Why a popular former Toronto pizza restaurant is now betting it all on burgers

Toronto's Big Trouble Pizza broke hearts across the city when, in January 2026, its owners announced they'd be closing the Geary Avenue pie shop for good. Now, just months later, co-founder Eddie Chan is back in business, but this time, he's going all-in on burgers.

Mista Boiga, Chan's new burger shop, which took over Big Trouble's old digs on Friday, April 24, could be heralded as the city's newest burger joint, but, in reality, the story starts long before Boiga was even a twinkle in Chan's eye.

Chan and Big Trouble co-founder Mikey Pamaputera first started experimenting with smash burgers when the duo began operating a Big Trouble location out of the Annex Hotel in 2019.

"Over the course of our short stay there, management asked us if we could add another food item to the menu so that it would be more than just pizza. And so we decided to add a single burger to the menu, which is kind of random, but maybe not," Chan tells blogTO.

Random or not, the smashburgers were a smash hit, but not even the city's mounting appetite for Big Trouble Burgers could have prevented the near-catastrophic fallout that would befall the restaurant when, just months later, the Covid-19 pandemic reduced the number of guests at the hotel to nearly zero.

Big Trouble packed up their Annex Hotel operation and retreated to their original Chinatown space, but with a space measuring roughly 300 sq. ft. and a kitchen unequipped for burgers, Big Trouble Burgers became a seasonal specialty exclusive to outdoor pop-ups in the warmer months.

Eddie Chan photographed with Big Trouble co-founder Mikey Pamaputera in 2023.

Still, the losses the business incurred during the pandemic were ground-shaking, leaving the team in deep debt, and with the downtown landscape forever changed by office workers staying home, they left the Spadina location behind in favour of Geary Avenue.

Here's where this burger — or should I say boiga — really gets juicy. The kitchen at the Geary space was fine for pizzas, but needed a major, and extremely costly, buildout if Chan and Pamaputera wanted to bring the burgers back.

"Our pizza programme is really straightforward," Chan explains. "It's an electric oven. You plug it in and start making pizza. It's pretty straightforward. The burger, on the other hand, requires a whole kitchen, meaning it needs an exhaust, it needs a hood, it needs a return air."

To put that all in would cost them no less than $95,000. 

"So Mikey and I are talking, he's looking at me. He's like, 'So what do you think?' I was like, 'So what we're about to do here, if I'm getting this straight, Mikey, is that we only have ever had one burger flavour, and we're about to wager, basically $100,000 on a single burger.' And he's like, 'Yeah, I know it's kind of [...] crazy.' And I said, 'It's not kind of [...] crazy. It's absolutely insane, but let's do it,'" Chan tells blogTO.

"And so we took on more debt and scraped and did everything we could, and I worked at other places. I worked, like, at fast food joints. I did whatever I could just to make this happen."

Slowly but surely, the burger program at Big Trouble began to grow again, before there was another snag: Pamaputera grew burnt out and, at Chan's encouragement, he pulled away from the business to "do some soul-searching." The restaurant, once again, closed, but this time around, Chan saw it as an opportunity to really bet it all on the burgers.

After a months-long closure, he's finally back with Mista Boiga: the triumphant product of the rollercoaster that has been the past few years. He's steeled himself against thinking too idealistically about how it'll all pan out, but he tells blogTO that he's confident his burgers will whet the city's appetite.

If he wasn't, he says, he wouldn't be selling them at all.

While smashburgers are a dime a dozen in the city, Chan's stand out in that they are meticulously crafted using a level of care and precision one might expect from a Michelin kitchen. 

"At the end of the day, it's hard to get a real gauge on people's true opinions, especially when they're your friends and family, because they're your biggest supporters, your biggest cheerleaders," Chan explains.

"I think for us, there is a question that helps us sort of sift through all of that stuff, and that is like, 'Would you pay money for this?' And I think when I've asked myself that question, and I've answered unequivocally yes, I think it's good enough to release into the wild, so to speak."

It's that unequivocal yes that provides the requisite seal of approval before any new burger joins the official lineup, which is why, upon Mista Boiga's official opening on April 24, the menu is made up of just three core items with limited-time rotating specials.

On your first visit, Chan suggests the Classic OG, which, dressed modestly in American cheese, lettuce, onion, pickles, ketchup and burger sauce, might seem plain, but, with Chan's keen attention to "eatability," will undoubtedly surprise you.

If you want something more out of the box, the Cwispy Wanch has been an unexpected hit, featuring pickled red onions, jalapenos, crispy onions and, yes, ranch.

At the end of the day, Chan admits that he, himself, is a sucker for burgers, and he only hopes that those he's griddling up on Geary Avenue appeal to his fellow beef-loving brethren.

[Burgers are] a really nostalgic, strongly emotional thing for me: I just absolutely love burgers. I eat burgers everywhere. I eat all kinds of burgers. Everywhere I go, I'm always thinking about where to get a burger, and so it was kind of a no-brainer for me."

Mista Boiga is located at 191 Geary Ave.