Toma La - The Portuguese Pit Stop

The chicken goes on marinated and comes off the charcoal with its edges caught and the piri piri worked all the way through — the single order that explains Toma La faster than any description of the menu could. This is a Portuguese BBQ pit stop on Upper James Street in Hamilton, built around an open charcoal grill and the marinated-ahead, fire-finished bird that anchors nearly every table that walks in. The name carries the whole posture: it is the casual Portuguese for here you go, the phrase a cook says sliding a plate across the counter. Toma La runs exactly that way — quick, generous, and unfussy about everything except what comes off the pit.

The menu widens from there without ever losing that charcoal spine. A bifana keeps an order fast and unmistakably Portuguese, thin marinated pork pressed into a soft roll, while piri piri wings carry the same heat the chicken is built on. Chouriço assado brings the smoke of grilled sausage; bacalhau à brás and filetes de peixe open a cod-and-seafood lane that steps well past grilled meat. Roasted potatoes and rice do the steady work of a side. The sandwich board runs from a pulled chicken sandwich to the loaded X-Tudo, and a Vegetariana handheld gives anyone skipping meat a real path rather than an apology. Dessert stays traditional — pastéis de nata, their custard set and tops scorched, and a chocolate mousse for the table that wants one more course.

Put together, the board reads as a specific regional kitchen rather than a generic grill. The Portuguese references are not decoration. The piri piri, the cod, the chouriço, the custard tarts are the menu's actual centre of gravity, and the open charcoal grill is the reason the chicken tastes like the anchor of the whole thing. Portions run large, and the format leans hard toward feeding a group: whole and half chickens, family dinners, catering trays, sides built to be passed around. The value here is structural rather than a matter of discounting — the food is designed to stretch across a table. Online ordering and pickup are treated as an ordinary way to use Toma La, not an afterthought bolted onto a dine-in menu.

Toma La opened in 2016 under Steven Vilarinho, who came to the grill from a butcher's background — a pathway that shows in how the meat is handled long before it meets the charcoal. By his own telling the name is nothing grander than a friendly handoff, and the cooking is meant to feel that direct. What began as a single counter has since grown into two addresses that do two distinct jobs. The Upper James location is the quick pit-stop side of the concept, built for pickup, weeknight chicken dinners, and family-scale orders that travel well from the pit to a kitchen table across town.

The second address, in Trinity, is the dine-in branch. There the concept slows down and stretches — seafood, drinks, and a longer sit-down give the Portuguese BBQ idea more range than a takeout counter can hold. A cod plate and a glass of wine read differently under a dining room's lights than the same kitchen's food does in a takeout bag, and Toma La is set up to serve both without pretending they are the same visit. The charcoal pit does identical work at either address. What changes is how long a table intends to stay.

That split is the whole logic of the place. One night Toma La is a bag of charcoal chicken and roasted potatoes carried home along the James Street corridor; the next it is a full Portuguese dinner that opens with wings and settles into bacalhau. The pit stop and the sit-down live under one name, and a diner picks the address to match the evening rather than the other way around.