On the corner of Sussex Avenue and Spadina Avenue in Toronto, a neon open sign flickers in the window of Daddyo’s Pasta & Salads. For the past 14 years, this 500-square-foot restaurant has stood here, its walls covered with framed letters and signed pictures — thank-you notes from grateful U of T student groups, alumni, and other satisfied customers that span years.
There are so many hanging on the walls that they look like bricks, stacked up all the way from the floor to the ceiling. At night, the restaurant’s awning emits a soft light, illuminating a red and yellow painted storefront. Another sign tells customers: “Don’t Walk Pasta Place.”
“I can vividly remember the smell walking toward Daddyo’s,” said Shannon McKechnie, a U of T alum. “Garlic, pasta, tomatoes — just very comforting.”
Looking at the exterior, there are more windows than walls. Even from outside, you can see the warmly lit yellow interior. Behind the cash register counter is an open kitchen, where customers can see their food being made. “It almost feels like you’re going into someone’s home, truly, because it’s so small,” said Lucia Plunkett, a third-year U of T student studying environmental ethics. “There’s only a couple tables… You can talk to everyone who’s in there.”
But for almost a year now, the chatter at Daddyo’s has died down. Since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, remote classes at U of T and dining restrictions have meant that the restaurant’s black plastic chairs sit empty and the tables remain cleared. For a small business so integrated into the U of T community, the pandemic has wiped out a major customer base.
On top of this, on November 20, Ontario Premier Doug Ford announced renewed lockdown measures in Toronto and Peel region, limiting non-essential businesses to takeout and delivery service only. Restaurants Canada, an association representing restaurant owners, estimated that indoor dining closures would gouge the sales of full-service restaurants by as much as 80 per cent, while quick-service restaurants could lose more than 40 per cent. Many restaurants are unlikely to survive.
“Business has gotten terrible,” said Jeffrey Markus, one of the restaurant’s co-founders, sometimes called ‘Daddyo’ by U of T students. “There was a lot of fear — what are we going to do?”
How it all began
The idea for Daddyo’s was born in a coffee shop. Over 14 years ago, Sri Thangarajah, an old employee from another pasta restaurant Markus had owned years before, called up Markus, asking to meet. At the café, Thangarajah told Markus that he wanted to quit his job to start a restaurant together. Thangarajah would head the chef duties, while Markus would handle the operational side of business.
It had been years since Markus owned a restaurant, but he remembered a listing he’d seen in the Toronto Star around two years earlier. Markus and Thangarajah left the coffee shop and went to the corner of Sussex Avenue and Spadina Avenue to talk to the owner. Around six months later, Daddyo’s opened.
Markus, a 64-year-old man with short, cropped grey hair and a bushy grey mustache, is the face of Daddyo’s. Although he’s not Italian and he doesn’t label his restaurant as Italian-owned cuisine, he certainly looks the part. In videos on the restaurant’s social media platforms, he can sometimes be seen sporting sunglasses and a straw fedora, puffing on a cigar.
In a way, the restaurant is his namesake: two of his youngest children began calling him ‘Daddyo’ while they were in elementary school. “Maybe they saw it in a cartoon. I don’t know,” Markus said. The name stuck. Soon, U of T students began calling him that too.
“He’s like everyone’s dad,” said Plunkett. Markus became known around campus as a friendly community figure, often chatting with customers who passed through his restaurant. Students learned about certain informal rules he has, like how he never lets you sprinkle cheese on your pasta yourself. And how he sometimes likes to throw in free extra sides, such as a drink or garlic bread, for no particular reason at all.
“Jeff is central to the experience of visiting Daddyo’s,” Vamika Jain, a third-year U of T student studying international relations, wrote in an email to The Varsity.
For somebody who fits into the restaurant business with such ease, Markus didn’t originally plan on going into the line of work. “I became a restauranteur just by natural evolution.”
Born in Toronto and raised in Miami, Florida, Markus travelled around the world working in casinos starting from age 17. In the 1980s, he lived in Africa, Europe, and Asia, dealing at blackjack tables in illegal and legal casinos alike. He came back to Toronto in 1983, working as a general manager in nightclubs, and found his way into the restaurant industry inadvertently. “I just grew into it because I’ve always been an entrepreneur,” Markus said.
He didn’t have any interest in cooking growing up, but he always wanted to own something for himself. “That’s what small businessmen are all about: we don’t have bosses — we’re our boss,” he said. “The decisions are all right there for us. You make them, you don’t make them — you live with the repercussions.”
This year, the pandemic has presented Markus and Thangarajah with some of their toughest decisions yet. Like many other restaurants in Toronto, COVID-19 has gutted its revenue. “Our losses were huge,” said Markus. They weren’t sure they could survive.
Lockdown measures have gouged the food service industry. According to Statistics Canada, at least 400,000 previously-employed people in this sector were still out of a job in July. As the pandemic dragged on after March, Markus and Thangarajah risked the possibility of incurring major debt. Meanwhile, Thangarajah has a pregnant wife, two small kids, and a mortgage to support. On top of this, Markus and his wife are especially at risk for the virus because they’re both diabetic, but Markus and Thangarajah still work 70–80 hours a week during the pandemic.
“I’m not trying to be cynical about it, but it’s really, really a mess what’s going on here… Ford [is] shutting down the small businessman,” Markus said. “They’re not given an opportunity to survive.” Daddyo’s faced a critical challenge: would it be able to outlive the pandemic, or would it have to close its doors forever?
The pandemic’s impact
Near the end of September, Markus and Thangarajah handed their landlord a notice to end their lease. “We were shutting down,” Markus said. “Not many people are aware of that.”
They had accrued staggering losses, but money wasn’t the only reason they considered shuttering their business. It was also personal.
“It’s very trying mentally to go there every day, to know you sat there and had the incredible business and life experiences for 14 years,” Markus said. “Now, all of a sudden, you sit there, and you wait for 10 people to come over a course of four hours and maybe 20 Ubers, which you know — it just gets very depressing.”
This may have been one of the most devastating blows to Daddyo’s — not just the lost revenue, but also the lost conversations. “Our campus is vast and our community is spread out, but Daddyo’s is one of those places that really brings us all together,” Jain wrote. When Markus and Thangarajah first bought the space, they knew their customers would likely be from U of T, but they could not have predicted how vital they would become to the campus’ community.
For many students, Daddyo’s feels like home. For Plunkett in particular, she remembered needing that feeling most during her first year, when she moved across the country from a small suburb to Toronto. Even before classes began, she felt pangs of homesickness and considered moving back. “I think I just had no sense of community yet,” Plunkett said. “I just felt really lonely and isolated.”
One of the very first meals she had at U of T was from Daddyo’s. As a Varsity field hockey athlete, Daddyo’s catered her team meetings every Friday. “I just remember being so… overwhelmed with joy because it’s such comforting food,” she said. “It felt like a home cooked meal… familiar and friendly and warm.”
If she ever walked into the restaurant wearing Varsity gear, she knew a Daddyo’s employee would ask about her season. “That was really sort of a change from how I think traditionally university can be,” she said. “I think sometimes it can be kind of cold. But Daddyo’s is always so welcoming.”
Ultimately, after weeks of deliberation, Markus and Thangarajah decided to rescind their notice and keep their restaurant open. But their struggle to outlast the pandemic wasn’t over. Right when they resolved to push through, in October and November, they hit their biggest challenge yet.
“As soon as we said that, business really dipped,” Markus said. “It really hit a bottoming out that we hadn’t seen since the pandemic started.”
What does the future look like?
On November 26, Markus posted a video to the Daddyo’s Instagram account. It began with his typical greeting, but this time, he had a somber message to deliver.
“Hi guys, Daddyo here,” he said. “Quite frankly, things are really tough.”
He asked community members to support the restaurant because he wasn’t sure how much longer they could keep going. “I’m calling out all our pasta guys, everybody [who’s loved] Daddyo’s over the last 14 years,” he said. “Help us survive.”
In the weeks since the video was posted, it has accumulated over 51,000 views and almost 150 comments. Along with that attention, Daddyo’s has received an outpour of support from the community. The restaurant even learned about two separate offers to set up GoFundMe campaigns. On a call with his daughter, who runs Daddyo’s social media accounts, Markus told her to reach out to the donors and thank them for their kindness, but tell them that he didn’t want to accept the money.
Although he was overwhelmed and grateful for the support, it wasn’t how he wanted to run his restaurant. “We’re not interested in charity,” he said. “We’re interested in business.”
But this sparked an idea. Markus realized that if people wanted to donate to Daddyo’s, he could use that money to give back to the Toronto community. On November 27, he posted a video about his new initiative: Daddyo’s Feeds the Downtown. Every dollar that people donate will be used to make pasta meals for frontline workers, homeless shelters, and charities.
Blythe Media, an email marketing agency, reached out and donated $2,000. Beginning on December 8, they are helping Daddyo’s coordinate pasta drop-offs with groups like the University Health Network every Tuesday and Thursday. The restaurant is scheduled to donate 80 meals each week. “Except for a short break for Christmas, we’re going to continue to do that into the new year, so the funds are spent,” Markus said.
On December 6, they surpassed $5,000 in donations. Markus credited the experience with reshaping his perspective on the restaurant’s future. He remembered being afraid at the idea of losing his business. “Since I was 17, I’ve been working every day in my life,” he said. “I feared… not working, because I didn’t know what I would do.”
But seeing the U of T community come together to support the restaurant, Markus felt a new clarity. “Like I said to my wife the other day, I’m just so reinvigorated by the whole thing. I got to a point after running restaurants for over 40 years, just really burned out by my whole career… and this has given me a whole new challenge,” he said. “As a crusty old man, I just feel blown away by everything.”
According to Markus, the game plan is to make it until next September. He figures that by then, the vaccine will likely be distributed and students will be back on campus. Given the engagement levels over Daddyo’s posts, it seems that the U of T community is determined to keep Daddyo’s alive to see that day.
For students like Jain, this restaurant is more than just the local pasta joint — it is also an achingly familiar place of comfort. Once, when she was having the worst week of her life and walking home to Woodsworth College Residence with tears streaming down her face, she impulsively turned into Daddyo’s instead. Barely having wiped her eyes, she placed her order in a shaky voice.
“Jeff sat me down, told me to breathe, and asked me if I was okay,” she wrote. “It all came tumbling out and I don’t remember exactly what he said, but I know that by the time he gave me the pasta and I started walking out, I was laughing.”
For moments like those, Jain and other students are resolute in rallying around Daddyo’s, giving back to a restaurant that has given so much to them.
“We’ve got his back,” Jain wrote. “Like he’s always had ours.”
