The first time I stepped into Instant du Palais, a two-year-old West African restaurant, the place was packed. Diners filmed every moment, live streaming the experience. Tables for two had been pushed together into a long communal setup for a party, while latecomers were left standing. Cool blue dots from phone cameras flickered across the room as guests captured shots of the space and the dishes emerging from the kitchen.
In February I was invited to an annual Black-owned restaurant crawl, sponsored by DoorDash, and organized by content creators Melissa Ayisi and Andrew Boateng (better known as @BigBellyMel and @The.6ix.Eats). Inside the small restaurant at 557 Mount Pleasant Rd., owned by Carelle Lahouri, dozens of local food bloggers and TikTokers passed around plates of pastels — a West African cousin of the empanada, filled with tuna and vegetables — dipping them into a fiery Scotch bonnet and tomato sauce.
Then came tender cubes of choukouya de chèvre (grilled goat) with sides of alloco (fried plantain) and attiéké, a quintessential Ivory Coast dish of fermented and grated cassava pulp that resembles couscous but has a sweet and underlying tang. It’s especially good when mixed the hot pepper sauce. We all wanted more but politely took tiny portions, conscious of the crowd. I whisper-shouted to Lahouri that I’d return on a quieter day for a proper meal and a conversation about her food and the stories behind it.
Lahouri was born and raised in Abidjan, Ivory Coast’s largest city, before moving to France in 2015 for business school. It was only after leaving home that she developed a deep appreciation for the flavours she no longer had daily access to. “I wasn’t passionate about food before I travelled to France… my dad just wanted me to study,” she says.
She started recreating the flavours she grew up with, asking friends from Ivory Coast for help with specific dishes and frequently calling her Auntie Adrienne back home for pointers. Like many food-loving millennials in 2016, she launched a blog — Instant du Palais — to document her budding cooking skills and gather tips from readers. Eventually, people began asking if she would cook for them or even open a restaurant, but without professional kitchen experience, that wasn’t something she could pursue in Paris.
She moved to Toronto in 2019 to work at the Ministry of Labour. Soon her online followers in Toronto asked if she would start a food business here. Then the pandemic hit. Like many, she turned to food, selling home-cooked Ivorian dishes on the side. The demand grew, and with Toronto’s lack of Ivory Coast-specific cuisine, she finally saw a real shot at opening a restaurant.
“Opening a restaurant wasn’t my childhood dream, but there’s a need in Toronto,” she says, referring to the lack of variety when it comes to West African food in a city that’s lauded for culinary diversity. “There was a Senegalese dish I wanted but couldn’t find it here. In Toronto, West African food is mostly Ghanian and Nigerian, but it’s such a cosmopolitan city I don’t know why there’s not more.”
Without hesitation, she named the restaurant — specializing in Ivorian and Senegalese dishes — after her blog. “It means a lot to me, it’s how it all started. In French, it means the moment the food touches your palate, that moment of pleasure and enjoyment,” she explains. Her aunt, or Mom Adi, as she’s better known as, moved to Toronto to become the chef.
Ivorian cuisine is hard to summarize in a sentence, but there’s emphasis on seafood meat, nuts, and hearty vegetables like okra, eggplants, cassava and plantains. Rich stews are a staple, and are best served with rice or cassava to soak up the flavours. Kankankan, a common West African spice mix, made from peanuts, ginger and chili peppers to bring a warm and savoury slow-burn to grilled meats. “Most of the time, people think African food is spicy,” Lahouri says. “But ‘flavourful’ is more accurate.”
There’s a lot of culinary overlap with neighbouring West African cuisines — peanut stews, grilled skewers and seasoned rice dishes. Thieb, a tomato-based rice dish from Senegal, is on the menu because Lahouri been eating it since she was a kid.
I arrived on a weekday, just as the restaurant opened in the late afternoon so that the sun would illuminate every inch of the dishes. I ordered the grilled seabass, a dish that requires a bit of patience for the whole fish to achieve that crispy and slightly blackened skin while the inside stays juicy and flaky. It’s simply topped with onions and tomatoes mixed with a light mayonnaise to give a crunchy and creamy contrast. There’s also the thieb chicken with the aforementioned rice and grilled dark meat, plus a mix of tender and sweet eggplant, carrots, cassava and cabbage with a side of hot pepper sauce and lime for a zip of acidic brightness. Lahouri made sure I tried garba, the dish she says everyone in Ivory Coast eats: fried tuna, attiéké and chopped raw peppers, onions and tomatoes with a side of mayonnaise.
Lahouri may have never planned to own a restaurant, but as word spreads about her little Ivorian bistro in midtown, her push to showcase more West African flavours in Toronto is paying off.
