Toronto craves Syrian food
THE EMERGENCE OF SYRIAN COOKING ILLUMINATES AN IMMIGRANT COMMUNITY’S INTEGRATION INTO THE BROADER POPULATION, AND THE BRIDGE THAT FOOD CAN BUILD TO A NEW LIFE
he interior Soufi’s, a fast-casual restaurant in downtown Toronto, is tailor-made for Instagram. There are white subway tiles, vintage photographs, a chalkboard menu and a selection of bric-a-brac assembled by an owner, Jala Alsoufi, a recent architecture and psychology graduate.
But Soufi’s offers hints of something more unusual — they include the sinuous melodies of old Arabic pop songs, the whiff of sumac and za’atar in the air, and the staff’s yellow-and-black T-shirts proclaiming, ‘From Syria, With Love’.
Until recently, Syrian cuisine hardly existed in Toronto. With just a few hundred families, the Syrian population was too small to support a restaurant scene. But over the past two years, after the high-profile resettlement of more than 50,000 refugees in Canada, the Toronto area — where more than 11,000 of them live — is experiencing the green shoots of a Syrian-food boom.
The entrepreneurs are as young as 17 and as old as 70, professors as well as farmers. They identify as Shia, Sunni, Druze, Kurd, Alawite, Christian or just Syrian. Some worked in food businesses back home. Others never cooked in their lives.
In a city whose culinary landscape is proudly defined by its immigrant foods (more than half of all Torontonians are foreignborn), the emergence of Syrian cooking illuminates an immigrant community’s integration into the broader population, and the bridge that food can build to a new life.
Unlike the Filipinos or Sri Lankan Tamils who opened food businesses clustered together in immigrant neighbourhoods to cater to their countrymen, the Syrians have spread their enterprises across the Toronto area.
They can market their meals on platforms like Instagram to a wider audience, tapping into a “visual obsession with food”. And Canada’s embrace of the Syrian refugees of has brought them a sort of celebrity status that can translate into sales and long-term success.
In August, Alsoufi opened Soufi’s, one of about a half-dozen Syrian food businesses to appear around Toronto in recent years, with her parents, Shahnaz and Husam, and her brother Alaa, 26. (A younger brother, Ayham, is still in high school.)
“We wanted to highlight Syrian cuisine, which had gotten lost in the shadows of Middle Eastern cuisine,” Jala Alsoufi, 23 said, noting how Lebanese and other Arabic restaurants had cloaked their restaurants in a generic “Mediterranean” label, for broader appeal.
Soufi’s is defiantly branded as a Syrian restaurant. Shahnaz, speaking in Arabic, said the family wanted to demonstrate that Syrians were “more than just victims.” “We wanted to consciously be light and airy,” Jala added, “because even though the situation in Syria is very unfortunate, it is important to show Syrian culture, music and art.”
Striking a balance
The Alsoufi family has purposefully struck a balance between traditional Syrian flavours and contemporary Canadian tastes. Soufi’s employees are exclusively young, Syrian refugees. Some wear headscarves and beards, while others prefer tight jeans and rolled-up sleeves. The meat is halal, but beer is served, and a sticker supporting gay, lesbian and transgender causes is displayed on the front door.
The menu is built around two quintessential Syrian street foods: freshly baked mana’eesh flatbread topped with a variety of ingredients, from sujuk (spiced ground beef) to crumbled halloumi cheese with braised, lemony spinach, and kunafah, a warm sweet dish of gooey cheese and phyllo strands, scented with rose water and soaked in syrup. The first Syrian food business to make its mark here was Crown Pastries, a small bakery opened by the brothers Esmail and Rasoul Alsalha in 2015 in a strip mall along a stretch of road in Scarborough (the eastern quarter of the city) that is dominated by Lebanese butchers and shawarma shops.
The brothers fled to Canada as refugees in 2009 from Aleppo. While Esmail finished high school, Rasoul supported him by working in Lebanese bakeries from dawn until dusk, but the goal was always to open a Syrian bakery.
“With other Arab bakeries, you cannot taste the butter or nuts, only sugar,” Rasoul said dismissively.
Crown Pastries is a recreation of their grandfather’s bakery of the same name, which operated in Aleppo’s old city from 1980 until the start of the civil war in 2011, when it was abandoned. It is where both brothers learnt the trade. Crown Pastries’ speciality is dozens of delicate sweets.
Canada’s warm welcome to Syrian refugees was a hallmark of Justin Trudeau’s election as prime minister in late 2015, and for many, it remains a potent symbol of Toronto’s multicultural identity.
No Syrian food businesses has felt the spotlight more acutely than Newcomer Kitchen, a nonprofit group of women who come together each Wednesday to cook a traditional Syrian meal in a small cafe and food business incubator called the Depanneur.
Newcomer Kitchen began in 2016 to give newly arrived Syrian refugees who were temporarily living in airport hotels a chance to cook a meal. But it has grown into a collective of 60 cooks, who rotate in groups of eight to make 50 three-course takeout dinners each week, for $20 (Dh73.5) apiece.
Newcomer Kitchen, at its heart, is a social experiment. “Food isn’t the end goal,” said Cara Benjamin-Pace, a retired software entrepreneur who helped found the group.