Marvin Palomo: The Honest Cooking That Built Liliana
The night before Liliana opened, Marvin Palomo was prepping in the back of the kitchen to music, the rear door propped open to the laneway. He turned around and standing in the doorway was Jay Carter — the chef who had built Dandelion in this exact room, a man Marvin had never met — had heard what the young crew was up to and walked over. “Chief,” Marvin blurted, “what are you doing here?” Carter said he’d come to give his support, left his number, and some words of wisdom. It was the first time anyone from Dandelion had stood in the space since it closed. “He is a culinary icon in Toronto.” Marvin says. “For him to give us his blessing — that was big, a stamp of approval. Okay. Maybe we can do this.”
From His Grandmother’s Kitchen to a Chef Named Liliana
He’d been admiring chefs from a distance his entire life. Born in the Philippines and raised in Scarborough and Markham, Marvin was a Food Network millennial — Iron Chef and Good Eats and Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives playing at his grandmother’s house while she cooked for the whole family. Hers was the first kitchen that pulled him in. The pull didn’t stop at her kitchen. His parents managed a Subway through the 90s after immigrating to Canada, and with nowhere else for a kid to go, he spent his summers hanging around the counter. By the time he reached high school — Brother André in Markham, which ran a real student restaurant called Chez André — that early curiosity had hardened into a direction, and he followed it straight into George Brown’s culinary program. At nineteen, still “not ready for the real world yet,” he left for a postgraduate program in Italy directed by Chef Dario Tomaselli: his first time in the Western world, a genuine culture shock, and the place where he met the chef who would drill him in traditional Northern Italian cooking. Her name was Liliana. He never lets go of it. “There is no plan B,” he says of those years. “It’s only plan A. If my current situation doesn’t work, we’re going to figure out a way to make it work.”
The Fine-Dining Job He Hated, and the Kitchen That Rewired Him
Back in Toronto, chef John Higgins, the Dean of George Brown helped land him a spot at one of Toronto’s premier dining establishments. He hated it. What clicked instead was DaiLo, where he was one of the first employees and stayed three years, learning from Chef Nick Liu and Dennis Tay on how to fold cultures into each other until something new fell out. “Working at DaiLo was the turning point in my career,” he says — the place that showed him European technique and Asian ingredients weren’t enemies. From there came Hong Kong, cooking under Vicky Cheng at VEA, then home again at 7 Enoteca in Oakville, sister restaurant of Hexagon that was meant to last two weeks and that turned into four years. Alongside executive chef Rafa Covarrubias, two young Chefs in Oakville both landed among the country’s best in a Global San Pellegrino Young-Chef Competition and KML 30 under 30 awards. By the end of 2024 he was executive chef and partner at Vela.
A Fire, a Ticket Abroad, and a Change of Heart
After New Year’s going into 2025 a tragic fire forced Vela to close its doors, and the worst of it wasn’t the loss of the room. “It was super heartbreaking,” he says — he spent the aftermath trying to find new homes for all his staff. For a while he wasn’t sure he wanted to be in Toronto at all. He and his wife took calls about working abroad again and seriously weighed leaving the city again. “We didn’t have kids, we didn’t have a mortgage,” he says. “Maybe now might be the time.” Then his business partner, Cole Diamond floated a different idea, turning this crisis into an opportunity: “Why don’t we open our own restaurant?” That turned out to be a perfect reason to stay.
“This Food Is Honest to Me”
He could have opened anything. Taking over a landmark space, a tasting-menu restaurant would have been the obvious flex — and he turned it down flat. “It wouldn’t serve any purpose to anyone except for my own ego,” he says. Liliana is named after his Italian mentor and the menu reads like a diary of everywhere he’s worked: Italian simplicity built on quality ingredients, depth, and traditional dishes he loves bent into something of his own. Nostalgia, he says, is the root of it all. It is not a traditional Italian restaurant by any means. “It’s honest to who I am…We opened this restaurant with the intention of not trying to chase any lists or awards,” he says. “Our criteria was just to be a neighborhood restaurant.” Somewhere in the climb, the priorities flipped. “As a young cook you think about how to make the prettiest dish. Now it’s more about the people, how we make guests feel first.” He credits Amanda Bradley, Vela’s Co-founder, for planting that in him, and his own mantra for the rest: “Work hard, Stay humble.”
A Place for the Industry to Exhale, on a Street Everyone Wrote Off
The room is relaxed and unpretentious, the flavors and execution quietly dialed — the kind of place, Marvin says, that the industry itself can come to and exhale. That was the register he wanted from the start. What he didn’t do was pick an easy address. When he scouted the space, he read the block, not just the lease. “It seemed like every store within the block radius was closed or up for lease,” he says of a post pandemic, Queen West most people had abandoned. It was a real risk. Nine months later Liliana has served roughly 15,000 people for a 30 seat restaurant which is two months booked out, and has been called the hardest reservation in the city — which quietly wrecks his own plan. “We’re no longer a neighborhood restaurant anymore,” he admitted. “You can’t just walk in here and eat.” What hasn’t changed is how he runs a young kitchen. “I wouldn’t be where I’m at if it wasn’t for the people I worked for,” he says. “For me, leadership isn’t about what my team can do for me—it’s about empowering them to reach their full potential and achieve the goals they’ve set for themselves.”
Written by Daniel Neuhaus
Photography by Daniel Neuhaus
