As I sipped a lychee martini and ordered a shrimp and avocado ceviche garnished with a shiso leaf, I couldn’t help but wonder: was this restaurant transporting me back to the early 2000s? The menu called appetizers “small tapas” and mains “large tapas.” And just like that, the Asian fusion I once had a soft spot for nearly two decades ago, still lives on.
But not the watered-down kind of fusion we’ve grown used to — teriyaki glazes and Sriracha mayo passed off as innovation, yuzu added to iced drinks and beers on cue every summer, matcha and ube desserts now as common as chocolate chip. I’m thinking the Y2K-era of Asian cooking, where chefs incorporated predominantly East and Southeast Asian flavours into sharable plates in a chic restaurant in a glamorous city. Think Susur Lee’s Singapore Slaw, or ordering pad Thai at the long-closed Bamboo Club.
Which brings us to Etobicoke, just a short walk from Islington subway station, where a small bistro channels that same energy of the cuisine, but in a casual neighbourhood setting. Mai Bistro (4906 Dundas St. W.) serves dishes like lemongrass pork tacos and shrimp ceviche with soy and chipotle. But while its flavours flirt with Y2K-era influences, the menu quickly reveals the work of a chef drawing from memory and experience rather than chasing trends.
If fusion cooking once had a reputation for picking and mixing flavours like a claw machine on free play, Mai Bistro feels more personal — less collage, more lived-in story.
That story belongs to chef and owner Manh Nguyen, who is in the kitchen while his wife Masako Fujio and daughter Maika work the dining room. Nguyen’s culinary style — part Latin, part Southeast Asian, part Japanese — comes not from trend cycles but from decades of cooking in hotel kitchens, upscale Japanese restaurants, and neighbourhood music venues across three countries.
“You can pull random stuff but you have to know the flavours work together,” says Nguyen. “All these foods are based on what I know goes well together from experience and memories. I know what goes together and what won’t go well together. It stays in my head.”
He makes a ceviche inspired by his time cooking at hotels in South America, but his experience at a high-end Japanese restaurant on King West shows through: the shrimp is marinated in soy sauce, lime, chipotle, and cumin, then finished with a shiso leaf, the minty, citrusy herb that cuts through fatty sashimi.
There’s also an Argentine steak frites topped with chimichurri, where soy sauce replaces vinegar to deliver an acidic bite with added umami. A mound of julienned green onions crowns the steak, offering a sharp, fresh counterpoint.
The grilled pork tacos? “Similar to a Vietnamese banh mi,” Nguyen explains. The pork is marinated in fish sauce, lemongrass, ginger and garlic before it’s grilled and topped with chopped tomatoes, mint, coriander, Thai basil and cucumber. “In South America, they have all these vegetables and herbs exactly like Vietnam. There’s cilantro, culantro, lime, chilies. It’s about how you approach the ingredients, you want them to shine.” Instead of serving it with vermicelli, he opts for a tortilla.
Nguyen’s culinary instincts were shaped early. Born in southern Vietnam, he came to Canada in the 1980s at 10 years old as part of the wave of “boat people” fleeing after the war, arriving with his mother and four siblings.
“We were dirt poor,” Nguyen says. “I ended up quitting school at Grade 11 and worked full-time in restaurants, anything. I worked at a gas station, was a door-to-door salesman, dishwasher, office cleaner.”
At 19, he started to work at a string of Japanese restaurants before he landed at Matsuri in the early ‘90s, a grand restaurant at the bottom of a Holiday Inn on King Street West complete with tatami-style seating. The moneyed investors spared no expense, flying chefs in from Japan to lead the kitchens and training local cooks like Nguyen. It was also there that he met his future wife, who briefly worked as a server.
After Matsuri closed in 1994, Nguyen spent five years cooking at the Intercontinental Hotel in Caracas, Venezuela. There, he picked up Latin American cooking styles while still turning out Western-style hotel fare. But it wasn’t until he returned to Toronto and began cooking at The Supermarket music venue in Kensington Market that his fusion style really began to take shape.
“All the shopkeepers would see me run around because we’d do 150 to 200 covers a night,” he recalls, back when Kensington Market was still mostly occupied by produce markets, butchers and specialty grocers. “I was supporting them and buying chicken, cheese, spices from Perola’s. Sometimes I’d send someone out to get tortillas or avocados. There were Jamaican and Latin grocers. I love getting cactus from Perola’s.”
When The Supermarket shifted away from food, Nguyen decided to open his own place and named it after his daughter. That was 13 years ago. The tables were built by Nguyen himself to save money. His son, Inasa Fujio, is a video game developer in Japan — his paintings, including a still life and a Chinatown street scene, hang on the restaurant’s walls.
Nguyen and one other cook share the cubicle-sized kitchen at the restaurant. In summer, most of the herbs and produce come from Nguyen’s home garden. The more Nguyen talks about his food, the more the lines blur between a neighbourhood restaurant and a cosmopolitan hotspot.
“We grew all the herbs, tomatoes, cucumbers. We have concord grapes, so at the end of the season, we’ll crush and reduce it and make it into ice cream. People wait for it because we only do it once a year. We also make our own hot sauce with scorpion chilies in the backyard right now,” he says.
“It’s all a labour of love.”
