Home / About
The shop that added a name to the sign
Kensington Market has changed around it for fifty years. The shop hasn't.
The House of Spice has been part of Kensington Market since 1975: a snug, sky-blue-walled aisle on Augusta Avenue where the shelves run floor to ceiling with bagged spices, coffee, tea, nuts, beans, hot sauces and things you won't find anywhere else in the city. The vintage sign over the aisle still says it plainly: Toronto's Spice Terminal.
In 1977, a 15-year-old named Carlos Pereira walked in. He worked for the original owners for the next 35 years, learning the shelves and the trade. In 2012, he bought the business.
“I just added my name to the sign.”
That's the whole rebrand.
The blends
The thing Carlos is famous for happens below the sales floor: a basement mixing room where he builds custom blends by nose and eye rather than a written recipe, up to eighteen spices in one mix. Chefs bring him a dish; home cooks bring him a memory of one. A Montreal café once ordered a thousand pounds of a single house blend.
The shelves
Spices are the headline, but the shop carries what Carlos calls the market's biggest selection of coffee, tea, nuts and beans, plus dried fruit, towering shelves of hot sauce, soaps, incense, and the hard-to-find items people cross the city for. If it can be scooped, weighed or bagged, it probably has a spot on the wall.
The neighbourhood
Kensington Market runs on shops like this: everyone knows the owner. Fifty years of regulars, restaurant cooks and tourists have walked this same aisle. Come by and Carlos will likely tell you what to cook next, whether or not you ask.
Supplied by the shopA line from Carlos about the market goes here.