Slammie Sammies Gets Locked Out of Its Own Restaurant — By Its Own Business Partner
For a sandwich shop with a name that basically promises drama, Slammie Sammies has now lived up to it in a way nobody saw coming.
The Toronto favourite, known for oversized, deliberately messy sandwiches piled onto homemade Mafra buns, spent nearly two years building a devoted following before finally landing a permanent home. Founders Pedro Dos Santos and Marilyn Simms — who’ve run corporate catering company Vert Casse-Croûte together for two decades — launched Slammie Sammies as a weekend pop-up inside Dundas West’s Opera Bob’s Public House back in spring 2024, serving standouts like grilled chicken tzatziki, Vietnamese sweet beef and shrimp po boy to a city that couldn’t get enough. When Opera Bob’s shut its doors that December after 16 years in business, Slammie Sammies lost its home and shifted to catering and event-only service while the pair searched for a permanent space.
That search ended last October, when Slammie Sammies opened its first brick-and-mortar location at 828 Eastern Avenue in Leslieville — a former Subway space attached to Grand Car Wash. The pairing made for an easy joke (grab a wash while you wait on your sandwich), but the car wash connection turned out to matter more than anyone expected: the restaurant’s landlord and business partner, Jermaine (Jay) Williams, also owns the car wash.
Just five months after that grand opening, the whole thing fell apart. Dos Santos and Simms announced on Instagram that Williams had locked them out of their own restaurant without warning, leaving behind everything inside — including Dos Santos’s professional knives and a $20,000 commercial suppression hood he’d paid for personally. The pair say they were also served a legal notice suggesting Williams plans to reopen a new shop using the exact Slammie Sammies menu that built the brand’s following in the first place.
Williams tells a different version of events. He says the lockout followed unpaid debts he puts at more than $90,000, and alleges misuse of company funds, including charges he’s characterized as fraudulent. Dos Santos and Simms deny those claims outright. At the core of the dispute is a disagreement over how the pair’s original partnership agreement should actually be interpreted — one that, more than a month later, still has no clear resolution.
The two say they met Williams through an ordinary Kijiji listing, and now believe the equity partners he later brought into the deal wanted control of the space from the start, with plans to steer the business — literally, they say, toward selling flowers — in a direction Dos Santos and Simms never agreed to.
Even with the Slammie Sammies signage already taken down and the Eastern Avenue space apparently being prepped for something new, Dos Santos and Simms say they aren’t done with the brand they spent two years building. Their stated priority right now is simple: get their equipment back. Beyond that, they’re leaning on the reputation they’ve spent years earning. As they put it themselves, the Slammie Sammies name is built on good people making good food — and they’re not ready to let a business dispute be the end of that story.
For now, there’s no confirmed timeline on a comeback, and no clean resolution to the legal side of things. But given how quickly this brand rebuilt a following after losing its first home at Opera Bob’s, it’s not hard to imagine it happening again — if Dos Santos and Simms get the chance.