Our Story

Founded in 2011, THG’s Hot Chicken was brought to life by Chef Aleem Syed, family and good friends.  After serving the community for a decade in the beloved Toronto food truck, THG is expanding their famous halal fried chicken empire into their first brick-and-mortar store.

 

Chef Aleem has always been a cook. Having trained classically at Le Cordon Bleu in Ottawa and making rounds at some of Toronto’s top fine-dining restaurants, his cooking pedigree and experience speaks for itself. In 2008, while working under Michael Bonacini at the highly regarded restaurant Canoe, Aleem experienced an accident that would leave him paralyzed from the waist down, changing his life forever––but not his love and passion for food. In 2011, he swapped his car for a shiny food truck and got to work on building what would later become one of Toronto’s most well-known vendors.

 

The truck travelled with Chef Aleem and his team to various events and festivals around the GTA, sweeping up prizes and awards along the way. The original menu featured just four items ––one of which, a fried chicken sandwich.

 

Just before the pandemic, the truck was posted up in a hidden parking lot in Scarborough, where it would garner longer and longer line-ups every weekend. By offering the best Nashville fried chicken tenders in Canada, the team was able to survive a global pandemic and scrape up the cash to make THG’s Hot Chicken a permanent mainstay in Toronto.