When Zahra Rezaei opened the Arch Café Bar in 2020, she spent a lot of time introducing her new regulars to her family members in the black-and-white photos on the walls, and describing all the cities in Iran where they lived.
“That was my job for the first year,” she says, laughing.
She filled the café with her grandmother’s belongings – a rug, a decorative dish and a plain kitchen plate, which her staff know not to touch. And she brings the Persian flavours of her grandmother’s table, such as pomegranate, cardamom and saffron, to the meals she serves at her snug place in Toronto’s Kensington Market. “Everything was so simple,” she says of her grandmother’s cooking, “but I don’t know, her hands had a special taste.”
Twinkly and sly as she is tough, Rezaei had to leave her archeology career in Iran. She says deciding to start over in Canada during the pandemic wasn’t easy, “but the things that happen in Iran now, it’s much worse.”
“You feel free here,” she says of Kensington Market. “It’s a safe spot. So, there are a lot of strange people wearing strange things, doing strange stuff. That’s Kensington. I can be anything I want.”
Zahra Rezaei, the owner of The Arch cafe bar in Kensington Market, on Nov. 10.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
The Arch Café Bar is part of a wave of Middle Eastern businesses opening in the neighbourhood. Armenian-Canadian brothers are sparking fresh nightlife at their music venue Tapestry, while Israeli-Canadian brothers are concocting delectable tahini creations at Parallel Basta, the new Kensington outpost of the Geary Avenue institution. The fact that Kensington is becoming a Middle Eastern hotspot is a secret party in plain sight. What’s more, women like Rezaei are driving many of these new businesses.
Once her café secured a liquor licence, Rezaei started surprising herself with her experiments bringing traditional flavours to cocktails, giving the mint in her mojito a Persian twist of pomegranate, and mixing cardamom with Irish cream.
“I’m a woman from Iran, where alcohol, everything is banned,” she says. “And I’m making up Iranian taste cocktail.” While some underground alcohol culture does exist in Iran – because, in Rezaei’s words, “Of course – you can’t stop drinking” – there was no Persian cocktail playbook for her to work with. Just getting a liquor licence felt strange and exciting. Coming up with Persian cocktails seemed subversive.
“It was such a conflict,” she says, laughing. “It was like, what’s happening? What are we doing?”
The front entrance at The Arch cafe bar.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
While Rezaei got the idea to start her café over drinks at Pamenar, another Persian place on Augusta, more and more Turkish spots have also opened in the market.
Tugce Aksu named Pera Café, her sweet and stylish baklava-and-brunch spot, after a neighbourhood in Istanbul that reminds her of Kensington.
She first came to Toronto from Turkey to study English in 2018, returning for love and culinary school after a year back home. She got to know Kensington while working at Ozzy’s, a Turkish burger joint on Nassau Street. Aksu’s father owns seafood restaurants in Turkey, and helped her open her own place with her business partner, Osman Cakir, in 2022.
Pera Cafe's avocado toast, egg croissant platter, and the Turkish breakfast.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
“I really love my customers,” she says. “It’s not about Kensington particularly, it’s about Canada. You can meet everyone from each country in the world here.”
Israa Ali, co-owner of Baldwin Street’s plant-based Egyptian street food restaurant Eat Nabati, came to Canada with her parents when she was 10. She began her career in software development, but retrained as a nutritionist after experiencing chronic illness in her 20s. Refocusing on plant-based food was a life-changing discovery she was eager to share.
“I started adding more of what we traditionally ate at home. And I realized the core of our culture is a lot of foods that not a lot of people know about, but they’re naturally plant-based.”
Pera Cafe's owners Tugce Aksu and Osman Cakir.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
Diners from different communities have now gathered around Ali’s comforting pitas and lentil bowls and fries, from vegans to Egyptian expats, and fellow business owners in the market. Some dare to complain that her falafel doesn’t taste like Akram’s, the famous but now long-closed Middle Eastern restaurant and grocery on Baldwin where you could get a wrap for $2 after being greeted with the endearment “habibi,” warm as a pat on the head.
Each time, Ali points out that Akram’s made Levantine falafel, with chickpeas, whereas hers follow the Egyptian style, using fava beans. But she too is nostalgic for Akram’s falafel. “I would just get it loaded up, and their hot sauce, the homemade tahini, and it was just so cozy.”
The mama shawarma platter and falafel at Eat Nabati.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
Moving Eat Nabati to Kensington in 2020 from its original Oakville, Ont., location felt like an obvious choice. “There’s a ton here that reminds me of Alexandria, where my mom’s from,” says Ali. “It really represents the diversity of us Canadians who have immigrant parents or are immigrants ourselves.”
“Anybody who has a vision feels at home,” she says. “Anybody who wants to express their creativity feels at home.”
Kensington itself, a place with a reverence for difference, distils what these women are trying to give their customers: the comfort and freedom of belonging.
“I feel right at home, actually, here in Kensington,” says Aksu, who chats every day with people from the four other Turkish businesses in the market. Here, she says, in contrast to experiences she had while travelling in Europe, “I don’t feel like I’m a stranger.”
Patrons inside Eat Nabati.Cole Burston/The Globe and Mail
Commentators decrying change in Kensington sometimes mourn versions of the neighbourhood they remember from the nineties or eighties or seventies or sixties, depending on their own vintage. But the market, from its Yiddish beginnings to its Portuguese, Latin American, Caribbean and now Middle Eastern adoptions, is actually continuing the habit that has always defined it: offering a starting place and an eager audience to immigrants carrying their traditions to Toronto.
“The neighbourhood is welcoming to all cultures,” Rezaei explains. “So you feel like, if I start something here, bring my background, bring my culture, bring the things I like here, people are going to like it.”