Former food pop-up opening what could become one of Toronto's coolest restaurants
What began as a pop-up at a series of Toronto restaurants will soon serve its celebrated brand of Filipino hospitality and cuisine at its first-ever brick-and-mortar location.
If the name Kusi rattles around your brain like a phantom whisper, a memory of a bygone era, there's good reason for that: it's been almost a year since founder Keanu Francisco and his partner-in-business-and-life, Rosa, last hosted a pop-up, but from 2021 to 2025, they were, more or less, the talk of the town.
Don't worry, there's an even better reason for their hiatus.
Founded as a pandemic project to highlight the diversity of Filipino cuisine, Kusi gets its name from the Tagalog word kusinera, meaning female chef. For Keanu, the word came to represent a type of hospitality that's quintessentially Filipino; the precise type of hospitality he's trying to embody with Kusi.
Working on limited timelines in other people's kitchens (Big Trouble Pizza, Cafe BluBlu and Sara, to be exact) limits the ability to execute one's vision precisely, though. It really was only a matter of time before Kusi flew the pop-up coop and settled into a nest of its own.
In the fall of 2026 — exact timeline pending — that's exactly what's happening.
"Ever since I first started in the industry, many years ago, I'd always known that I'd wanted my own restaurant — I just didn't know in what capacity," Keanu tells blogTO.
"I used to really want to do French cooking, Italian, Japanese, blah, blah. And then the pandemic hit, and I started Kusi because I wanted to reconnect with my roots."
Six years later, Keanu isn't done with this culinary exploration of his heritage. If anything, he's only ramping it up, and thanks to a partnership with the team developing Squig Space, a new multidisciplinary art space in Chinatown, he and Rosa can now do it in a permanent capacity.
"When we wanted to figure out opening up a restaurant, it kind of came into place, kind of naturally, especially the partnership with Sarah, the owner of Squig Space," Keanu says.
As it happens, Rosa and Sarah went to high school together, and Sarah had initially contacted Rosa for help with the development of the concept and community. When she learned that Rosa and Keanu were looking to open a brick-and-mortar, all the pieces fell into place.
The restaurant, which Keanu hopes will eventually double as an incubator for other burgeoning food pop-ups and chefs in the city, will start off serving a concise tasting menu inspired by the diversity of Filipino cuisine.
Expect more than tried-and-true lumpia and adobo, and also expect, quite possibly, to walk away with leftovers.
"The tasting menu regime, so to speak, in the city right now, is like, you pay what? $150 on average, and then you leave, probably still a little hungry, and that kind of leaves a sour note in my stomach," Keanu explains.
"With Filipino culture, the tasting menus that I would have growing up would be, I would go to a tito or tita's house, who I has no blood relation to me, but they're my aunt and uncle somehow, and the tasting menu would be whatever is there for the barbecue, like, there's pancit, there's adobo, there's so many different things and like, that's a journey in itself, and discovering that for the first time. And then I would also always leave super full."
At Kusi, diners can expect a similar experience.
Of equal importance to Keanu and Rosa is that their staff have a similarly warm experience working at the restaurant.
Both seasoned hospitality veterans in their own right (they both currently work at Sunny's Chinese), Keanu and Rosa have both witnessed first-hand the old guard of restaurant culture, marked, not necessarily all the time, but regularly enough, with aggression, burnout, and harsh criticism.
"I've been in the industry since I was 16, so it's been about 12 years, and over time, you always see things that you don't necessarily resonate with. [...] things like that, I personally don't think that they have a future in our industry anymore. " Keanu explains.
Referring back to Keanu's wish of using the space to incubate burgeoning culinary talents, Rosa adds that it'll also double as a place to build the type of workplace they actually want to work in.
"When it comes to the standard of what a proper, healthy workplace I want to work at, now we can actually build what we want: a living wage, and a focus on everyone's well-being. "
With Squig Space still under development, there's no firm word on when Kusi will be opening its doors, but Keanu and Rosa say that only gives them more time to hone in on making the restaurant the best possible place it can be.
Kusi and Squig Space will be located at 77 Grange Ave.
William Murara Shields, courtesy of Kusi
