Mozy’s Charcoal : When an Alo Chef Opens a Chicken Shop

The name Mozy’s comes from the person Barbode Soudi misses most. His father, Mozaffar — “a very Iranian name,” Soudi says — was known to everyone around him as Mozy. He passed away about five years ago. When Soudi finally opened his own restaurant in January 2026, after years of false starts and near-misses, there was never another name in the running. “I really wanted to channel his energy through this project.”

It helps that Mozy’s is also exactly the kind of food his father loved — chicken cooked straight over charcoal, no tricks, no hiding. Just fire.

From the French Laundry to a Thousand Square Feet

Soudi’s résumé reads like a greatest-hits list of North American fine dining: the French Laundry, Quince in San Francisco, then back in Toronto through Nota Bene, the Black Hoof, Actinolite, and finally Alo, where he served as chef de cuisine. For years after leaving Alo, he pursued a concept called SEMA — named after his mother, Sima — that would have been his shot at a Michelin star. He negotiated leases for months. It all fell through.

“I learned a lot about myself,” he says. “I learned that it would be better, more suitable for a personality like myself, to own something small and own it myself.”

The pivot came on Christmas Day 2024, when his friend Greg Bourolias — who runs Burger Drops next door — texted to say the neighbouring space on Atlantic Avenue was available. Within weeks, Soudi had the keys. Within seven months of construction, he had a charcoal grill imported from Portugal, a thousand-square-foot kitchen, and a menu built around a single conviction: fire.

The Chicken Is the Canvas

The chicken at Mozy’s is brined, air-dried for a couple of days, and grilled whole over charcoal. That’s it. No marinades. No spice rubs. No glaze. Finished with a touch of confit garlic oil, and nothing more.

“What we’re trying to accomplish is showcasing the charcoal flavour first and foremost. We don’t want to hide it. We want to put it front and centre.”

The restraint is deliberate — and it’s the fine dining brain at work. By keeping the protein clean, everything else on the plate gets room to be loud: a green sauce inspired by Peruvian aji verde, a charred pepper sauce built on burnt onions and Mexican chilies, a coriander-lime sauce, and a straight-up garlic sauce. The chicken becomes a canvas for all of it.

“I wanted people to eat the food and really feel that there’s a chef behind this,” he says. “Even if it’s takeout, even if it comes in a container, we approach it as if it’s a plate.”

Rice, Labneh, and a Cookie That Broke the Internet

The sides tell their own story. The rice comes loaded with toasted vermicelli noodles, an Egyptian staple, drawn from Soudi’s partner’s kitchen. The labneh is spiked with brown butter and preserved purée, a recipe carried over from his private dinner days. The eggplant is charred directly on the grill, blended with roasted onions, then dressed in tahini and a house chili crisp made with urfa pepper, gojugaru, cumin, and black and white sesame.

And then there’s the tahini miso cookie which became the thing people can’t stop talking about. “There were days of me debating whether a cookie was enough,” Soudi admits. “And then the cookie started blowing up more than our chicken. Now we’re making hundreds and hundreds of cookies a day.”

Toronto on a Plate

When people ask Soudi what culture Mozy’s represents, his answer is simple: Toronto. “We grew up with so many different communities,” he says. “A lot of people in Toronto have a base foundation of knowledge of other people’s cultures and foods. I wanted our menu to reflect that.”

Coriander and lime show up in five different culinary traditions. So do cumin and chili. The green sauce is Peruvian in spirit; the rice is Egyptian; the chili crisp bridges the Middle East and East Asia. None of it pretends to be authentic to any single origin — it’s authentic to the city, to the overlap, to the way people in Toronto actually eat.

“When you eat at Mozy’s,” Soudi says, “you can’t really compare it to anything else. That’s what I hope.”

Gratitude Before Pride

The space is small, the team is lean, and Soudi is still in the kitchen prepping eggplant between phone calls. He got busy faster than he expected, and he’s choosing to protect the in-house experience over scaling up.

When asked what he’s proudest of, he pauses. “It’s too early to be proud,” he says. “I’m more grateful than I am proud. I’m grateful to the Liberty Village community that has embraced us. I’m grateful to the people who leave us good reviews and come in and say it’s worth the wait.”

After five years of trying to open the restaurant of his dreams, Barbode Soudi built something different — smaller, louder, more personal — and it turns out that was the dream all along.

Written by Fabie Lubin
Photography by Scott Usheroff (Craving Curator)

Updated on June 02, 2026

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