalgic genre of Japanese dance tunes called City Pop has become the kitchen soundtrack for a community of Toronto chefs – one that sets the tone for a kinder, brighter kitchen culture.
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Three urban farming projects are working toward making Toronto a food-sovereign city – and showing how almost every bit of space can be made to flourish.
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We asked WEP readers what menu item you still crave from a Toronto restaurant that closed its doors, recently or long ago. You gave us all the toothsome details – how it became your special, what else is wrapped in the memory of it, and why nothing can take its place.
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Former owner of the Good Egg cookbook shop Mika Baraket launched a publishing company this fall with a recipe book called Blood – one the other publishers wouldn’t touch – that sold out in its first run. Now she’s using the pandemic as a cover, to grow the business deliberately in her own sweet time.
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Elizabeth Rodriguez left Cuba for a freer life in Toronto; she came to make music but stayed for Magdelys Savigne. The two met in a band here, fell in love, then formed their own group – the Latin jazz ensemble OKAN, whose second album, Espiral, was released during the pandemic. Now they’re waiting out the virus at home – cooking, teaching, preparing for virtual award shows and still making beautiful music together.
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Toronto’s restaurant industry had problems well before the pandemic hit. But if there’s hope, says Len Senater, who runs the collective kitchen Depanneur, it’s in a new style of business that puts people ahead of profits.
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“The kind of leader a young Somali kid needs.” That’s how a friend describes Asha Ahmed, whose restaurant, Wiff – the heart of Weston’s main strip – is facing eviction.
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Mahamed Aden Elmi has expanded Istar Restaurant, which his mother opened in 1999, into a de facto civic centre, a place where his community not only eats but celebrates, organizes and makes itself at home.
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Even before restaurants across the city closed their doors, the food industry was a tough one for workers. That’s why Chuck Ortiz started a Wednesday run club for chefs and kitchen staff, to help them deal with stress.
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Moscow Apartment met in band camp at 13. Now 17, the duo has landed a recording contract and has a new record dropping in May. In the kitchen and onstage, their chemistry is clear.
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Catherine Tammaro, who grew up Irish-Italian, never understood what drew her to the ceremonies she observed when she was younger – crushing berries for face paint, lining her path in cedar boughs, drumming by the High Park burial mounds – until she discovered her mother was adopted and that another culture had been waiting for her to find it.
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April Wozny was in her 20s when she launched the popular monthly queer party Business Women’s Special. But it wasn’t until she got sober that she learned she could really dance, and cook too.
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