Hope you’re hungry, Yonge and Eglinton: foodie is moving in
Owner hopes her passion project fills area’s void of fine-food stores
At Yonge and Eg, you can pick up a fabulous pair of shoes, a fancy meal, health food, sporting equipment, nice bedding, a closet organizer and a long shopping list of other items.
But it’s oddly difficult to find yourself a chunk of really good cheese, decent meats for a charcuterie and healthy prepared meals that you can just plunk on the table. That’s why Serina Pararajasingam chose this mall of a neighbourhood for her fine-food store Uptown Brie.
She came to this small business in the usual, roundabout way. She grew up loving food and watching her grandmothers, both from Sri Lanka, labouring over traditional dishes.
Then, before going to university, Pararajasingam worked in a butcher shop, where she learned a thing or two about meat.
But then she went off to study criminology and her first professional job was as a corrections officer in a jail in Saskatchewan. That lasted a year.
After some travel and some thinking, Pararajasingam decided to find a new career she was truly passionate about. “I love all kinds of food. Maybe I could do something with that,” she recalls thinking to herself.
Taking inspiration from her grandmother’s recipes and the incredible foods she ate in places such as Venice, she moved back home to Toronto and started looking for retail spaces.
She hung out a lot at Yonge and Eglinton, knew there was a gap in the offerings there and began looking for space.
As luck would have it — at least for her — one of her favourite new juice bars closed after just a few months in business. She leveraged some charm and got the space at 11 Castlefield Ave., just a few steps from the Yonge St. bustle.
She recruited former Big Carrot chef Lyla Garcia and the two got busy concocting ready-to-go meats, fishes, salads and sandwiches.
Since Pararajasingam has a gluten intolerance herself, she’s making sure a lot of her dishes don’t contain gluten. She’s helping with menu creation, but makes it clear she’s not doing the bulk of the cooking. “I just eat it all,” she says.
The small shop has a bistro vibe with a black-and-white checkerboard floor. There’s a wall of the usual crackers and olives. Then, two large cooler displays, one of cheese and meat, the other of prepared foods.
Stop by and you’ll probably catch Pararajasingam’s sister (who helped come up with the name) or her mother, who helps develop, taste and assess the Sri Lankan concoctions.
“Without my family, I don’t know what I’d do,” she says.