Ferdi’s: The Swiss-English Chip Shop Winning the Junction

On its very first fish-and-chips Saturday, Ferdi’s had a lineup before it opened. The place hadn’t served a single plate yet — word had simply spread online, and people turned up early, curious. “I don’t know if it’s that alleyway charm, or people are just really itching for good fish and chips,” says Lauren Conover, who runs the tiny operation in Toronto with her fiancé, Theophil Dalton-Maag.

The name is a quiet tribute. Ferdi’s is short for Ferdinand — “Ferdi” — Theo’s grandfather, who lived in Zurich and whom Theo visited every summer as a kid. That Swiss thread, tangled with the English side of his family and a London childhood, runs through the whole menu in Toronto. When Theo stepped away from serving about a year and a half ago to strike out on his own, what he missed most from home was simple: good sausages. So that’s what he made.

He started selling them wholesale, and the first restaurant to bite was Gram’s Pizza, which began building them into pies. Tiny Market followed, folding the sausages into pasta specials and stocking them in the fridge. Theo — who had cooked for years under David Mattachione, a seven-minute walk from home — set up in Dave’s kitchen, then eventually cleared out the garage to build a little Ferdi’s kitchen of his own. He and Lauren met waiting tables at Mother Tongue; they’ve been together three years, engaged since last August.

The menu leans hard into that Swiss-English DNA. Saturdays bring fish and chips, a fish sandwich, and the chip butty — triple-cooked chips crammed into a house-made milk bun with nothing but ketchup and butter. “It’s sacrilege, but it’s also fantastic,” Lauren says of the English classic. The sausages come the traditional Swiss way, wrapped in parchment with a smear of mustard. Fridays swap out the labour-intensive chips for a schnitzel sandwich, Swiss-style, with a cucumber salad in Swiss dressing on that same bun.

Those chips are almost comically painstaking. Each batch takes three days — blanched, soaked, boiled, left overnight in cold water to leach the starch, then pre-fried before the final fry on the day. The sausages take three days too. It’s a punishing amount of work for one cook. Theo “cares a lot about doing things really well,” Lauren says. “Everyone’s been telling us they’re the best chips they’ve ever had, so clearly he’s doing something right.”

What’s grown up around Ferdi’s might be the best part. In their corner of the Wallace Emerson–Junction area — near Dotty’s, in Gram’s orbit — the couple describe something closer to a small town than a restaurant scene. The florist up the street shouts them out; the escape room next door lends tables and shelter on rainy days. “You’re not competition, you just bring each other up,” Lauren says. “More good food in the neighborhood is more people to the neighborhood.” For now, Ferdi’s runs Fridays and Saturdays, noon until it sells out — usually by early afternoon — with Sundays and a winterized room somewhere on the horizon.

Written by Daniel Neuhaus
Photography by Daniel Neuhaus

Updated on July 06, 2026

Make a suggestion