Scarlet Ibis – Best Guyanese Restaurant

Hello everyone! After many months, here’s to another blog! Firstly, I would like to wish everyone a Happy New Year! 🥳 Hope you are staying safe and healthy.

Today, I will write about visiting one of the best Guyanese Restaurants I have been to in Toronto and the GTA area. This is the to-go food spot for my Guyanese friend Jermain and his family. We went to this restaurant before Covid-19 came to Canada and I miss the times we could hang out with friends, catch up and not have to worry about the virus. How things have changed. But insha’allah those times will come again. Ameen.

I had no idea Guyanese and Caribbean food was this good! And the best part was it was Halal! Alhamdullilah. If it is your first time trying out this type of cuisine or love Guyanese/Caribbean food make sure to check out this spot and you will be blown away.

Let’s jump to the appetizers. We started with getting a dish called Pholourie. This dish was brought to Guyana 🇬🇾 and Trinidad and Tobago 🇹🇹 from Indian migrants. They just adjusted the spices to what was available to them in their region. Also, “Pholourie is from Bihar (a state in India) and is their specific staple snack”, as mentioned from a YouTube commenter. This Pholourie is served with tamarind sauce (aka imli chutney), which is perhaps the BEST sauce in the world lol. Imli is huge in South Asia, and we use it on samosas and pakoras and more! Going into more detail, Pholourie is basically a deep-fried dough ball. You can also try this appetizer with the restaurant’s homemade hot sauce, which was super spicy yet very tasty!

Next up was the potato balls we had, this was similar to the Pholourie but had a potato 🥔 stuffing inside. The potato balls were my favourite and were served with the legendary Imli sauce.

The last appetizer we got were the fish cakes! Which are salted fish condensed into a patty with potatoes and fried.

For our mains, we got a similar dish to Hakka noodles (beef and chicken chow mein), chicken fried rice, jerk chicken with rice and black beans, fried plantain chips, pot roast goat with rice and shrimp curry. All the food was outstanding and I could eat that food all day long.