Shehzaad Jiwani from Greys in action (photo: Mathew Morand).
Interview by Jason Schreurs
Shehzaad Jiwani, vocalist/guitarist of Toronto noisey rockers Greys, guides us through his city’s seemingly endless food options.
There’s so much food in Toronto. Can you walk me through it? It seems like there are so many different pockets of places to go.
Oh man, yeah, and the variety is what’s characteristic of the city itself. The band was talking about this the other day. If we’re on tour and we to a city like Philly, then we want to go try a Philly cheesesteak, or there’s a lot of great pizza in New York, for example. Just things like that. We want to have burritos when we’re in San Francisco. I don’t know if Toronto has something like that, but there’s a lot of really great food and one of the city’s biggest draws is it has pretty much anything you could ever want. There’s great Ethiopian food, there’s great Mediterranean food, there’s wonderful Italian food. Any cuisine that you could conceivably want, you can get here.
What’s your background?
I’m Indian. So I pretty much never eat Indian food when I’m out because I can just go to my mom’s house and eat it for free, and it will probably be better. But there are few good Indian spots, too.
I remember walking down the street there and being overwhelmed by the different choices.
Yeah, honestly, for me it’s difficult to pick one thing a lot of the time, and I just end up circling around wondering what the hell to eat. I have a lot of dietary concerns, so I can’t eat very much, but when I was just eating whatever I wanted every time we would come back to Toronto I would make sure to go to either Poutini’s, which is my favourite poutine place in the world; or Burrito Bandidos, which is one of my favourite burrito places, or North of Brooklyn Pizza, which is my favourite pizza spot. But there’s a lot of great stuff.
Is it hard to narrow it down there, just because there’s so much to choose from?
It’s not that hard. I think it’s pretty easy to find a decent spot, and there aren’t really that many places that flat out suck, as far as I can see. I also live here, so that makes a difference. But, yeah, sometimes it’s can be tough to pick a place because there’s so much choice. It’s like opening up your fridge and having one of everything and you can’t figure out what the hell you want you to eat.
Do you ever hit up Mandarin? The huge Chinese buffet?
Oh, yeah [laughs]. I’ll go once every couple of years. It’s pretty hilarious.
I remember my buddy used to bring me to Mandarin when I went to Toronto and it was, like, $25 for all you can eat, but you could walk in and immediately get a huge, heaping plate of king crab legs that was worth at least $40.
Yeah, Mandarin is hilarious. It’s funny because everything there but the Chinese food is really good. The steak is amazing and their pizza is amazing, but the Chinese food is terrible.
Where do you guys like to go and eat together as a band?
There’s a great burger place called The Burger’s Priest that’s, for my money, I think the best burger I’ve had in my whole life. There’s a few locations now, but it started in the east end, and now there’s one at Queen and Spadina, and there’s one by the area I grew up, which is further up town.
What kind of food is trendy in Toronto right now?
That’s a good question. There is stuff like that, for sure. We don’t have food trucks here like they do in the States, so people really like fancy tacos, which I think is hilarious. They’ll pay, like, $4 a taco for an okay taco with beef cheek or whatever the fuck, when they could have gone to a real Mexican place and just pay $2 for it. So there’s places like that, that just strike me that a dude went to Brooklyn once and said, ‘Hey, me too!’ I don’t really go to places like that though, because they’re really douchey.
That seems to be a trend across Canada though: the fancy taco places. There’s even one in Edmonton now that’s exactly the same idea as places I’ve seen in other cities.
Yeah, it’s kind of annoying. The food’s not even that good. I mean, it’s fine; if I ate there I wouldn’t complain about it, but why doesn’t anyone open up a decent, actual Mexican place? That’s the one thing that I think is lacking in Toronto: more legit Mexican places. There are a few great ones, but there’s not a ton of them.
Maybe it’s just being up north. I’m sure down south there a ton of them.
That’s true. And there also aren’t a lot of soul food places up here, just because of where we are. That’s another one where we have a douchey version of it, but the food is actually pretty good.
You mentioned going to Philly for a cheesesteak, but is there anything like that for Toronto?
I don’t know. I think people like Sneaky Dee’s a lot, so I’m sure when you’re going to Toronto for the first time you go there and have a plate of nachos, maybe? But other than that, I can’t think of anything. We were all trying to think of it the other day, like what would you tell someone to eat when they came to Toronto? It’s, like, what do you want? I know a few friends of mine come here and eat rotis because they don’t have them down south a lot. There are a few roti places here that are out-of-this-world amazing, even considering my Indian clause. So rotis are a thing.
Those are the potato wrap things?
Yeah, so there are Caribbean rotis and then there are Indian rotis, and also the Jamacian rotis. They’re all kind of different. The Indian ones, picture a double-sized burrito filled with Indian food. It’s the best thing I’ve ever had. I can’t eat them anymore because I can’t eat gluten, but it is seriously the best thing ever. And if you eat one you’re pretty much good for the rest of the day.
Does your mom make them for you?
Naw, my mom just makes regular Indian food. I’m sure she could, I’ve never asked her to, actually.
Well, maybe it’s time, and she can make you a gluten-free one?
Maybe. Yeah… People here are also pretty up on farmer’s markets and getting good produce and shit like that, and I don’t really buy into the whole reactionary, ‘Oh, that’s so annoying.’ No, it’s not. It’s getting good food and people are into that. People are really into independent butchers. So, yeah, it’s great. It’s a great food city.
When people get together for parties in Toronto, what’s the comfort food that they eat?
I haven’t had one of those in a long time. Our bass player Colin [Gillespie] works in a kitchen and we sometimes cook stuff together. As far as comfort foods, he likes making pizzas and he’s really good at it. I like making risotto for the guys every now and then on tour. For a citywide comfort food, maybe it would just be the burgers here. There are a lot of fancy burger spots and people love that. Burgers and pizza, people love it. And people love bacon, obviously. And brunch. As with every major metropolitan city, there’s a pretty huge brunch culture here. And there are good spots. There’s a really great spot called La Cubana, which I think has one of the best brunches in the city. It’s just this really good Cuban place. Aunties and Uncles is also really excellent, just traditional breakfast stuff. Yeah, I would say brunch is peoples’ comfort food. And you can get it here all week long.
Grey’s If Anything is out now on Carpark Records and Buzz Records in Canada.
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