There are few things Toronto loves more than a good sandwich — and even fewer things the internet loves more than telling you you’re wrong for enjoying one. Tucked inside the West Window at 161 Baldwin St., Uncle Pete’s Bread & Co. opened its doors in August 2025 and has already entered the chat.
After an instantly successful opening, the team behind the window started thinking about how to bring Toronto something warmer and more comforting as the weather turned. Enter The Chino — the sandwich that went on to ignite a full-blown comment-section war.
The Chino is Uncle Pete’s answer to a warm vegetarian sandwich — and depending on who you ask, it’s either a stroke of genius or a crime against humanity. Built on fresh-baked rosemary focaccia, it stacks a mozzarella-stuffed arancini, finished with local hot honey chili oil and chef Lou’s marinara. In short: bread, fried rice, cheese and more bread. No meat. No problem. That is, until Reddit got involved. One devoted Chino fan took to a thread to share their discovery of this oily, cheesy, decadent indulgence and the sandwich became instantly polarizing.
“So you had a rice sandwich?” one commenter asked. “Carbs on carbs, ” says another, deadpanned. The comments began to pile in with the same critique. Baffled, amused, offended and yet myself? Intrigued. There seems to be a quieter minority across the city that are both ordering the sandwich and advocating for it.
My take? A carb-on-carb sandwich is hardly anything new, or scandolours. If you look beyond the Toronto carb-scape you’ll see that historically many cultures have committed the same carb-on-carb crime. In the UK, the chip butty (hot fries stacked between two pieces of buttered white toast bread) dates back to the 19th century, born out of industrial England as a cheap, filling, working-class staple. Spain has the bocadillo de tortilla, a potato omelette pressed into a baguette. India’s dabeli places spiced potatoes into a bun with chutneys.
So why does The Chino feel so controversial now? According to Uncle Pete’s co-founder Petar “Pete” Petrovic, the reaction says more about the internet than the sandwich.
“It’s funny, ” he says. “Ninety-five percent of people who actually try it love it. The
loudest criticism is coming from people who haven’t eaten it.”
Petrovic explains that The Chino wasn’t designed to devise the masses, it was designed as a solution. As a shop that bakes its focaccia fresh daily, Uncle Pete’s is serious about minimizing food waste. Unsold bread doesn’t get tossed; it gets transformed into breadcrumbs that get toasted and used to coat the arancini patty itself, meaning yesterday’s focaccia becomes today’s sandwich.
“It just made sense,” Petrovic says. “Arancini is already incredible, risotto stuffed with cheese and fried. It’s salty, rich and fragrant with the rosemary. That flavour is the point.”
To balance all that richness, the team finishes the sandwich with a hot honey made using Rippa Chili Oil, a Toronto-based business founded by Nicola, an Australian woman who considers herself a “spice enthusiast” and has been described as a “powerhouse.”
“We care really, really deeply about the Toronto angle,” Petrovic says. “Nicola’s incredible. She moved here from Australia, she lived in Malaysia, her mom lived in Hong Kong so her palate is just wild. I’ve honestly never seen someone with that kind of work ethic.”
That global background matters in a sandwich like The Chino, which Petrovic admits is intentionally indulgent. “This thing has a ton of salt. It’s very carby, very fatty, full of cheese,” he says. “It needs something to freshen it up.”
Instead of defaulting to a predictable heat hit, Uncle Pete’s worked with Rippa Chili Oil to build something more nuanced. “It’s not like a normal chili oil or hot honey where someone just dumps red pepper flakes into honey, ” Petrovic explains. “It’s really different. It’s layered. ” The result is an incredible hot honey that cuts through the richness before the team finishes it with their in-house marinara.
The team at Uncle Pete’s isn’t shying away from the debate. If anything, they’re amused by it.
“People say wild things online,” Petrovic laughs. “You forget sometimes that there’s a real person on the other side but honestly, it’s funny.”
