A brand-new Portuguese restaurant that’s opening very soon in Toronto is a whole lot more than just a pretty face.
Paris Paris co-owner and Toronto native Kelly Amaral has known she wanted to open a Portuguese restaurant on Dundas West (the area known to many as Little Portugal) for years now, but the story behind Taberna Lx, the soon-to-open culmination of those dreams, actually starts before Kelly herself had even been born.
Back in the 1950s, her father, born on Pico in the Azores, was among the first wave of Portuguese newcomers to arrive in Toronto. Shortly thereafter, her mother followed and, come the 1960s, they opened the first Portuguese business in what would later become known as Little Portugal.
“It was traditionally Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish, and [my parents] opened up a full-service supermarket with a full butcher shop… and then there was a full fish counter,” Kelly tells us. Both the butcher and the fishmonger, on top of everyone who worked at the store, were also new immigrants from Portugal.
The store would prove to be a massive success, acting as a magnet for burgeoning Portuguese entrepreneurs who moved into the neighbourhood in droves. Quickly, the neighbourhood earned its moniker of Little Portugal.
Over more recent years, though, the concentration of Portuguese businesses in the area has waned, replaced by those of all cultural origins.
And, though the phenomenon isn’t exclusive to the neighbourhood (just look at the response to Taste of Little Italy earlier this summer), Kelly wants to bring the Portuguese flavour back to Little Portugal. It’s sort of the family business, after all.
Enter Taberna Lx, her new, truly faithful Portuguese restaurant that officially opens for business on July 10.
Named after locals’ nickname for Lisbon (Lx is to Lisbon as The Six is to Toronto), the restaurant, Kelly says, will take a markedly different approach compared to anything similar in the city.
“I am really committed, and really want to stay [true to Portuguese cuisine] and not veer from that,” Kelly explains.
“I think it’s easy sometimes when you open up a restaurant and it has European flavour to it, to quickly move into other countries and offer other kinds of food or alcohol or wines, but I’m going to do everything it takes to really stay in this lane and bring it back to the neighbourhood, and hopefully people will embrace it, and will see that Portuguese food is not just piri piri chicken.”
Staying true, as Kelly says, to the restaurant’s Portuguese inspiration means that the menu will exclusively feature cuisine inspired by the country, designed by Paris Paris chef Jonathan Poon (Paris Paris co-owner Gani Shquier is also tied to the project).
It includes offerings like whole sea bass, steak bitoque and a take on flan that Kelly describes as being somewhat akin to a sponge cake, but “very eggy and way more moist,” served with a scoop of bay leaf ice cream.
For Jonathan’s part, though he isn’t Portuguese himself, he has a passion for the country and its cuisine, which made him a particularly strong match for the project.
Behind the bar, mixologist Isabo Leblanc will be shaking up a selection of — you guessed it — Portuguese-inspired cocktails.
The wine menu, too, will offer an unwavering taste of Portugal, offering a diverse array of wines sourced entirely from the country, including a number that’ll be exclusive to Taberna Lx, available nowhere else in the city.
“We will have a very large selection of volcanic wines from Pico, the island my parents are from, and those are very, very special wines, very rare,” Kelly says. “We’ll have the largest selection in Canada.”
Ultimately, Kelly told us, she just hopes to be able to educate her patrons on the diversity of Portuguese cuisine, wines, cocktails and cultures, and serve as a hub for celebrating those very things, much in the way her parents did over 60 years ago.
“I love our menu, and [it’s] very true to being Portuguese, but we have a lot of inspiration that comes from Africa, India and Asia,” Kelly explains, which are common influences found in Portuguese cuisine due to the country’s history of “world discovery.”
“For 25 years, I’ve been trying to sell people on Portugal, and, you know, we always kind of got left behind,” Kelly says. “People would travel through Europe and kind of stop at Spain, and this is going to be cool, because I think that people have finally found Portugal and have fallen in love with it.”
Reservations for Taberna Lx are now open so that you can experience the spectrum of Portuguese cuisine (and the magic of Little Portugal, while you’re at it) for yourself. The restaurant is located at 1161 Dundas St. W.
