For Julia Gallay, food was always like a love language. Growing up in a Jewish-Brazilian household, traditional treats like pudim de leite and torta alema expressed what words could not. “I speak Portuguese now, but growing up, a lot of my family members didn’t speak English,” she recalls. “It was like the only way to showcase love was by cooking your favourite things.” 

Today, the self-taught pâtissier creates otherworldly confections beloved by Instagram aesthetes and sweet tooths alike, drawing baking inspiration from unique sources like ikebana, architecture, and ceramics. Since winter 2020, she has been baking her signature floral desserts full-time from her home studio. 30 thousand followers later, she counts brands like Mejuri, Dermologica and Sézane as clients and leads cake decorating courses, where she shares her expertise.

Before launching Gallz Provisions, Gallay had been working for a medical tech startup and baking recreationally. Though she wanted to be in the food industry, she wasn’t sure how to make the transition. “The food space is where I wanted to be, but I had no way to show that—I had never worked in a kitchen before or in restaurants.” When a work grant for the orthopaedic software she was working on fell through in 2020, she made the leap.

Gallay’s micro-bakery, Gallz Provisions, took flight during the pandemic, placing her among a new class of entrepreneurs in the food space whose endeavors were jump-started by the hyper-specific circumstances that arose from COVID restrictions. And in the origin stories of these culinary start-ups, authenticity is the main ingredient.

“I didn’t expect to be doing this full time,” former model Becca Pereira shares. “It really was just a way to connect with the community and it’s now turned into so much more beyond just me.” When her plans of attending culinary school shifted in light of the pandemic, Pereira launched Spice Girl Eats, a Toronto-based pop-up that served up the Indian cuisine that she grew up eating.

As a child in Barrie, Ont., Pereira had a more difficult time embracing that same traditional cuisine. “People did make comments about us smelling like [Indian] food and it was hurtful,” she recalls. In lieu of the elaborate Indian leftovers that her mother prepared, Pereira would sometimes request bologna sandwiches. “I was ashamed. Now I feel like I was so ridiculous,” she admits. “Me and my siblings should not have done that, but you do want to fit in as well.”

Now, that food is a source of pride. After the pop-up’s first year, Spice Girl Eats became Spice Girl Chai, with Pereira pivoting the brand’s focus from a pop-up kitchen to a bespoke bottled chai mix. She’s now developing a ready-to-drink version of her signature concentrate. 

“The idea came because when people came to pick up the food [from the pop-up], we would give them chai—that was my mom’s idea—and people loved that,” she reflects. “I realized there isn’t actually a lot of good chai that you can get in the city, and saw that as an opportunity.”

And like both Gallz Provisions and Spice Girl Chai, the idea for the elusive Toronto supper club Jeudr3di was close to home for its co-founder Alexandra Francis. On a video call with her co-founder Brutalé, she recounts how one of her fondest childhood memories was a monthly dinner party hosted by her Lebanese grandmother. “We would celebrate everybody’s birthdays. It would just be a time for us all to come together,” she shares. Seated at a long dinner table, Francis and her extended family shared delicacies like cabbage rolls, spinach pies and kafta.

Years later, when Francis moved back to Toronto after living abroad, she hosted a dinner party in hopes of making new friends. “It was that summer after COVID when things were open but not really open,” she remembers. “We had a potluck dinner in an abandoned warehouse. We just threw everything over the fence— that would have been our very first dinner. Then we thought we were definitely on to something.” Today, she curates the dinners with Brutalé, a former fashion designer. Each event explores a new theme with a different featured chef. The location is often kept secret until the day of the event.

The duo curate each experience while keeping connection top of mind. “For myself, there’s a lot of purpose in bringing people together,” Francis shares. “Especially in a day and age where everything is done through a screen, and you have 90 minutes at the dinner table when you go to a restaurant. Our dinners are like, six hours long.”

While Brutalé, who is admittedly the more shy of the duo, manages the back of house for each event, Francis sits at the table and hosts.

They credit their male-female dynamic for allowing them to navigate the food landscape in a unique way. “From the female perspective, in a lot of industries, there’s a boys club,” Francis begins, “That exists in the Toronto food scene a bit. Our partnership allows us to take on different responsibilities.”

Brushes with ‘boys clubs’ occur in and out of the kitchen. Though most of the clients that Gallay engages with are women, she estimates that around five percent are “men buying cakes for their girlfriends.” Interactions with these clients are occasionally tinged with an undermining attitude. “The times that I have felt less-than are when men are sent to pick up cakes,” she explains. “They have no understanding of what the concept is or how big the operation is.” Some of this, she says, can be attributed to her youthful appearance. “They think they’re coming to pick up this cake from a teenager’s home and they begin to ask, ‘Oh, you do this full-time? That’s possible? You make enough money from this?’” While this response isn’t always the case, she finds it frustrating when it does occur. “Those types of interactions make me so uncomfortable,” she adds. “Just because it’s baking, which is what the homemaker does, [they feel it is] less-than compared to working at a bank or being in consulting.”

In the early days of Spice Girl, Pereira also felt the weight of breaking into the city’s male-dominated food industry. “At first, when I was doing the food pop-up, there were a couple of men who were doing similar cooking. I hate to say it, but quite a lot of chefs have an ego,” she admits. “There was just a bit of feeling that I wasn’t respected.”

Instead of being discouraged by this, she used it as fuel. “It just makes me want to be better and more successful so that I can be like, ‘See? I told you I could do it.’”