A collaboration all about the love for food, culture and resilience

By Liana Yadav

Deep in the Ossington strip, Please & Thank You (P&TY) is a new fusion restaurant and cocktail bar, which serves up delicious combinations of South and East Asian cuisine.

Owner of P&TY and ODDSEOUL Naveen Chakravarti is known for filling his restaurants with shareable plates, flavourful cocktails and an interior that feels like you stepped into a party in someone’s living room.

Co-owner of cocktail brand Broken Richshaw, Blitzkrieg, was looking for a legacy business to collaborate with. It made sense then, for him to join forces with P&TY to sell his branded rum cocktails and related apparel, all with artwork that draws inspiration from South Asian street culture.

With his drinks on the menu at both of Chakravarti’s bars, the two owners are working together in their quest to serve people delicious fusion bites.

Having owned ODSSEOUL for five years, Chakravarti knows how to make a gritty interior look warm and welcoming. Both ODDSEOUL and P&TY are cozy joints — small but with enough room for good conversation and even greater food.

With intimate seating and a crafty menu, the restaurant’s motto is to “mind your manners.” According to P&TY’s social media, they wanted to keep it simple and unpretentious. After its predecessor Neon Tiger closed down, it took them six months to build this new location, which opened earlier this year in Ossington.

The P&TY menu has unique combinations of flavours that come from different worlds. Their corn cheese pakora has a Korean cheese filling with tonkatsu and is coated with kimchi mayo and green chutney. They also boast a tikka fried chicken, a customer-favourite and a pulled lamb rann-wich that consists of lamb cooked with house spice on a bánh mì bun.

Blitzkrieg wanted to knock down the barriers for cultural representation, not just for South Asians but for all communities to feel like they can create spaces to represent themselves.

But beyond similar cultural backgrounds, there was a deeper reasoning behind this collaboration. Blitzkrieg and Chakravarti are both cancer survivors.

Chakravarti was diagnosed with stage two cancer when he was in the process of building P&TY, he said on their social media.

“There’s not enough awareness about and support for young individuals who have been diagnosed with cancer in the South Asian community,” said Blitzkrieg. “I kind of connected with [Chakravarti] in that situation too. We’re both South Asians creating fusions in the city and it just made it that much more passionate for me.”

Broken Rickshaw had its genesis as a brand when Blitzkrieg started experimenting with various concoctions of liquor during COVID lockdown.

“I realized there was a really big void,” said Blitzkrieg. “Liquor is dominated by brands and flavours that don’t specifically represent us as South Asians.”

It was also about taking control of his narrative. Blitzkrieg has been in the South Asian hip-hop industry for more than two decades and is now recognised as one of the pioneers of the scene within Canada. His backing vocals have been in songs from popular Bollywood movies such as Gully Boy and Love Aaj Kal.  

“I recognized the opportunity from a business point of view. Our Instagrams are getting so much traction. [So I thought] why are we promoting other people’s stuff and not our own?” said Blitzkrieg. “Everybody wants to look cool in their videos, holding liquor or wearing clothes that are not owned by our own diaspora.”

Broken Rickshaw apparel is as representative of the brand as their spiced rum cocktail is. That is why Blitzkrieg designed all the merch himself: t-shirts and hoodies sporting drawings of rickshaws ridden by Bollywood-esque heroes and heroines on the streets of Indian cities. 

Choosing restaurants such as ODDSEOUL and P&TY wasn’t by chance for Broken Rickshaw. “It’s important for us to resonate with places that we truly believe in, like how we truly believe in our brand. I’ve been going to [ODDSEOUL] for close to a decade. They are really big on fusing Asian culture with hip-hop,” explained Blitzkrieg.

Blitzkrieg intentionally named the brand Broken Rickshaw — choosing something that is unmistakably a Desi cultural symbol but is understood by and is a part of other communities. It was inspired by the classic “broken down golf cart,” a popular old-school cocktail often enjoyed on golf courses. He wanted to create a Desi version that carried the same nostalgic charm but reflected his own cultural background.

“Everybody knows what a rickshaw is,” he said. “It’s probably one of the oldest forms of transportation in the world.”

Both owners have had transformative journeys while setting up their businesses, which is a testament to the passion fuelling their ambition. Such stories of resilience remind us of what makes Toronto so special — its multifaceted communities committed to serving up experiences that are authentic to them on each neighbourhood street.