Chef Blessing Alasan of Blessinglicious brings the bold, soulful flavours of Nigerian street food to Scarborough, Ontario. From her mother's kitchen in Nigeria to selling 100 packs of suya chicken her first pandemic weekend, her journey is rooted in love, resilience, and radical inclusivity. Now participating in ByBlacks Restaurant Week 2026, Blessing is lovingly feeding her community on her own terms.
There is a particular kind of confidence that comes from feeding people well. Not the studied confidence of culinary school or the manufactured bravado of food television, but the quieter, deeper kind that grows when a dish you made from scratch leaves someone speechless. Chef Blessing Alasan has had that feeling since she was a teenager in Nigeria, cooking for friends just because she loved it, watching people come back for more, listening as the compliments slowly started to sound less like kindness and more like a sign.
That feeling followed her across an ocean, through a cold and disorienting landing in Saskatchewan, into a Brampton living room where she grilled suya chicken for family during the height of the pandemic, and finally to a restaurant at 2849 Kingston Road in Scarborough, where Blessinglicious now operates as one of the GTA's most talked-about Nigerian street food destinations. Her story is worth knowing. Not because it is exceptional in the way of fairy tales, but because it is true in the way that matters: built slowly, plate by plate, with no guarantees.
The kitchen was always the beginning
Blessing grew up in an all-encompassing food culture. Her mother ran a catering operation and restaurant; her father owned a bar and hotel. As a child, she moved between those spaces naturally, helping with prep, watching technique, absorbing flavour. She cooked for friends through secondary school and university, and most of those friendships, she says with a laugh, started over a meal. But cooking was still a side thing, something she did alongside life rather than as the centre of it.
The shift came in two stages. The first was an event booking roughly a decade ago, when an organizer bringing a Nigerian artist to Saskatchewan, Blessing, offered to pay her to cook for the event. She was already doing pop-ups and small gigs on the side. The fact that someone tracked her down, trusted her enough to write a cheque, and put her food in front of a crowd told her something important: There was real demand there, and her instincts were sound.
The second shift came during the COVID-19 pandemic. With the city locked down and her schedule suddenly empty, Blessing grilled suya chicken for a small gathering of family and friends. Her husband suggested they sell it. She posted on Snapchat, asked people to share, and by the end of that first weekend, they had moved 100 packs. Their starting capital was $300, sourced from a local African grocery store. One item on the menu. One hundred sold. That was the beginning of Blessinglicious.
Saskatchewan, Scarborough, and what belonging actually feels like
Blessing arrived in Canada in 2014–2015 as a student. She did not land in Toronto. She landed in Saskatchewan, and the contrast with everything she had known was sharp. The cold was one thing. The isolation was another. There were very few West Africans around; the African restaurant in Regina closed shortly after she arrived, and finding familiar food required either cooking it yourself or going without.
That experience shaped her permanently. The hunger she felt, and she means this literally and figuratively, became the blueprint for the kind of restaurant she wanted to build. If food is community, then a restaurant that makes you feel unseen or unwelcome is a kind of failure, regardless of what is on the plate. She was determined to do the opposite.
Scarborough was never a calculated choice so much as a gravitational pull. When Blessing and her husband began looking for a permanent location, they had tried markets and pop-ups across the GTA. They kept landing in Scarborough. Long nights driving home to Brampton from events on the east end, markets that felt right, crowds that responded. The connection felt instinctive.
"Scarborough supports Scarborough," she says, and means it as both observation and philosophy. The neighbourhood's density of Caribbean, African, South Asian, and East Asian communities creates an audience that already understands food as identity. They are not coming to be educated. They are coming to eat well and to feel at home.
A menu built on inclusion, not compromise
One of the most revealing things about Blessing as a chef is that she refuses to water things down. Blessinglicious is Nigerian street food. Not Afro-fusion, not a blended concept with a diplomatic name, but Nigerian, with Blessing's roots and technique at the centre. At the same time, the menu is designed to bring people in rather than leave them out.
The restaurant currently offers halal-certified dishes alongside vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-free options. Blessing is willing to adapt existing dishes for specific dietary needs on request, and she takes that offer seriously. The menu spans classics like smoky jollof rice, suya chicken, gizdodo (chicken gizzard with fried plantain), puff puff, yam chips, and egusi soup, alongside newer additions like coconut basmati rice and Naija-style fried rice. The chicken is grilled or air-fried rather than deep-fried wherever possible, keeping the flavours authentic while reducing the heaviness.
One of her most recent and creative innovations is the tofu dodo, a plant-based variation on the signature gizdodo. The original features chicken gizzard sautéed with fried plantain, bell peppers, and seasoning, visually striking in its traffic-light palette of green, yellow, and red. For customers who recoil at the word "gizzard," she swapped in seasoned tofu and found that the result holds up. The plantain carries the dish. The sauce does the work. And diners who had never considered themselves tofu people often come back for it.
Her thinking on this is straightforward: Nigerian food does not need to become something else to welcome other people. It needs to be cooked well and presented with honesty. The invitation into her culinary world stands on its own terms.
The jollof question (she has thoughts)
Ask a Nigerian chef about jollof rice, and you will get an answer. Blessing tips her hat to Senegal, where the dish originated, before clarifying that Nigeria has simply done something remarkable with it since. She draws the comparison to pizza, noting that the Italians who created it deserve respect, and that the dish has still become something distinct and beloved in the hands of everyone who adopted it. The same logic applies to jollof.
She tells a story about a Ghanaian customer who came in, ordered her tilapia and roasted plantain with street sauce, and told Blessing it tasted exactly like her grandmother's cooking. That is the kind of bridge she is trying to build: A dish rooted in one tradition that can reach across to another and feel familiar. Recognition without imitation.
ByBlacks Restaurant Week: More than one good week
ByBlacks Restaurant Week runs from Monday, May 11, to Sunday, May 17, 2026, with participating businesses offering either a Prix Fixe menu or a $10 special, discounted by up to 25%. More than 30 Black-owned restaurants across five provinces are participating this year, with events spanning Ontario, Alberta, British Columbia, Nova Scotia, and Prince Edward Island.
Blessinglicious is among the Ontario participants. For this year's Prix Fixe, Blessing has designed a menu that showcases two signature concepts. The starter is a tofu dodo delight, a plant-based twist on the classic gizdodo, with crispy spiced tofu paired with sweet peppered plantain and a flavourful sauce. The main is Naija-style fried rice, packed with vibrant vegetables, suya chicken or shrimp, and finished with plantain or spicy pepper sauce.
For Blessing, participation in ByBlacks Restaurant Week carries weight that extends past the week itself. The event creates a kind of professional fellowship that is rare in the restaurant industry, a space where owners who understand each other's pressures, financial swings, and operational realities can compare notes without judgment. She talks about it with real warmth. Being in a room with other food entrepreneurs who understand what a bad invoice week actually feels like is its own form of sustenance.
She is also direct about the limits of event-driven support. Black History Month floods her phone with orders. The weeks after, it quiets down. The question she returns to, practically and without bitterness, is how to convert the momentum of those high-traffic moments into year-round customer relationships. Her answer: data, outreach, and consistency. She keeps an email list. She reaches back out. She treats seasonal peaks as on-ramps, not endings. It is unglamorous, disciplined work, and it is exactly what sustains a business beyond any single celebratory week.
Where Blessinglicious is headed
The Scarborough location on Kingston Road remains the home base, open Monday through Saturday. Blessing has her eye on a Danforth pop-up with a street-food-forward format, going back to the stripped-down energy of her early days. She has a food truck concept in development. The restaurant has also maintained a presence at UTSC, serving students in the KW Building atrium, which has introduced a new generation to jollof rice and suya on a regular basis.
None of this happened because the path was clear. It happened because Blessing cooked, kept cooking, paid attention to who showed up, and built around what she found.
Food as a living record
There is a moment in the conversation when Blessing returns to a student from UTSC who reached out to her for a class project on Black food and entrepreneurship in Canada. The student had found Blessinglicious through a search. For Blessing, that contact was not a small thing. It meant that her work had been documented somewhere, that it could be found, that it would outlast the moment it was created in.
This is part of what draws her to initiatives like ByBlacks Restaurant Week: the archival value. Participation means being counted, being findable, and being part of a record that a future entrepreneur, researcher, or student can locate and build on. A restaurant is a living thing, fed by daily decisions and customer trust, but it also leaves a trace. For Blessing Alasan, that trace is intentional.
The table is open
Blessinglicious is the kind of place that rewards curiosity. If you have never tried Nigerian street food, it is a generous entry point. If you are already familiar, the depth of the menu and Blessing's willingness to adapt will keep you coming back. The jollof is smoky and confident. The gizdodo is genuinely unlike anything else in the GTA. The tofu dodo is a quiet revelation for anyone willing to give it a chance.
Beyond the food, there's something in the spirit of the place worth experiencing. Blessing has built her restaurant around a simple conviction that everyone deserves a seat at the table, and no one should have to compromise who they are to take it. That applies to her menu, her community, and quietly, to every plate that leaves her kitchen.
ByBlacks Restaurant Week runs May 11–17, 2026. Blessinglicious is located at 2849 Kingston Road, Scarborough Village. For reservations, menus, and more, visit blessinglicious.ca.
