David Schwartz almost didn’t show up for the Michelin Toronto awards ceremony in late September, but he’s glad he did.
His name was called to receive the inaugural Michelin Young Chef award – fitting for a 31-year-old chef-owner who has opened not one but two popular restaurants in Canada’s largest city that serve Chinese food, such as grilled eggplant and leeks with Sichuan sauce, tendon and tomato, and shaved ice with osmanthus syrup and brown sugar tapioca.
Ever since he was a child, Schwartz has been obsessed with Chinese cuisine, thanks to his parents.
“My family and I would go for dim sum every Sunday for the first probably 15 years of my life,” he says via a video call from Toronto. “My dad was really big into eating tripe, tendon and chicken feet. And then basically, I picked up the same habits. I just became fascinated with the textures and I became obsessed.”
A dish of tendon and tomato by Schwartz. Photo: Gabriel Li
They not only frequented Chinese-Canadian restaurants, but also Cantonese ones.
He continues this practice today, driving to municipalities outside Toronto – such as Markham, Mississauga and Scarborough – to try out Chinese restaurants.
I realised the vastness of regional Chinese cuisine is unparalleled, it’s crazy
David Schwartz
If he likes them, he’ll make a point of recommending them on the “Favourite Spots” list on the websites of his restaurants, Sunny’s Chinese and Mimi Chinese.
As he and his family ate at Chinese restaurants, he would also pay attention to what the staff were eating and examine the menu. He’d ask himself questions such as, “Why does the Cantonese menu have two or three spicy dishes?”
“I didn’t recognise at the time the regionality of Chinese cuisine, of course,” he says. “But that was kind of a trigger for me because I saw, OK, what are these different dishes that don’t match the rest?
“And so once I started exploring that, I realised the vastness of regional Chinese cuisine is unparalleled. It’s crazy. And that’s where my obsession really began and took flight.”
It was this passion for food that led Schwartz to study food and beverage management in 2010, at Fanshawe College, in London, Ontario, which gave him the know-how to open and manage restaurants, as well as some culinary skills.
Another seminal moment for Schwartz was backpacking around Southeast Asia in 2012, visiting northern Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam.
Schwartz’s dish of shaved ice topped with osmanthus syrup, brown sugar tapioca, seasonal Ontario plums and red grapes. Photo: Gabriel Li
“I walked around with a notebook,” he recalls. “My friends were like, ‘Stop trying to be like Anthony Bourdain.’ I was poking my head into the kitchen and writing down everything I could.
“That was when I discovered doubanjiang [spicy bean sauce]. And the pivotal part of that trip was realising after the fact that all of the dishes that resonated with me the most […] were those that were influenced by Chinese food culture.”
He returned to China two years later and again in 2019, sampling foods from Beijing, Shanghai, Xiamen, Guangzhou, Xian, Chongqing, Chengdu, Changsha and Hong Kong as well as Taipei.
He plans to go back to China, to visit Yunnan province and return to Sichuan.
In 2015 Schwartz met his future sous chef and business partner, Braden Chong, at DaiLo, a fusion Asian restaurant in Toronto. Soon afterwards, Schwartz pitched the idea of opening a Chinese restaurant where employees would work four-day weeks, and enjoy good benefits and salaries.
Chong thought he was crazy at first.
We have very clear mission statements; our food is about representation of a food culture and not about creativity
David Schwartz
Nevertheless, they proceeded – and one of their first hurdles was to learn how to use a wok.
Schwartz believes that he and Chong were shut out of traditional Chinese kitchens because Schwartz wasn’t Chinese; another reason was that old-school chefs did not seem keen to pass on trade secrets to them.
“A lot of the learning we do about Chinese food and cooking now comes from eating the cuisine constantly,” says Schwartz. “It is basically all that I eat and it’s all that Braden eats for the most part, too.
Grilled eggplant with garlic scapes, big leeks and Sichuan sauce by Schwartz. Photo: Gabriel Li
“YouTube is my best friend – the amount of videos over the past eight years that I’ve fallen asleep watching next to my girlfriend, like GoPro wok-cooking videos or videos that are in full-on Chinese that I’m translating as I’m watching to try to figure out techniques.”
Although Sunny’s Chinese opened in November 2020, Schwartz had originally planned to open Mimi’s Chinese first. He’d written the business plan and found investors and a suitable space by April 2020, but by then Covid-19 was already wreaking havoc across the country.
Since they had the kitchen space, they decided to open a takeaway pop-up called Sunny’s Chinese, featuring dishes from a different region of China each week.
At Schwartz’s Toronto restaurant Mimi’s, refined southern Chinese food rules the menu. Photo: Gabriel Li
It was so well received that it was sold out for 11 consecutive months and named best takeout by Air Canada’s enRoute magazine in 2021, even being featured on the cover.
To give context to diners, Schwartz wrote information cards for each region they featured, as well as explanations of ingredients such as doubanjiang and peppercorns, cornstarch slurries and MSG.
It was then that Schwartz and his partner realised Sunny’s Chinese could be its own stand-alone restaurant.
The interior of Mimi’s Chinese. Photo: Gabriel Li
Building on that momentum they opened Mimi’s Chinese a year later, which helped Schwartz clarify each of the concepts – Sunny’s Chinese is more regional Chinese whereas Mimi’s is refined southern Chinese, with waiters wearing starched shirts and black bow ties.
“We were offering an experience at a time [during the pandemic] when you couldn’t get any experiences,” Schwartz says of the pop-up’s success. “I think the overarching reason people enjoyed it and why people enjoy both of our concepts now is because of how focused they are.
“We have very clear mission statements; our food is about representation of a food culture and not about creativity. It’s 80 per cent representation and 20 per cent creativity.”
At Mimi’s waiters wear starched white shirts and black bow ties for service. Photo: Instagram/@mimichinese
He says these days many Toronto restaurants offer globalised cuisines, making them hard to distinguish, whereas his are very focused, not only on the food, but also on beverages such as baijiu and Shaoxing wine, hospitable service and a fun atmosphere.
“If someone is only looking for food and they don’t care about anything else, I get why they would come in and say, ‘This isn’t for me.’ But that’s not what restaurants are about,” Schwartz says.
“To me, it’s about the theatre of dining, really wanting people to come in and feel that they’ve had an experience – either with nostalgic memories that have resurfaced or where they come and form memories that will one day be nostalgic to them.”
A selection of dishes at Mimi’s. Photo: Gabriel Li
He observes younger Chinese bringing their parents and grandparents to Sunny’s Chinese and getting compliments that the dishes remind them of their grandmother’s cooking.
It’s a far cry from when he started. When Schwartz and Chong first met a Chinese food supplier for the Sunny’s Chinese pop-up, they were sceptical about working with someone who wasn’t Chinese.
“At first they asked, ‘Who does the cooking?’ and I would say, ‘Me,’ and I remember one instance where they just burst out laughing in my face,” says Schwartz.
“And now, three years later, we’re like best friends.”
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