Toronto is known for its multicultural cuisine due to the diverse demographic and communities, and if you’re craving authentic Filipino food and flavours, Kanto by Tita Flips is the place to go.
Diona Joyce aka “Tita Flips” is a chef and the owner of Kanto by Tita Flips, the first Filipino street food shop in Toronto, located at 707 Dundas Street West.
Kanto opened in 2012, and during this time the city wasn’t known to have diverse food trucks.
“I wasn’t in the food industry before, but then I saw in that time, there was no such thing as Filipino food in Toronto. There is, but it’s only like catering for just [the] Filipino community in itself, but not in the mainstream,” Tita Flips tells The Brandon Gonez Show.
(Diona Joyce aka “Tita Flip” ios the owner of Toronto’s first Filipino street food restaurant, Kanto)
“So I said, ‘Oh my god, there’s so much more that the Filipino cuisine can offer. There’s so much things that I want to share to the whole [of] Toronto, because it’s a multicultural [city] and there’s so many dishes that you can literally eat anything here in Toronto’,” she adds.
Previously working as a broker, she was given the opportunity to turn her love for cooking into a business when she saw the kiosk located at Bloor and Danforth Street.
Tita Flips describes the opening of her street food restaurant as an adventure, taking a big risk of bringing Filipino food to Toronto and being the first to do so at the time.
“I guess that’s kind of like my mission, you know, like to show people that there is something there, and the cuisine in itself the culture in itself, and it’s worth trying it. If you haven’t tasted it, just try it,” she said.
Filipino cuisine is described as a combination of salty, savoury and sour flavours coming together to create delicious dishes, and the flavour profile is what makes the food so loved and unique.
“For example the pasta you know, like who would put hot dogs in their pasta and make it a little bit sweet because of the banana ketchup?” Tita Flips tells The Brandon Gonez Show.
Kanto is also known as the “home of the original Kamayan kit”.
Kamayan, meaning “hands” in Taglog, is a traditional Filipino communal feast where foods like rice, mangos and chicken are beautifully placed on banana leaves and eaten by hand.
Tita Flip’s success shows that when dream meets opportunity, anything is possible and Tita Flip proves that perseverance can be worthwhile.
“I’m just lucky enough to be able to show other people or inspire other people to do that [starting a business], that they can do so too,”she shares.
Kanto is such a loved restaurant in the city that Live Nation referred her to cater for the crew at Rogers Stadium during one of Bruno Mars’ shows in Toronto.
(Filipino Delicacies from Kanto by Tita Flips at the Bruno Mars Concert in Toronto)
Bruno Mars is half Filipino from his mother’s side, who immigrated from the Philippines to Hawaii.
Kanto has three locations within the GTA, and catering from Tita Flips is available through her company, Mercado.
