Jeff Cupchik was flying home to Toronto when a summer storm bucked the plane. Around him, passengers screamed, certain the flight was doomed. Cupchik didn’t make a sound. A single thought pinged in his head: “I just want to go to Gerry’s and get a chickpea roti.”
Since 1977, Gerry Wong’s family-run restaurant on St. Clair West has been serving Jamaican classics and rum cakes while cultivating generations of loyal customers. Donovan has worked there for decades, Andrea joined as their father stepped back, and even after Gerry’s death in 2020, the Wongs continue to run the neighbourhood institution.
Many customers are from the area, but plenty make the pilgrimage from afar, according to Donovan, 65. He was happy to serve up a full plate of customer tales, each one more crazed for his food than the last. One customer pulled up in a limo en route to the airport, desperate for Gerry’s before he left town. Then Blue Jays manager Cito Gaston bought two chicken rotis the day the team won the World Series in 1993, as legend goes. Another long-time customer, posted to various cities across the country, would dispatch friends to Gerry’s to pick up roti shells for him before visits. During the agonizing St. Clair West construction period in the mid-2000s, one customer was craving Gerry’s so badly he attached some cash to a pole and held it out over the construction crevasse to get his fix. The love of Gerry’s has even gone international; one time, Gerry and his wife were at the airport in Jamaica and someone recognized them from Toronto. “Hey, Gerry!” he yelled out. “Your chicken is better than any I had down here!”
Gerry opened the shop after immigrating from Jamaica with his family. Eglinton West already had several Caribbean restaurants, including one run by his brother, but St. Clair West — then mostly Italian, with some Portuguese families — had few. Donovan says the community welcomed them immediately. Once the family tracked down the perfect allspice variant for the perfect jerk chicken sauce (thank-you, Indian food stores), Gerry’s succulent offerings soon became local favourites, whether it was the chicken, curry goat, chicken soup or patties. Over the years, the small shop filled with faded photos, aging display cases and wood-panelled tables, taking on the feel of a neighbourhood living room.
Sweet tooths are sated, too: the family also runs a brisk cake-making business. They bake rum cake after rum cake, perfecting the OG recipe over decades, and vanilla cakes using the very same recipe that Gerry used to bake for Donovan and his siblings when they were little. Legit rum cake makers start soaking the fruits and the rum right after Christmas for the next year’s holiday rum cake; the Wongs churn out rum cake year-round, so they always have a big vat of fruit and rum on the go in the back for their many orders. Come Christmas, it’s a “madhouse,” Donovan says, as they pump out hundreds of cakes for the community. They eventually switched their order system to phone numbers after the Jamaican practice of using multiple names caused chaos during pick-up.
Prefer your rum in liquid form? For a few extra cents, they’ll spike your sorrel for you. They make enormous quantities of the traditional drink during the holiday season, and smaller batches the rest of the year. The Wongs stay hydrated during their shifts with their own in-house watermelon-pineapple juice with a hint of ginger; if you ask nicely, they’ll sell you a cup.
Kindness is an important currency at Gerry’s. Cupchik says that he can always count on Donovan smiling, no matter what’s going on outside or in the shop. He visited that day because he’d been having a bad day and knew getting his chickpea roti — yes, the one he was consumed by on his potential deathbed — and seeing Donovan would make him smile. (He had, in fact, just returned from a month out of town; Gerry’s Fast Foods was his first stop back home.) Donovan lets regulars low on funds pay later if they need to. During our visit, a man came in selling cupcakes in exchange for charity donations. “I don’t need the cupcake, but I’ll give you five bucks,” Donovan said.
The kindness has been repaid by regulars who come back month after month, year after year, decade after decade, generation after generation, even as the neighbourhood changes around them. Donovan has noticed more young families flocking to the area, and the occasional big business like McDonald’s moving in. But Gerry’s Fast Foods has been around so long now that the children who once ate Gerry’s cakes as kids now return to the shop to get cakes for their own children. “I had this one lady say ‘I have to come and get Gerry’s cake because my daughter said if we didn’t get a Jerry’s cake she doesn’t wanna have a party,’” Donovan says.
Donovan was especially touched by how people showed up for his family during the pandemic. “It’s a good feeling. You get to establish a clientele and you get to know you get to know a lot of people, which was quite evident during COVID when I had so many customers that would call me up to see how I was doing,” Donovan says. “I had customers offering me loans, I had customers that were ordering dinner for the family, and they would say ‘we wanna see you on the other side of this,’ so it was good to know that we were really that well-liked in the community that they would go to these lengths to see us survive.”
Another half-decade on, the business is still going strong, despite some challenges. As a small business, his food orders are not big enough for delivery so he must criss-cross the city to find the best deals on meat and produce and pick them up himself, which he does every morning after dropping his wife off at work. His biggest problem? “The escalating price of oxtail!” he says. “A lot of places don’t even carry it anymore; at $10 a pound, it can cost more than prime rib!”
There’s also the usual staffing ups and downs; Donovan hopes to maintain a reliable team that may want to take Gerry’s Fast Foods over someday. He’ll probably be involved to the end, though. “I don’t think I could ever fully retire. Like I would go really nuts,” he says. “Sometimes if I’m home on a Sunday, I say ‘I gotta go check on something at the store,’ and my wife will say ‘you can’t give that place a break!’”
Donovan says he loves the continuity — the consistency. “I have a friend whose number has changed so many times and he says, ‘you’re the only person I know I can always find you at Gerry’s; your phone number is the same!’ It’s the feeling of familiarity, of comfort.”
Perusing the cakes, one is transported back to childhood at the sight of bright-orange icing curlicues crisscrossing a cake. “Happy Birthday Warren,” reads one, graced with a delicate blue rose and intricate icing greenery. Another pink-and-yellow confection is emblazoned with the Jamaican saying “more life” — a wish for long life, success and happiness. “The lady didn’t ask for anything on there so I put it on,” Donovan says. “More life.”
