North American fast food classics get a spicy new lease on life at Masala Burgers, a recently-opened takeout and delivery kitchen on St. Clair East.
Like many great culinary concepts, this one was born out of the twin inspirations of trauma and travel.
Toronto-born owner/innovator Mohamed Panchbhaya is the son of immigrants from the western Indian state of Gujarat. Growing up in the 1990s, Panchbhaya juggled the temptations of Toronto’s fast food scene with the terror he experienced when schoolyard bullies took issue with the traditional Indian dishes his mother packed for his school lunches. As a survival strategy, young Mohamed urged his mother to camouflage her home cooking within the literal white bread guise of sandwiches. Since he loved burgers, she agreed to make her own version -- with masala spices.
For Panchbhaya, the potential to mash-up his two culinary cultures began there and further blossomed during trips to India where he found himself galvanized by the wealth of creative street food options. As he confessed in a recent interview, “My mind was blown. I wanted to do my own style of hybrid street food here [in Toronto].”
Located on the site of a former Thai restaurant at 2889 St. Clair Avenue East, Masala Burgers is the concrete realization of Panchbhaya’s dream. Although the menu’s fast food mainstays -- hamburgers and cheeseburgers, cheese steak sandwiches, chicken wings, and fries -- are pretty straightforward, getting the spice mixture just right was more complex, entailing months of experimentation. After trial, error and multiple taste tests, Panchbhaya settled on his own trademark “tandoori masala” whose formula of a dozen spices includes the aromatic likes of cloves, cardamom, fenugreek and mace.
This signature masala works its way into pretty much the entire menu. Burgers are marinated in a moistened version of the mixture before being smash-cooked on a griddle. Before being heaped onto a bun, the cheese steak ingredients -- beef, cheese and onions -- are sautéed in fiery Masala BBQ sauce, which also douses the chicken wings.
There’s even a Masala Poutine in the works: in which chunks of tikka-style chicken, bathed in chili, ginger, garlic and yogurt are piled over fries and doused in a tzatziki sauce, one of several made-in-house condiments, including Masala Buffalo and Secret Sauce, that spice up the already pungent proceedings.
Masala Burgers is located at 2889 St. Clair Avenue East. Tel: (647) 326-9309. Hours are Wednesday to Sunday from 5 p.m. to 10 p.m. Delivery is available via Uber Eats.
