One of the city’s best British chefs is behind this UK-style pie shop

If you walk down Gerrard East and smell the unmistakable scent of flaky pastry and parsley liquor, don’t check your GPS—you haven’t been beamed over to London’s east end. You’re in the vicinity of Eastend Pie and Mash, a tiny new British pie and pastry shop with a massive soul.

For chef and owner Davy Love, this isn’t just a business; it’s a comeback story with more layers than his signature crust. A DJ and the mastermind behind Toronto’s legendary Britpop party BlowUp (IYKYK), Love spent the late ’90s and 2000s at the epicentre of Toronto’s Anglophile culture, from starting the Oxford Circus pub in Kensington (at a dangerously young age) to launching popular restaurants including the Bristol Yard and the Bristol.

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But life threw a spanner into the works: a rare spinal disease, and the surgery that followed Love’s diagnosis, means standing for long periods of time is a struggle—and now he has a terminal heart condition too. “The doctor told me, ‘Go out and enjoy your life,’" Love says. “He couldn’t give me an exact time but told me I should just enjoy every day.”

So what did Love do? He built exactly what he’s always wanted. His Eastend Pie and Mash pop-ups had been amassing fans about town, and he dreamed of opening a permanent location. Then he spotted a 150-square-foot space—hardly bigger than a walk-in closet—across the road from his home and snapped it up.

Love renovated the space by hand and designed it to look like a London home during the Blitz, right down to the wallpaper, photographs of his grandparents’ pubs in England (both sides of his family ran them), the model of a Spitfire airplane dangling from the ceiling and the BBC playing on the radio. He opened the doors just before Christmas.

The result? Utter chaos.

“After the first two weeks, I was like, What did I do?” says Love. “We were bombarded. We sold out every single day. I was kind of thinking it would do okay and I would have a nice quiet little shop where I could live out my days. I wasn’t prepared for this type of wild response.”

Beyond the traditional London beef pie, topped with gravy or parsley liquor (a green parsley sauce) and served alongside a dollop of mashed potatoes, there are chicken tikka masala; döner kebab; and spinach, mushroom and cheddar pies. The menu also includes savoury handhelds like classic Cornish pasties (or mac-and-cheese ones) and, of course, Scotch eggs. And there’s a fridge full of Scottish and British soft drinks, including Irn-Bru, Vimto and Tizer, plus a small selection of grocery items.

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The joint is tiny, with only four window-facing stools, and Love makes every pie and pasty himself in a nearby commercial kitchen. To get it right, he goes to extreme (some might even say obsessive) lengths. He imports the flour from a 400-year-old family mill in England. He brought in baking tins from the UK to ensure the pies are the traditional shape and size. Even the salt is from Dorset. And he’s a stickler for proper, sturdy pastry technique—you do not want to hear him go off on the posers that serve meat pies in tinfoil trays and call them British.

“We get all these old British guys in here, which is the nicest compliment. They come in, they have their cup of Yorkshire tea and their pie, they read their paper, and then they order another pie. They always say things like, ‘This takes me right back to when I was a boy in East London.’ That’s who we’re doing this for. Not for the influencers.”