It’s been a year since anyone has eaten a juicy rib-eye or a bowl of impossibly fragrant Thai curry or anything, for that matter inside a packed Toronto restaurant, an experience once as central to life in this food-obsessed town as piling onto the streetcar at rush hour. (That, we don’t miss.) Since then, more than 10,000 restaurants have reportedly closed across Canada hundreds in Toronto taking countless jobs along with them. The rest continue to scrape by on a mix of takeout, delivery and outdoor dining, along with Covid relief funds and, if they’re lucky, flexible landlords.
NOW Magazine
How Spice Girl Eats turned family recipes into booming business
Becca Pereira is keeping her popular Indian comfort food takeout service all in the family By Kelsey Adams
Courtesy of Spice Girl Eats
There’s a venerated and sacred cookbook in Becca Pereira’s family kitchen that contains a pile of handwritten recipes from her great-grandmother. Using it as a guide, Pereira learned to cook all the dishes she makes for her weekly meal service Spice Girl Eats.
“My mom won’t let me touch it because it’s so sacred but she typed out the recipes and we use that,” she explains. “Every recipe that we cook is from that book.”
Toronto commissary is a hub for some of the most interesting takeout restaurants in the city
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The Depanneur in Toronto has hosted tons of interesting food projects over the years as an experimental kitchen, including hundreds of independent chefs who participated in their drop in dinners before establishing their own formal food business.
You might recognize some of the projects that have enjoyed success since their stints at Depanneur: Daily Dumpling, Thindi and Cookie Martinez all used the space at one time. So what s the next big thing that s cooking up in there right now?