A Seat at the Table
Steve Kidron is intimately familiar with building a life from scratch. Growing up in a small Israeli town amid a working-class household of 12, dinner was an egalitarian effort — it meant plucking feathers off chickens one day and chopping vegetables the next.
“We didn’t have money to buy anything, so whatever we bought, we had to come up with a dish with that,” Kidron says. “Some of the best food that we know today, from our culture, it’s poor people food. And today, we beg for it everywhere, and we can’t find it. You have to make it yourself.”
He recalls cholent, a stewed culmination of marrow bones and beans, slow-cooked overnight and commonly eaten for Shabbat. It’s a visceral dish — gargantuan in effort and complexity, yet comfortingly delicious and straightforward.
For Kidron, cholent provides honest, universal sustenance. Cholent is a labour of love.
His latest labour of love, run by Kidron and co-founder Alexandra Pelts, is Kitchen24. The 34,000-square-foot culinary space in North York, designed as an incubator for emerging food entrepreneurs, features two large commercial kitchens — one of which is certified kosher — and a variety of multi-purpose rooms, from a sunlit studio kitchen for photoshoots and cooking classes to conference rooms and lounges. The spaces have versatility and mobility in mind; equipment under the hood system can be rearranged depending on the needs of members.
For Kidron and Pelts, the idea of mobility stretches beyond its physical definition. Several years ago, when a full-time caterer approached Kidron asking to rent what was then a smaller kitchen facility, two questions dawned on Pelts: “How come a catering company that does catering every day doesn’t have a kitchen? Who else doesn’t have a kitchen, and needs it?”
When a Kijiji ad they published garnered more than 300 responses in a year, they realized there was a gap in the industry — and aimed to fill it.
Kitchen24, which opened in March 2018, is for those who are “dreaming, but don’t have the foundation to do the jumping,” Kidron says, adding that it’s a space that enables food entrepreneurs to launch new businesses and culinary side projects with minimal risk.
Where both founders come from an ethos of living and creating from the ground up — Kidron and Pelts designed and rebuilt the space themselves — they recognize that today’s economy has made it difficult for fledgling businesses to sustain themselves. And perhaps even more so, after the closure of Toronto’s FoodStarter, a non-profit food startup incubator forced to close in late 2018 due to a lack of funding. With 160 tenants, many of them turned to Kitchen24 to save their business and production means.
What began as a response to an increasingly cost-prohibitive market has now flourished to become something that they feel is bigger than themselves — a community of aspirational entrepreneurs leading the frontier on food. The culinary space hosts ventures of all flavours — red pepper stews to cricket patties, holistic dog food to vegan cheese — with everything from family heirloom recipes to experimental passion projects. But, as Pelts says, “It’s not just renting the kitchen. It’s access to information. It’s the community.”
Throughout the year, Pelts and Kidron expand their community to the city at large. On several holidays, including Thanksgiving and Christmas, the incubator collaborates with large food suppliers, chefs, and volunteers for Kitchen24 Gives Back — an initiative to cook free meals onsite, as well as deliver them to those in need at shelters and community centres.
“During the holidays is where people feel most vulnerable,” Pelts says. “While everybody else is having their family dinner and celebration, not everybody can afford it.”
It’s a sentiment Kidron knows all too well, having first arrived in Canada with $100 in his pocket. “I was homeless, and I was hungry. No English, no work, no family, no nothing,” Kidron says. “So I had to find my way.”
Today, Kidron and Pelts are in the process of finding it together. It’s not a path well-trodden, Pelts admits — but she believes their entrepreneurial stakes will help navigate this journey with members at the top of mind. “We understand most of our members because we look at this as a startup. We understand the emotions and fear and mistakes. Because we took the risk not knowing,” Pelts says. “But until you try, you don’t know.”
Kidron and Pelts are quietly working on the second phase of the business — the unveiling of which will entail knocking down a wall. On top of physical expansion, they plan on eventually opening a soup kitchen and they’d like to provide mentorship opportunities and business workshops for their members.
“We would like to play an instrumental role to help people fulfil their dreams,” Pelts says. “A lot of time, effort, sweat, tears, laughter, was put into this. Every little piece, every nail, every tile. I just hope that our dream will make many other dreams come true.”
Kitchen24
Suite 200, 100 Marmora St., North York, Ont.
kitchen24.ca | 416.792.4505 | @kitchen24_
