ByBlacks Restaurant Week is making a comeback, which means it’s time to amaze your palettes and fill your bellies while supporting Black-owned eateries!
Returning for the fifth year, ByBlacks Restaurant Week is an initiative by ByBlacks Magazine, a publication dedicated to supporting Canada’s Black communities. The event highlights and celebrates Black-owned restaurants, caterers, pop-ups and food trucks across Canada.
BY BLACKS RESTAURANT WEEK 2025
This year’s event runs from May 12 to 18, with businesses offering exclusive prix fixe menus, as well as $10 specials for customers across 50 Canadian eateries.
We all know Toronto is no stranger to Black excellence, so it’s no surprise that eight spots across the city will be participating in this year’s event, including:
- Sugarkane Caribbean & Cajun Cuisine
- Taste Seduction
- Sheryl’s Caribbean Restaurant – Queen St.
- Sheryl’s Caribbean Restaurant – Little Jamaica
- Scotthill Caribbean Cuisine
- Greelz
- Frontlines Catering
- Classic Juice Co
Find out which other restaurants in the GTA and across the country are participating here.
PRESERVING CULTURE AND SUPPORTING BLACK-OWNED
Roger Dundas, co-founder of ByBlacks and project manager of the organization’s annual restaurant week, told Now Toronto that the publication first tried to launch the culinary event in 2018, without much success. They then decided to give it another shot during the pandemic.
“All of our team members work from home, so COVID did not affect us at all in terms of continuing our operations,” Dundas explained. “We said, ‘This is something that we could use to help a particular sector of the Black entrepreneurial community.’”
The annual ByBlacks Restaurant Week has flourished since its early days, growing from ten spots across two provinces to 50 locations in six provinces. Now, the event has become so popular that eateries must be invited to attend.
Dundas explained that the initiative is not only important for encouraging people to support Black-owned businesses, but also for cultural preservation.
“We felt like restaurants and spaces that provide food and drink and everything, it’s somewhere where our culture is maintained,” he explained. “And where Black people always feel welcome and at home in these spaces.”
“We saw it as a way to help the Black-owned restaurants in the first instance. But also, there’s a cultural preservation aspect of it as well, because we don’t want to see them fail. We want them to be there.”
This event is an extension of the support provided by ByBlacks’ extensive business directory, which boasts nearly 5,000 listings for Black-owned businesses and services, about 20 per cent of which are food-related. Dundas explained that this massive collection started as a simple list of Black-owned companies, such as restaurants and barber shops.
“What we found at that time was that, 14 years ago, 75 per cent of the businesses on that [original] list didn’t have a website,” he explained, adding that about 65 per cent did not even have social media accounts dedicated to their companies.
The need for digital presence inspired the creation of the directory, which now includes thousands of listings for various businesses, including accountants, churches, beauty salons, mechanics, and more.
