Tables Turned

In a world where many restaurants won’t survive the lockdown, what is the future of dining out?

- COREY MINTZ

In 1999, Sanjeev Yogeswaran came to Canada as a refugee. He was fourteen years old, and his family had paid almost $40,000 to get him out of Sri Lanka, which was gripped by civil war. At age fifteen, he began working at Pizza Hut; within a few years, he was working at three Pizza Huts at the same time, putting in seventy hours a week. Except for a brief period when he co-owned a pub, Yogeswaran has spent the vast majority of his restaurant career working for other people. And then the pandemic hit.

It was the last weekend in March. The business Yogeswaran managed was closed; two weeks without going into work was the longest vacation he’d had in two decades. His sister, Mirna, a financial manager, had been casually catering for years, cooking for friends’ birthday parties and the like. The siblings discussed posting a small selection of dishes for sale, which they would deliver themselves to the areas near their homes, in the suburban Ajax and Pickering areas. With little planning — just that quick conversation — they shared a menu on WhatsApp, telling family and friends that they were offering kochikadai biryani (a rice dish in which a basic dough is used to seal the pot lid so no steam escapes), chicken fried rice with devil chicken (fried chicken chunks tossed in vinegar, soy, sweet sauce with peppers, onions, and chilies), and yellow rice with mutton curry. Within half an hour, Yogeswaran recalls, they started getting orders. “We hadn’t started cooking.”