As a food writer, I’ve committed the ultimate cardinal sin. I’ve been holding out on you. Three months ago I had the best sandwich of my life and I’ve kept it to myself ever since. But just a little over a week ago, small town influencer duo @livto2020 traveled to Bolton, Ontario and discovered my secret spot.
At first glance, there’s nothing unique about the unit at 9-365 Healey Road that would suggest it’s serving some of the best sandwiches by the best looking pair in the GTA. In fact just a little over a month ago they finally put a sign above their door. Before that, if you wanted to go you needed to know someone who knew someone who heard something about something delicious, maybe hiding in this industrial plaza roughly 45 minutes outside the city.
La Focaccia Sandwiches operates out of a working industrial kitchen with no dining room, and yet, since last week on most days there’s a line.
“We originally thought we’d cap it at maybe 80 to 100 sandwiches,” says Jonathon Cambouris. “Now we’re doing triple that.” Three months in, the brothers behind La Focaccia are still slightly stunned by how quickly things escalated. “There were days at the beginning where two people would come in,” he says. “Now it’s busy all day, eight hours straight.”
With nearly 97 missed phone calls, and the removal of their mobile orders, the duo is still
looking to hire this week as they ramp up to keep up with the demand.
The story starts the way many pandemic food ventures do: with sourdough. During COVID,
Jonathon Cambouris, the eldest of three brothers who always had a passion for two things:
cooking, and gyming, began baking bread at home. Pizza came first, then sourdough pizza and eventually focaccia. “I just fell in love with it,” he says. “I was making bread constantly.”
His brother Stefan, meanwhile, was not the family cook. “I didn’t care about cooking at all,” he says. “I was just doing chicken and rice. Gym food.” Meanwhile Jonathon was the one coming home after long days and cooking full meals from scratch. “He loves it,” Stefan says. “Like, genuinely loves it.”
Their mother, Adriana Cambouris, was already running a long-standing business out of the same space: Just Catering for Kids, a school lunch program she founded more than two decades ago. As her catering work began to slow after the hard hit of the pandemic, a family member floated an idea that would change everything.
“He basically said, why don’t you just do your sandwiches here?” Jonathon says. The brothers took over the kitchen, built the menu around house-made sourdough focaccia, and started selling panuzzo-style sandwiches: a savoury Italian street food sandwich from the Campania region made with pizza dough that’s been baked, and stuffed with various topics creating essentially “a pizza sandwich.”
Jonathan, who prides himself on having travelled Italy for the food alone noticed the uptrend in Italian sandwiches sweeping the city here in Toronto and decided to take it one step further. Known for their soft, airy interior, and crisp exterior, these sourdough panuzzos make the perfect sturdy vessel for the stacks of deli meats, fetinas and grilled vegetables these boys are packing in.
“We didn’t do any Instagram marketing. Nothing,” Jonathon says. Then TikTok found them.
A video posted by two food creators instantaneously exploded about three months into their opening. “The next day, we sold out in an hour and a half,” Jonathon says. “We looked at it and it had like 200,000 views. We couldn’t believe it.”
What stuck with him most wasn’t the numbers, but the reaction. “They were standing there
saying it was one of the best chicken parms they’d ever had,” he says. “ Meanwhile Jonathan was in the back just smiling. That’s why he loves cooking.”
Suddenly, people were driving in from far beyond Bolton. Keeping up means adapting fast. Larger mixers are now on order while dough production has multiplied. “I used to make two pizza blocks a day,” Jonathon says. “Now I’m making ten.” The menu reflects the work of a true Italian food lover shaped by years of at-home tinkering rather than trend-chasing.
Alongside the Italian classics you’d expect like mortadella paired with stracciatella and pistachio pesto, or a prosciutto e rucola layered with arugula, Parmigiano Reggiano and a hit of good olive oil – the menu also leaves room for playful, deeply comforting combinations. There’s the Sole e Creme, where creamy stracciatella meets sun-dried tomatoes and arugula and the Hot Honey Calabrese, with spicy salami, whipped ricotta and a drizzle of hot honey.
Then there’s the crowd favourite (and by that I mean my personal favourite): the Vodka Chicken Parm Panuzzo. Fried chicken cutlets smothered in house vodka sauce, layered with pistachio pesto and finished with creamy burrata inside crisp, golden sourdough pannuzzo.
At the core of the team is something more practical than passion for business: a shared family history built around food. Their grandfather was a butcher who gave them their first deli slicer. Their mother, a caterer and cook, ran the kitchen and the household, using her business to support the family after her husband was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Years later, her sons carry that same relationship to food into the business, working together and supporting one another.
For now, the goal isn’t expansion or franchising — it’s consistency and good quality ingredients. While some may wish for seating or new menu items, the true charm of La Focaccia is the home grown authentic feel.
