When you’re Palestinian, like me — born outside your homeland, the descendant of refugees — it can be hard to know what being Palestinian really means. I spent my childhood moving between the U.A.E., the U.K. and finally, Canada. My father often shared stories about his own childhood in Jerusalem, playing with friends in the shadow of the Dome of the Rock. My maternal grandfather spoke of Nablus, his hometown in the West Bank, and the scent of olive oil soap factories that lingered in the air.
But growing up in North York, where life moved to a different rhythm and language, I felt detached from those stories — and from my Palestinian identity. What anchored me instead was the food.
Palestinian dishes weren’t just something we ate; they were how my parents preserved our culture. My father, a chef, ran a catering side hustle with my mother, hand-making kibbeh balls stuffed with spiced beef and walnuts. Every now and then, a few would be set aside for me to snack on. There was piping hot lentil soup during winters, musakhan with slow-cooked onions and sumac on weekends, and the morning ritual of dipping bread into za’atar and olive oil. To this day, I buy a special za’atar blend imported from Nablus. That first bite, earthy and tangy, always transports me to a country I have yet to visit.
Writer Ali Amad and his parents preserve their Palestinian culture through food
Roughly 15,000 Palestinians live in the GTA, part of a global diaspora of more than seven million. For many of us whose families have been torn apart by conflict and scattered across the world, trying to understand our identity hasn’t come through language or history, but through what is served on the table.
That’s what makes the rise of Palestinian restaurants in Toronto so significant. Places like Louf, a new casual fine dining spot near Casa Loma; Arbequina, an upscale Palestinian-Jordanian eatery in Roncesvalles; and Darna, a traditional kitchen in Leaside — along with Levant Pizza, Bait Sitty and others — are offering something that stands apart. In a city saturated with generic “Middle Eastern” menus, these restaurants are making a distinct declaration of identity. They aren’t just somewhere to eat — they’re spaces of dignity, resilience and cultural affirmation, serving food that carries centuries of Palestinian history and heartbreak, but also hope.
Darna
Born and raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan, Arbequina chef and owner Moeen Abuzaid didn’t set out to become a chef. “The kitchen found me,” he says. As a teenager, he volunteered in a kitchen just to escape the blazing sun during a state-run summer program. He quickly discovered he had an instinct for cooking, going on to work in several Jordanian luxury hotels and plying his trade in countries like Germany and the U.A.E.
In 2009, Abuzaid landed in New York with $27 in his pocket and limited English skills. He hustled through the city’s restaurant scene — working everything from brunch spots to Michelin-starred kitchens — before launching a well-loved pop-up called The Broken English. Opening Arbequina in Toronto in 2024 was the culmination of that global journey, something reflected in his menu. “It connects the dots,” he says. “Bringing everything I’ve learned around the world and translating it into something rooted in my culture.”
Arbequina
Classic Jordanian-Palestinian dishes are reimagined with precision and creativity. Take his mutabbaq: Traditionally a stuffed pastry filled with spinach or mozzarella, Abuzaid refines it into a fine dining-inspired version made with truffled mushrooms and smoked kashkaval cheese, transforming a comfort food into a new experience. After our interview, Abuzaid serves me a hummus that looks recognizable enough — until I take a gloriously delectable bite and he fills me in on the surprise ingredient: lima beans, which give the dish a light, delicate flavour that perfectly straddles the line between homage and novelty.
Abuzaid’s Roncesvalles restaurant is small and serene, inspired by Nordic minimalism with warm, earthy tones of green and brown — a quiet ode to the olive trees found across Palestine. The name Arbequina itself refers to a variety of olive grown in the Jordan Valley, and its oil is served in dishes throughout the menu. This adherence to the flavours of home can be traced elsewhere: The spice blends are sourced from Abuzaid’s family shop in Jordan. And the influences he’s picked up along the way are similarly folded into the food. Abuzaid serves rice infused with curry leaves, a nod to his wife Asma’s Indian background. “It’s about the balance of honouring where we come from while still moving forward,” she says.
The philosophy at Louf — an elegant restaurant tucked near Casa Loma that opened last winter — is similar in ambition, but carries a sharper political edge. Palestine-based chef Fadi Kattan and his Torontonian business partner, Nicole Mankinen, launched the restaurant with a clear goal: to be unapologetically Palestinian. The name Louf is the Arabic word for arum palaestinum, a flowering plant native to Palestine. Cooked properly, it’s edible. Cooked improperly, it numbs the mouth. “There’s no cookbook for louf,” Kattan says. “You learn how to cook louf because your grandmother teaches you.”
Louf
At Louf, that intergenerational knowledge is paired with upscale execution. The menu shifts frequently but features staples like lentil soup and shishbarak, or roasted dumplings, as well as a braised lamb shank served with jameed, a fermented dry yogurt typically handmade in the region. There’s also a mushroom salad, inspired by both Kattan’s mother and Mankinen’s grandmother, who often foraged for mushrooms in Northern Ontario.
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Read moreFor both of them, marketing the restaurant as Palestinian was intended as a statement. “I wanted my kids, our community, to see that it’s OK to call yourself Palestinian,” says Mankinen, who has five children with her Lebanese-Palestinian husband. “You don’t have to tiptoe around your identity or hide behind labels like ‘Middle Eastern’ just to make others comfortable.”
Not every restaurant is operating in that same lane, but each one is pushing the conversation forward in its own way. At Levant Pizza in Dovercourt Village,
co-owner Nader Qawasmi takes a more casual, genre-bending approach. He grew up in Keswick, Ontario, where his family — newly arrived from Palestine in the early 1970s — ran a diner for 30 years that became a local favourite. Alongside burgers, his family served dishes like shawarma. “My father introduced falafel to a small town used to bacon and eggs,” he says.
Levant Pizza
Levant Pizza, which Qawasmi opened in 2021, reflects that same spirit of blending in while standing out: His best-selling pie is topped with slow-cooked beef shawarma and tahini. “I didn’t want to compete with every other pizzeria out there,” he says. “This was about staying true to Arab flavours, while also having fun with the pizza concept.” It’s not authentic in the nostalgic sense, but in their own way, Qawasmi’s recipes carry the spirit of adaptation and resilience that the Palestinian diaspora has cultivated for generations.
At Darna, co-owner Marwan Carmi set out to do something simpler, but no less powerful: offer Palestinian food made with the kind of care you’d find in your mother’s kitchen. “When I moved from Jerusalem to Toronto in 2016, I couldn’t find a good Palestinian restaurant,” he says. “There were lots of Syrian and Lebanese places, but nothing that tasted like home.” He opened Darna in 2019 with that market gap in mind, followed by a second location in Roncesvalles last year.
Darna
Many of the recipes came from his partner and father-in-law, Osama Khalaf, a longtime chef who also runs a Darna in Ramallah, Palestine. Khalaf still travels between the two countries, often walking table to table, telling diners the story behind each dish — just like Abuzaid does at Arbequina. Fans from Abuzaid’s The Broken English days in New York now make pilgrimages to his Toronto restaurant, and others fly from as far as Australia and Kuwait.
It’s that kind of personal connection — where chefs share stories and meals at your table — that makes these places feel like more than just restaurants, and draws people from across the world. On my own visit to Darna, Khalaf insists I try the sayadieh, a Gazan dish I’ve never heard of — fish layered over seasoned rice, his version made with sea bass. When I mention the dish to my parents, they tell me that sayadieh had been one of my late grandmother’s favourite meals to cook. I’d never known. That one dish, eaten in a Toronto restaurant, reconnected me to a piece of my own family history.
For many Palestinians in the diaspora, food is the last surviving thread of their identity: The one thing that can’t be occupied, erased or renamed. In Toronto, these restaurants are claiming space — not just on menus, but in the cultural landscape of the city itself. Their approaches vary: some elevate and experiment, others preserve and honour. But whether it’s Abuzaid and Kattan reimagining classics at Arbequina and Louf, Khalaf sharing family recipes at Darna or Qawasmi layering tahini on pizza at Levant, the message is the same. Each plate is a declaration: We are still here.
I’ve never lived in Palestine. I’ve never seen the olive groves of Nablus or walked the streets of Jerusalem like my ancestors did. But in these dining rooms — where za’atar is sacred and stories are served alongside mains — I feel a flicker of connection. A kind of homecoming. And maybe that’s what these restaurants offer above all: a seat at the table, not just for Palestinians, but for anyone hungry for belonging.
