Barbode Soudi: the fine dining soldier who chose chicken
On a Friday night last winter, Barbode Soudi looked up from his charcoal grill and counted 50 people in the room, with a line pushing out the door of his brand-new chicken counter. His restaurant, Mozy’s, had been doing a calm 100 or so transactions a day since opening. Then a video shot with a former colleague went online, and Toronto arrived all at once. He shut down early that night because prep would never survive the weekend. The next day he closed from 2:30 to 5:30 just to keep up, and reopened to a lineup around the corner. For two weeks straight, Mozy’s sold out every single night. “I was absolutely perplexed by what was happening,” he says. It was, by his own account, brutal. It was also everything he had spent five years begging the universe for.
A blazer, a summary, an empty farmhouse
To understand why a lineup for takeout chicken could move a man this deeply, you have to know who is holding the tongs. Soudi is Alo’s former chef de cuisine, a cook whose resume reads like a pilgrimage through the continent’s most demanding kitchens. None of it was inevitable. Born in Montreal in 1986 and raised in North York, he was studying political science in Ottawa with law school in mind when a friend at Le Cordon Bleu described what culinary students actually do all day. That, plus too many hours watching the Japanese Iron Chef, cracked something open. A childhood connection to the late restaurateur Peter Oliver got him an hour at Canoe with Anthony Walsh, and he walked out of that dining room certain. He was 21 and knew nothing. At his first kitchen job, at Mistura, someone asked him to grab a laddle and he had no idea what they meant.
What he lacked in knowledge he replaced with nerve. To land an internship with Michael Stadtländer, he put on a blazer, drove two hours to Eigensinn Farm, found nobody home, left his resume on the table and drove back to Toronto. It worked; he lived on the farm for six months and took four days off. For the French Laundry, he assembled a package of reference letters and made himself a vow: one envelope to Per Se and one to Yountville every two weeks, for two years if that was what it took. One round was enough, and the acceptance reached him on a vacation in Cuba. For San Francisco, he simply flew out and knocked on the doors of every restaurant that had ignored his emails, knives in hand, which is how he ended up spending the most intense year of his career at Quince. Back in Toronto, Actinolite taught him the opposite lesson: no lemons because they don’t grow in Ontario, winters cooked from a pantry of ferments and cures. Then came Alo, four years, the World’s 50 Best extended list twice back to back, and a farewell pop-up built inside a Wellington Street warehouse in two weeks. Through all of it he carried a Thomas Keller line like a talisman: “Treat it like it’s yours and one day it will be.”
Two parents, two restaurants
Nothing of his own, though, came easily. After leaving Alo, Soudi spent five years chasing a restaurant called Sima, named after his mother, a fire-and-skewer concept worthy of the Michelin star he had always imagined for himself. He cooked elevated five-course dinners in strangers’ homes to stay visible, hunting for the partner or lease that would unlock it. Deals collapsed. Negotiations fell apart at the last moment. “Five years, I was completely depressed,” he admitted. He had all the ambition in the world, and still, restaurants opened around him daily while his own life stalled. His father’s failing health had already pulled him home from California years earlier; his father’s death ended the waiting entirely. “It was showtime for me. It’s time to create my own path now.” His father’s name was Mozy. When the restaurant finally came, there was never any question what it would be called.
It arrived like a joke with perfect timing. Soudi had spent years slipping through the back door of Burger Drops to hang out with his owner, Greg, joking that if the struggling shawarma spot next door ever gave up, he would take it. One Christmas morning, a text: “Merry Christmas, bro. He wants out.” Soudi negotiated the takeover by phone from Cuba, the same island where the French Laundry’s answer had once found him. The concept that emerged was not Sima. “I wanted a Michelin star restaurant. That’s been my pedigree,” he says. “And what I’ve opened is the furthest thing from it, but I love it.” The lesson of those five years was that the shape of the restaurant mattered less than whose name was on the lease. “I’m a control freak. Once I learned that about myself, I realized that really just ownership was everything for me.”
The audacity of unseasoned chicken
The fine dining brain shows up at Mozy’s precisely in what it refuses to do. Soudi arrived with a 30-ingredient spice blend, glazes and spray bottles of flavor ready to go, and threw them all out. “Every time I did it, it just never tasted as good as just the brined chicken over fire.” So the birds get an overnight umami-heavy brine, then four days drying on racks so the skin roasts over a $20,000 Portuguese grill. Roughly 950 chickens a week, temped constantly, moved around the charcoal, out the door in under 15 minutes. It looks nothing like the lacquered, spice-crusted grilled chicken people expect, and that is the entire point. “My competition in my mind was the grocery store,” he says. He is not chasing the tagline of top bird in the city; he wants to replace the dry rotisserie chicken on the weeknight table, the one you can shred over tomorrow’s salad. There is no delivery either, and no apps, only a line and a counter. “There’s a vibe in this room that I’m very particular about. I know once I unleash delivery, it’s going to change that to a certain extent.”
The room he is protecting has grown from six staff to 18 in seven months, including the two cooks who were there on day one. He thinks about them in terms few chefs say out loud: “My team depends on me to pay their rent, to buy their groceries. I’m responsible for lives.” The restaurant, he insists, has already outgrown him. “We are not our business. Mozy’s is its own living, breathing thing. I just lead the ship.”
Written by Daniel Neuhaus
Photography by Scott Usheroff
