Why Family-Run Restaurants Cook Better Food

The best food in this city comes out of eight-table plazas run by families. There is a real reason for that.

The best thing you will eat in the GTA this year will almost certainly come out of a small, family-run kitchen in a strip plaza with a hand-painted sign. This is not romanticism, there are structural reasons for it.

Nobody is optimising the recipe

A commercial kitchen is under constant pressure to make the dish faster, cheaper and more consistent. Every one of those pressures makes the food slightly worse. A family kitchen is cooking the recipe they have always cooked, because that is the recipe. There is nobody in the building whose job is to shave 40 cents off it.

The short menu is the tell

A family kitchen does a small number of things because that is what the family knows how to cook. That constraint is a gift. Twelve dishes done adequately will always lose to four done properly.

They are cooking for their own community first

This is the big one. When a Sri Lankan kitchen is full of Sri Lankan families on a Sunday, the food has not been softened or simplified for anyone. The spice level is real. The technique is real. You are eating the actual thing, not an export version of it.

The room tells you where the money went

A beautiful dining room is a signal that capital went into the room. Fluorescent lights and eight tables is a signal it went into the kitchen. In Scarborough, the plainer rooms are usually the better food.

Weekends are when they are strongest

The whole family is in the kitchen on a weekend. That is when a place like this is at its actual best.

We are one of them

Blessed Kitchen is a family kitchen in Scarborough cooking halal Sri Lankan and Indian food the way it is cooked at home. Read our story, or our guide to eating in Scarborough.