Award-winning food writer, Suresh Doss, tours across Canada’s diverse food in CBC’s Locals Welcome. In this 10-episode series, Doss celebrates the food, people and chefs — quietly and boldly—pushing what we know as “Canadian food” into a new generation of Canadian food culture.
From Mississauga, Ontario, to Richmond, BC, Doss and special guests visit restaurants and food court stalls well-known to locals in its immigrant community.
Throughout the series, several episodes feature the Asian Canadian diaspora communities, where Doss explores South Asian, Chinese, and Filipino cuisine in Canada.
Cold Tea Collective had the opportunity to join the Locals Welcome food tour in Toronto ahead of the show’s launch. It was a great way to translate what we saw on screen to a real life experience, featuring the faces and flavours of those whose stories are featured in the new series. The meals and the people I met on the food tour represent more than just a meal, but the connection we find in creating community through food.
Cold Tea Collective spoke with Doss on a guided food tour about the series from creation and his hopes for the series.
The role of food in building communities
The restaurants showcased in Locals Welcome are pillars of the community they serve. When Doss and his production team were deciding on which cuisines and neighbourhoods to feature, Doss says, “It’s about people and faces, and how we’re so different in terms of our immigrant communities … Can I tell the Scarborough story? Can I tell the super specific regional specificity of Chinese cuisine in Richmond, B.C… That’s how we started.”
Cold Tea Collective was invited to join Doss for a special screening in Richmond alongside other local media, digital storytellers, and local Chef Lee Man of Memory Corner, a Taiwanese restaurant.
Food is more than sustenance for many immigrants in the diaspora — from first generation to many generations before — food is a tangible piece of culture that can evoke memories and feelings that help reconnect to our heritage.
While exploring Mississauga’s South Asian food scene in episode 2 Around The Airport: Flights Of Flavour, the concept of third spaces, a gathering space outside the home, work, and school, places like restaurants and plazas, become social gathering places. These places connect families, friends and multi-generations through familiar flavours. In this episode, Doss says, “Food is relatable — a kaleidoscope of people — food is nostalgic to different times and places,” and this is true for many diaspora communities.
Moreso, Locals Welcome features food courts across in the tenth and final episode, Food Courts: A Culinary Refuge. The finale exemplifies how food courts are an integral third space in diaspora communities. In talking to Doss about food courts, he shares, “Those kinds of places feel like you belong somewhere and you’re safe. As immigrants, first or second generation, there’s a sense of, ‘I am okay here,’ and everyone here is from the same sort of journey or path.”
Redefining “Canadian cuisine” by Asian Canadians
Cold Tea Collective met with Doss ahead of a food tour he led at Coffee In, a Filipino restaurant featured in. Speaking with Doss, he shares how his experience as an immigrant influenced his creation of the show and what he thinks is “redefined” Canadian cuisine.
As an immigrant himself, Doss arrived in Canada at the age of 12 from Sri Lanka. Doss recalls being exposed to a specific kind of Tamil, Chinese, and Portuguese-influenced cuisine in his childhood. After he arrived in Canada, he shares retrospectively, “My mind was blown away.” He recalls how his mom tried to influence him by exposing him to “Canadian” cuisine by making “a spaghetti with soy sauce kind of thing.”
Despite his mom’s efforts in the home kitchen, Doss credits his friends and classmates at school for opening his mind up to new cultures and cuisines, “It was like literally growing up in Scarborough, being in a multicultural high school, and surrounded by Filipinos and Chinese people was how I was influenced.”
In Canada, the concept of the “cultural mosaic” has been a prevalent social idea since the 1970s, where immigrant cultures are welcomed and respected. Compared to the “melting pot” in the United States, a cultural mosaic preserves unique cultural practices, enabling food cultures to remain authentic to their roots.
For Doss, he says, “I prefer the idea of the mosaic because it’s his map of like all these individual cultures that are on this map and we’re all mixing without melting, necessarily. I think, because of the waves of immigration that we’ve had from [around the world], so in 20, 30 years, we are probably going to be the defining culture of food in the world,” Doss says. “Everything converges here, and whatever we create now is gonna lead into the future.”
Locals Welcome celebrates the current time and place – a confluence of cuisines – where good food is shared and enjoyed by people in and outside of any given community.
Locals Welcome shines spotlight on Chinese, Filipino and Punjabi cuisine in Canada
Richmond is famously known as “North America’s most Asian city,” with 74% of its residents identifying as Asian, represented largely by Chinese (54%), South Asian (7.4%) and Filipino (7.3%) communities according to 2021 Census data.
In episode 3, Richmond – Dining Out, of Locals Welcome, viewers and diners can find various Chinese cuisines within the city limits and Richmond’s Chinese Canadian cuisines thrives thanks to the city’s proximity to fresh seafood – a staple in many regional Chinese cuisines.
Immigrants and chefs have been able to adapt their traditional recipes in a new place, while maintaining quality and authenticity. Although many may consider chop suey and egg foo yong as the original Chinese Canadian dishes, dim sum and suan chai yu (sauerkraut fish) are becoming more mainstream and a go-to order for diners. Immigrant and diaspora communities are resilient, and so are their food cultures.
Similarly, in episode 5, Filipino – Transforming a Food Scene, Doss gives his flowers to the Filipino community in Toronto, and its food is becoming more popular in the mainstream food and restaurant scene. When we visited Coffee In, we met the owners, Eric and Jean Taninas. Throughout the experience, there was a constant flow of customers coming in and sitting down to eat.
Eric and Jean still run this “mom and pop” shop, but their daughter, Erika, helps out and hopes to make their food and Filipino food more popular with curious eaters.
In Toronto, arguably one of the most diverse cities in the world, it is a landing place for immigrants who often are the backbone of front-line work, caregiving or labouring. Which is why Locals Welcome is a great addition to the conversations around food in Canada.
The show lends a voice to the chefs and people who feed and nourish diaspora communities. Locals Welcome invites viewers to try something new. Doss’s advice for trying something new or if you are curious about food is to “at least give it two times, because the first time may not be the right one.”
Stream Locals Welcome on CBC Gem or on the CBC YouTube channel.
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