Thank you so much to the powerhouses Andrea and Shawn and To Ashwani and the entire Scarborough Business Association for encouraging residents to support our local restaurants this month.
I’m going to try and name drop a bunch of restaurants in Scarborough Rouge Park during my remarks so let’s see if you can keep a full count of them as I go through.
It is really great that our friends from Tropical Nights were part of the program. It’s a great place to have a bite to eat after a cricket tournament (which unfortunately we don’t have right now) but please do support them with take out. Likewise it was really great that our friends at Northern Smokes were able to connect and it’s definitely my favorite place to pick up ribs to eat in the backyard with friends.
At city hall our colleague Coun. Cole has recommended that when we return from uh the stay-at-home orders and we come back to sitting in person at council that we have a donut competition and i will let you know that I’ve already selected that the Port Union Bakery will be my pick to present in this very important city hall contest. So stay tuned for that.
Last summer an intern in our office worked alongside students at The Bridge through the Scarborough restaurant recovery project to call Scarborough restaurants because we needed to get the word out and let people know about some different programs that we were offering. Students were able to help 27 restaurants in Scarborough to get onto toronto.com. That website is still up and what it does is it’s trying to promote takeout and to go and pick up your food specifically because as we know third party apps take a large portion of the money from our restaurant so it’s important that we’re trying to pick it up and also support the restaurants that have their own delivery systems.
We also called restaurants to let them know about cafeTO and we definitely have advocated to the city staff that they need to do more to advertise this program to Scarborough restaurants. It’s a little bit different in Scarborough than in the downtown where area restaurants were expanding into the roads.
So the city was shutting down roads downtown but in Scarborough the restaurants are expanding into their parking lots and we did change zoning permissions to allow them to do that. Unfortunately we didn’t see as many restaurants sign up in the Scarborough area as we did downtown.
I think that’s mostly because we haven’t been promoting it as heavily here, so we’ve asked city staff to promote that. As you heard, Coun. Ainslie is trying to promote that as well and I will say that in Scarborough Rouge Park four restaurants participated in cafeTO and they were Six Social, Sunny Up Carla’s Roadhouse and Fratelli’s. We’re hopeful they’re all going to come back on board with that program again.
I’m really excited that UTSC and Centennial both announced today that the website will be launching for FindDining. This is a great initiative to promote Scarborough restaurants but also tell the story of the people behind the food and as we know everybody who connects with their local restaurateur has a conversation with them. When we support our restaurants we’re supporting people. We’re supporting the staff. We’re supporting those entrepreneurs and we’re making sure that they’re able to thrive despite the challenges that are offered by Covid-19 so events like this that are promoting them are just so wonderful.
I’ll tell you where the name FindDining came from. We were having conversations about Summerlicious and Winterlicious and why the suburbs weren’t signing on. Part of it is that Summerlicious and Winterlicious were about find dining experiences and bringing that price point down so that it could be accessible to a wider variety of people.
In Scarborough the challenge is different. There’s these small restaurants owned locally by families. It’s about finding them and telling everybody about these great places. So that’s the origin of the title for the program FindDining so it’s great that Bill and Shannon from UTSC and Centennial were here today.
I’d like to thank all the students for their hard work. I’m so grateful that the city was able to be a partner and to make this happen so please do support local restaurants this month.
Another great suggestion I will drop is Soya Spot on Morningside. It serves a variety of African dishes and i will give another shout out to Howard Tam because he’s the one that introduced this restaurant to me on his Eat More Scarborough tour. We’re featuring it today on our social media in honor of Black History Month and last week we featured Drake’s Scarborough restaurant Patty Stop at Port Union and Lawrence.
Please do support our local restaurants this month for black history month for Lunar New Year, for Valentine’s Day and Family Day.
I’m so happy that I could join you. Does anybody want to take a guess about how many restaurants i just named dropped? well that was 10 restaurants in less than five minutes that you have to check out in Scarborough Rouge Park.