Over the past five years, Toronto has undergone (and continues to undergo) one of the fastest restaurant booms of any North American city. Food is a big business.
And the Toronto scene is one of the most diverse in food cultures.
But a closer look at this diversity reveals a huge lack of inclusion. The Toronto food scene is dominated by White male chefs, who get the lions share of funding and investors while minority chefs get the racism and xenophobia.
I caught up with one of Toronto's newest Black restaurant owners, James Gregg of Carib 21 and the ladies of Spiked Punch. They were recently one of four winners of the first-ever UberEats pop-up kitchen competition, and now they're trying to open their first restaurant.
It's not just banks standing in the way of Black-owned restaurants opening in Toronto, it's also the landlords. Both Gregg and the ladies of Spiked Punch have spoken about the difficulty in getting landlords in Toronto's central food districts to rent their spaces.
Perhaps, what makes this racism even more painful to Black chefs painful is the obvious demand and financial viability of our food. From pubs to snack bars to fine dining, jerk and now jollof are featured dishes on menus of White-led, and staffed kitchens.
Gregg also points out that the reality of owning a restaurant as a Black person requires watching the numbers closer and with the lack of support we have to take fewer risks. Thus, we will open grab and go spot before a dine-in restaurant.
Gregg is correct. The average successful restaurant has a profit margin of 4.2%. No one opens a restaurant to be wealthy.
Photo courtesy Carib 21 Facebook page.
I think as a community, we hold some culpability in the lack of sit down restaurants in the city. In order for dine-in experiences to survive we must recognise that curried goat can't be sold at $8.99 a plate.
There is a chain effect that brings that food to your plate. The ingredients are ordered, prepared and plated. There is a prep cook, a line cook, a server, a dishwasher and a host of suppliers that all contribute to you receiving a plate of food in a restaurant. In take-out restaurants, the cashier is often also the cook.
Where there are no investors, we should support our Black-owned food businesses. This support need not be blind; we can offer support and criticism simultaneously. But if we want to have Black-owned restaurants to celebrate our birthdays, graduations, career changes and general happiness in, we need to be willing to spend the same money in those establishments as we are at The Keg.