Walking into Bold Food Hub is a treat for the senses: it smells like comfort foods, with an array of flavourful scents greeting visitors. The one-of-a-kind, custom murals explode with colour and are rich in Chinese history, and modern rap music that makes you add a spring to your step plays as you walk in.
The first stall doesn’t look like what we’ve come to know as a pizza place, with flavours hanging from wooden panels and a big, circular oven that almost looks like an oversized propane tank. But nothing about Three Kingdoms Pizza is like anything North America has seen before.
With over 1,000 locations in China, Three Kingdoms Pizza selected Toronto as the setting for the eatery’s western expansion, manager Tyler says, because of the city’s diversity and welcoming nature. Toronto is, he says, more open to cultures and cuisines than New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, or any other North American city.
In terms of calling it a pizza, Tyler says, it’s not the most accurate term, but the closest the English language can get to describing it. The real word is guokui, which literally means pot helmet, but it’s a stuffed flatbread of sorts. “It’s kind of like a pizza and kind of like a dumpling, but we had to think about it in North American context,” Tyler says. “Because of the crunchiness and the way it’s spiced, we called it a pizza.”
It’s almost like a Jamaican patty and a pizza came together to create a flavourful dish, and Three Kingdoms’ massive guokui is about the size of an adult human’s head. It’s crafted in a giant, circular oven with stones, one that is traditionally used to make Chinese pancakes. The spicy beef is the company’s most popular combination, followed by the Signature guokui, but Tyler says they have all been welcomed by the Baldwin Village community, who has also shown interest in Chinese history.
Decorating the space, there’s murals with odes to pandas (that come from the Sichuan region in China, where Bold Food Hub drew all of their street food inspiration), and Chinese opera masks that pay homage to the opera of the Three Kingdoms period in China (which is also where the guokui eatery got its name).
While all of the flavours are currently meat-based, Tyler notes that a red sugar, vegetarian guokui will be added to the menu next month. And, expansion is on Three Kingdoms’ menu, too, with more outposts across Canada in the works.