Sash Sampson, a former street orphan in India, is chef and owner of Toronto's Sash
July 18, 2022
Starting this week, Sash Simpson’s Sash Restaurant and Wine Bar, located in the Summerhill neighborhood of Toronto, Canada, is serving lunch as well as dinner. It reopened earlier this year, following the nearly two years long COVID-19 lockdown, but served only dinner.
Sash, which opened in May 2019, was forced to shut less than a year later due to the lockdown. “I had a lot of sleepless nights because I said, "‘What the hell am I doing?” Simpson, 52-years-old, told Dolcemag, a lifestyle magazine in Toronto.
Roughly one out of five restaurants in the Toronto area were permanently shut during the lockdown. Eight out of the remaining ten have taken on debt and require at least 18 months to recover. “COVID-19 has been devastating for an industry that depends deeply on the traffic and business from social gatherings, special occasions and events,” Roy Little, Chief Executive of the lobbying group Restaurants Canada said in a statement earlier this year.
To survive the lockdown, Simpson collected government subsidies, sought takeout clients and catered to at home parties as well as borrowed money. In the past, he has overcome major challenges. Orphaned at age five, he lived on the streets of Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu state, India. He stole food and searched for it in a garbage dump and slept on the sidewalk.
On its website, Simpson describes Sash as serving “globally inspired, locally-sourced ingredients.” This reflects his being adopted by a Canadian family with four biological and 27 other adopted children, many of them disabled: sons from India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Spain and an African American and daughters from China, Korea and Somalia.
“My menus are all about flavours,” Simpson told Dolcemag. There are a lot of Indian influences, “lots of spices…Any dish that you put on your palate — it’s going to hit you hard.” His signature dish is the Chilean Sea Bass with Vegetable Pakoras served in a Madras curry with coconut milk, okra and coriander for Canadian $60. He also serves a vegetable biryani rice with curry leaves for C$16. Sash’s other dinner dishes include garlic butter prawns in a shellfish bisque with black trumpet mushrooms and citrus sauce for C$58; chilled seafood platter for C $80 and Caviar at the market price.
Before opening Sash, Simpson worked for nearly 25 years at North 44 in Toronto, one of the best restaurants in Canada. Named after Toronto’s latitude. North 44, which served French/American food, rejected him twice. Yet he persisted and the chef tried him out for three months without pay.
Simpson worked long hours, filling any gaps in the staff, including taking out the garbage. He quickly rose from peeling potatoes and onions to junior sous chef to executive chef. He also ran North 44 caterers and helped the owner Mark McEwan launch ByMark. a popular restaurant in Toronto’s financial district. Simpson also helped McEwan produce three seasons of episodes for the Food Network TV channel. North 44 closed in 2018 after 28 years of operations following the expiry of its rental lease.
Simpson and his siblings grew up taking turns cooking for the family each week. At age 12, he started his first job delivering newspapers. Two years later, he took up a dishwashing job at a restaurant in Toronto where his older sister Melanie worked as a waitress. Bored at school, he dropped out in the 12th grade and worked full-time at casual restaurants cleaning tables, delivering food and then finding his way into the kitchen to cook.
Sashi (Sash) Simpson, whose biological father was a deaf and mute laborer, recalls having an older brother and sister. He does not remember how he ended up as an orphan on the streets. He was found on the streets by volunteers from the Families for Children and taken to their orphanage near Coimbatore. At eight years old, he was adopted by Sandra and Lloyd Simpson, Canadian philanthropists who founded the orphanage. “Sashi persists in whatever he does,” Sandra told Streets of Toronto. “Every time I visited our Indian project, Sashi would be front row and centre asking, ‘Canada, mummy, please.’”
His new home, split between Montreal and Toronto, was a bright contrast to the lonely, precarious life of a street orphan in India. His culinary work draws inspiration from both worlds. Married to Robin Pecker, an event planner, Simpson has two sons. As he gets older, he told Dolcemag, “I’m getting more and more used to doing Indian dishes now because I’m getting more comfortable with myself and my Indian heritage.”
Sash has an average 4.7-star rating from roughly 160 diners on Open Table, the online restaurant booking site. Most recent diners have given it good ratings. “Incredible service and fabulous food! 10/10,” KarenP from Toronto stated along with a five-star rating. Another diner GregM wrote, “Great place to go if you like nice things and don’t mind paying for them.”
Indeed, as a report in The New York Times noted, “Sash Simpson made his name as a chef for Canada’s rich, preparing them chardonnay-poached lobster and $27 foie gras-smothered burgers” and vodka served with gold-encrusted ice.
“I can never forget I was a street kid,” Simpson told Dolemag. “One day, when I have time on my hands to wander the streets,” he told Streets of Toronto, ”I’ll try to find my parents” in India.
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