A Toronto cafe secretly serves up next-level smash burgers and fried chicken every weekend
A Toronto cafe is now home to one of the city’s hidden gems for smash burgers and fried chicken, but you can only get it two days a week.
It all started with a New Year’s Eve dinner to ring in 2024. Nafe Mustafa and Omar Ibrahim of Those Guys Burgers and Chicken, The Annex’s latest addition to the fried chicken and smash burger scene, tell Dished Toronto.
Technically, though, their story starts before then. Both born and raised in Bangladesh, the two met after studying as international students in the city. Their friendship, they tell Dished, was instantaneous.
A year after meeting in 2022 came that fateful New Year’s Eve dinner. Though they didn’t serve what they now do, the dinner featured a menu of hearty winter staples, like brisket and mashed potatoes, which got the wheels spinning as they imagined what was possible when they joined forces.
“We realized we work well in the kitchen together, and everybody also ended up loving what we made,” the pair tell Dished Toronto, “so we started to think about what we could potentially make to share with the rest of the city.”
Wanting to hone in on scalable foods, they quickly settled on fried chicken and burgers. Less speedy, however, was the process of perfecting their recipe.
Mustafa and Ibrahim tell Dished Toronto that it took four months and 16 different fried chicken recipes to get it perfectly right. In early 2025, they launched on Cookin, a food delivery app for small businesses, and Those Guys were off to the races.
Orders began flooding in, and before too long, the pair decided it was time to look into a physical space to start vending their creations. It didn’t take long to settle on the perfect spot to do exactly that.
“Since both of us live in the Christie neighbourhood, we would always walk past the Crossroad Kafe, and Omar approached the owner of the cafe to ask whether the cafe was available during evenings,” Mustafa tells Dished.
“The owner was kind enough to agree to have us use the space during the weekend evenings for Those Guys, and the rest is history.”
Nowadays, you can find Those Guys whipping their one-of-a-kind fried chicken, which is marinated for 24 hours in a proprietary spice blend that pays homage to their Bangladeshi roots, smash burgers, and other specialties, like curry poutine on Friday and Saturday evenings from 6 p.m. to 11 p.m.
According to Mustafa and Ibrahim, the reception they’ve received from the Annex community in the two months since moving in at Crossroad Kafe has been nothing short of “amazing.”
- You might also like:
- A massive 60-foot sushi bar experience is taking over Toronto’s King Street West next week
- Bobby Flay to open 65 burger restaurants across Canada
- Beloved Toronto Mexican restaurant closing after nearly 15 years, a year after reopening
“The Annex community is really supportive of local businesses, so it’s been a fun and rewarding experience,” Mustafa and Ibrahim tell Dished Toronto.
While they’re content to keep churning out chicken and burgers from Crossroad Kafe for now, the duo tell Dished that, in the future, they hope to continue growing the business.
Finding their own space, operating on more days of the week and employing their own staff (Mustafa and Ibrahim currently run the entire show with their partners Maddie and Ashmita) are all things they hope to accomplish in the near future, and, after all the support so far, they intend to stick around in the Annex for now.
In the meantime, we’ll all just have to make do with knowing that Those Guys is only available two days a week.
Those Guys Burgers and Chicken
Address: Crossroad Kafe, 262 Christie St.
Still hungry? Discover Dished Toronto on TikTok