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Canadian Macedonian Business Directory Canadian Macedonian Heritage Society · compiled from public sources

Compiled from public sources

Business Directory

The businesses Macedonians have built in Canada — the ones open today, the ones that came first, and the institutions that grew up around them.

134 Entries

70 Open listings

25 Heritage businesses

30 Organisations & media

31 Cities

How this directory was compiled

This directory has been compiled by volunteers of the Canadian Macedonian Heritage Society from public sources — the community's newspapers and newsletters, sponsor rolls, news coverage, and the businesses' own websites. Each entry notes how its Macedonian connection is documented. Inclusion is not an endorsement, and we cannot guarantee every detail is current. If something is wrong, out of date — or if you would rather your business did not appear here at all — write to us and we will fix or remove it promptly.

The directory

Businesses trading today, grouped by trade. Each card records how the Macedonian connection is documented and links the sources behind it.

Food & hospitality

3 of 15 shown

  • Tim Hortons — Branoff Family franchises

    Coffee shops (franchisees) · GTA

    Community-affiliated

    Every Macedonian Open for years has begun the same way: coffee and breakfast under the Branoff family's Tim Hortons banner. Franchise coffee is the modern chapt...

    Macedonian connection: The Branoff family's Tim Hortons operation is the registration-and-breakfast sponsor of the Macedonian Open year after year.

    Sources: https://canadianmacedonianplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Zdravets-Newsletter-Spring-2026.pdf

  • Triple "A" Cheese

    Cheese manufacturer · Mississauga

    One of the GTA's principal feta makers, founded in 1996 by Kosta Stanwyck and his sons Chris and Tom. Kosta belonged to the generation that built St Clement of...

    Address: 7210 Torbram Road, Mississauga, ON L4T 3L7 (retail outlet at 7190 Torbram Road)

    Telephone: 905-678-7053

    Website: https://www.tripleacheese.com

    Macedonian connection: Founded in 1996 by Kosta Stanwyck — a founding builder of St Clement of Ohrid Cathedral — with his sons Chris and Tom; the Stanwyck family are mainstay sponsors of Canadian Macedonian Place.

    Sources: https://www.tripleacheese.com/

  • Tumbecafe Bar & Pub Тумбе кафе

    Bar & pub · Scarborough

    A Scarborough bar that wears its heritage in its name: Tumbe kafe is the Bitola song every Macedonian wedding band knows, and the pub advertised for years in th...

    Address: 1375 Danforth Road, Scarborough, ON

    Macedonian connection: Named for 'Tumbe kafe', the beloved Bitola folk song — a name only a Macedonian would choose — and a long-time advertiser in the community's Macedonia newspaper.

    Sources: https://macedonianewspaper.com/files/uploads/June%202017.pdf

Nothing in this trade matches the current filters.

Health & wellness

0 of 6 shown

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Finance, accounting & insurance

2 of 7 shown

  • The Trentos Advisory Group — RBC Wealth Management

    Wealth management · Toronto

    Community-affiliated

    Marilyn Trentos's advisory group at RBC Wealth Management appears wherever the community's money is raised for good: gold sponsor of the Macedonian Open under h...

    Macedonian connection: Marilyn Trentos — CMP director, gala co-chair and family foundation donor — leads her advisory group at RBC Wealth Management, a perennial gold sponsor under her name.

    Sources: https://canadianmacedonianplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Zdravets-Newsletter-Spring-2026.pdf

  • The ZAF Group

    Executive advisory & investment · North America (community ties in Toronto)

    Community-affiliated

    The ZAF Group is the family vehicle of Mike Zafirovski — born in Skopje in 1953, formerly of General Electric and Motorola, chief executive of Toronto's Nortel...

    Macedonian connection: The family vehicle of Mike Zafirovski, the Skopje-born executive who led Nortel Networks in Toronto (2005–2009); a five-figure donor to Canadian Macedonian Place.

    Sources: https://canadianmacedonianplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Zdravets-Newsletter-Spring-2026.pdf

Nothing in this trade matches the current filters.

Real estate & mortgages

3 of 8 shown

  • The Lillian Marson Team

    Real estate team · GTA

    Community-affiliated

    A GTA real-estate team recorded among the Unity-level sponsors of Canadian Macedonian Place's ReImagine Gala. The society lists the team from the gala's honour...

    Macedonian connection: Unity-level sponsor of Canadian Macedonian Place's ReImagine Gala.

    Sources: https://canadianmacedonianplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Zdravets-Newsletter-Spring-2026.pdf

  • The Penzo Team & Urban Blueprint Development

    Real estate team & development · GTA

    Community-affiliated

    Debbi Penzo's real-estate team, paired in the community's records with Urban Blueprint Development, has backed Canadian Macedonian Place from the gala floor to...

    Macedonian connection: Gala and tournament sponsor of Canadian Macedonian Place across several years, at gold level in 2022.

    Sources: https://canadianmacedonianplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/13225-CMP-Zdravets-Newsletter-SinglePage-r1-FL-cropped.pdf

  • Tom & Alexandra Bozanis — Royal LePage Connect Realty

    Residential real estate · Toronto / Durham

    The Bozanis family's Royal LePage Connect team — Tom, Alexandra and John across the tournament rolls of different years — has been a fixture among the Macedonia...

    Macedonian connection: The Bozanis family team sponsors the Macedonian Open at silver level year after year.

    Sources: https://canadianmacedonianplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Zdravets-Newsletter-Spring-2026.pdf

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Construction & trades

0 of 6 shown

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Manufacturing

1 of 4 shown

  • Twin Equipment & Tesco Division

    Equipment manufacturing & service · GTA

    Community-affiliated

    An equipment firm that appears on the Macedonian Open's silver sponsor rolls under Mike Mintsopoulos's name — one of the Aegean-Macedonian and Greek-Macedonian...

    Macedonian connection: Mike Mintsopoulos keeps the firm on the Macedonian Open's silver sponsor roll.

    Sources: https://canadianmacedonianplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Zdravets-Newsletter-Spring-2026.pdf

Nothing in this trade matches the current filters.

Automotive

2 of 5 shown

  • The Mechanics Shop

    Auto repair · Scarborough

    A Scarborough garage on Winter Avenue that kept the same advertisement running in the Macedonia newspaper for at least six years — the steadiest kind of endorse...

    Address: 79 Winter Avenue, Scarborough, ON

    Telephone: (416) 267-6033

    Macedonian connection: An east-end garage that advertised in the Macedonia newspaper continuously across at least 2017–2022.

    Sources: https://macedonianewspaper.com/files/uploads/June%202017.pdf

  • Todor Kajcevski — BMW Autohaus

    Car dealership (sales consultants) · Thornhill

    Community-affiliated

    Todor Kajcevski and his BMW Autohaus colleagues put up the hole-in-one cars at the Macedonian Open — the tournament's flashiest prize, backed by a Macedonian na...

    Macedonian connection: Kajcevski and colleagues sponsor the Macedonian Open's hole-in-one prizes through BMW Autohaus.

    Sources: https://canadianmacedonianplace.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Zdravets-Newsletter-Spring-2026.pdf

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Retail & services

0 of 4 shown

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Media & creative

0 of 9 shown

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Technology

0 of 3 shown

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Travel

0 of 1 shown

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Entertainment & gaming

0 of 2 shown

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The honour roll

Macedonian names at the top of Canadian business. They sit apart so that a Nasdaq-listed company does not share a row with a dental practice.

  • Torstar / The Toronto Star

    News media · Toronto

    Community-affiliated

    In 2020 Jordan Bitove co-led NordStar Capital's $60-million purchase of Torstar, and after the partnership's 2022–23 arbitrated split he emerged as sole owner a...

    Website: https://www.thestar.com

    Macedonian connection: Canada's largest-circulation newspaper is owned and published by Jordan Bitove, third generation of the Macedonian-Canadian Bitove family.

    Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torstar

Nothing here matches the current filters.

Heritage

The businesses that built the community. All of these are closed; the directory above is what they paid for.

The first Macedonians reached Toronto around the turn of the last century, overwhelmingly young men from the Aegean villages — Zhelevo, Oshchima, Banitsa, Gabresh, Buf — and the failed Ilinden Uprising of 1903 turned a trickle into a migration. An internal community census counted about 1,090 Macedonians in the city by 1910, clustered in three settlements, the largest of them around King Street East and Eastern Avenue. They worked the abattoirs, the foundries and the sheet-metal shops, lived in boarding houses, and organised village mutual-benefit societies — the Zhelevo Benevolence Brotherhood and the Oshchima Benefit Society, both founded in 1907 — which served as the community's first banks and its first employment bureaus. The earliest businesses served the colony itself: Slave Petroff and Company sold steamship tickets, wired remittances home and ran a labour bureau, and by about 1910 Lambo Tenekeff, whom everyone called Mr. Louis, had turned three years of butchering into Louis Meat Market.

Factory hands became counter men. Over the next half-century Macedonians moved out of abattoir shifts and into food shops of their own — butchers, grocers, dairy bars, fruit markets, shoe-shine parlours, and above all restaurants: lunch counters, grills, fish-and-chip shops and burger rooms. Professor Harry Vjekoslav Herman's study Men in White Aprons documented both the mechanism and the result. The mechanism was kinship: village partnerships, a brother-in-law's loan, a dishwasher who became a cook and then an owner. The result, as Professor Herman's research was presented to this society, was that by 1970 Macedonian families owned or operated more than a fifth of the independent restaurants and diners of the Greater Toronto Area. The trade acquired its own institution in the Canadian Macedonian Restaurant Co-op, founded in 1970, and its profits paid, systematically, for the next generation's professional degrees.

A few of those rooms lasted long enough to be remembered by name: the Majestic, opened in Hamilton by Dan Kuzoff in 1933; the Patrician Grill on King Street East, opened by Louie Papas in 1953 and closed in 2026 after seventy years; the 3 Star in the Beach, bought by Tom Gulin in 1955. Beyond Toronto the same pattern repeated in Hamilton, in Windsor, and in towns like Welland, where a Macedonian grocery store or restaurant anchored a family economy for two generations.

Two families turned the food trade into national business. Steve Stavro, born in Gabresh in 1926 and brought to Toronto in 1933, was a butcher's son who left school after Grade 10; his produce stand of 1951 became Knob Hill Farms, and its "food terminals" — from Markham in 1963 to the 340,000-square-foot Cambridge store billed in 1991 as the largest food store in the world — invented the Canadian big-box grocery decades before Costco crossed the border. His fortune bought the Toronto Maple Leafs and built the arena now called Scotiabank Arena. John Bitove Sr., born in Toronto in 1928 to immigrants from the same village, went from a fourteen-stool lunch room called the Java Shoppe to forty franchise outlets, then to the catering contracts for Pearson Airport and the SkyDome, merged in 1989 into one of Canada's largest private food-service companies. Both men banked the community as they rose — Stavro through his family foundation, Bitove by founding Canadian Macedonian Place in 1978 with his wife Dotsa.

Their children's generation went to university. The restaurant families produced the lawyers, accountants, physicians, dentists and realtors who fill this directory's modern pages, and by 1992 those professions had organised themselves into the Canadian Macedonian Business and Professional Association and the Macedonian Canadian Medical Society, now the Canadian Macedonian Health Professionals' Association. A second marquee generation emerged alongside them: John Bitove Jr., who won Toronto the NBA's Raptors in 1993 and founded XM Radio Canada; Mike Zafirovski, born in Skopje, who ran Nortel Networks from 2005 to 2009; and Susan Niczowski, who built Summer Fresh out of her mother's kitchen in 1991 into a North American prepared-foods company.

The pattern holds today at both ends of the scale. Jordan Bitove owns and publishes the Toronto Star; Chris Pavlovski's Toronto-founded Rumble trades on the Nasdaq. On the main street there is the Damceskis' California Restaurant on Pape Avenue, the Georgievskis' Macedonia Secrets, an Oakville aerospace plant that advertises its jobs in Macedonian, the Stanwyck cheese works, and the realtors, dentists and contractors whose names fill the Macedonia newspaper's advertising columns and the Macedonian Open's sponsor boards. A new Canadian Macedonian Chamber of Commerce began organising in 2025. The businesses below are closed now, but the community they built — and the businesses that fill the directory above — are their receipts.

A hundred and twenty years, in dates

  1. 1903

    The Ilinden Uprising fails; mass emigration from Aegean Macedonia begins.

  2. 1907

    The Zhelevo Benevolence Brotherhood and the Oshchima Benefit Society are founded in Toronto — the community's first banks and employment bureaus.

  3. 1910

    A community census counts about 1,090 Macedonians in Toronto. Louis Meat Market opens around this time.

  4. 1911

    Sts Cyril and Methody, the community's first church, is founded.

  5. 1919

    Nikola and Vana Bitove arrive from Gabresh.

  6. 1926

    Steve Stavro is born in Gabresh; some sources give 1927.

  7. 1933

    The Stavro family reaches Toronto. Dan Kuzoff opens the Majestic in Hamilton.

  8. 1940

    More than 1,200 Macedonian families are living in Toronto.

Show all 41 dates
  1. 1942

    The first Macedonian Open golf tournament is played.

  2. 1947–49

    The Greek Civil War sends the Detsa Begalci refugee generation to Canada; many later prominent in business.

  3. c.1949

    A teenage John Bitove Sr. opens the fourteen-stool Java Shoppe.

  4. 1951

    Steve Stavro's produce stand opens on Queen Street East — the seed of Knob Hill Farms.

  5. 1953

    Louie Papas opens the Patrician Grill on King Street East.

  6. 1955

    Tom Gulin buys the 3 Star Restaurant in the Beach.

  7. 1959

    The United Macedonians Organization is founded; Ensemble Makedonka is formed.

  8. 1962–65

    St Clement of Ohrid Cathedral is chartered, and opens for services three years later.

  9. 1963

    The first Knob Hill Farms food terminal opens in Markham — Canada's big-box grocery pioneer. The Skopje earthquake drives a new wave of emigration.

  10. 1970

    The Canadian Macedonian Restaurant Co-op is founded. Professor Herman's research puts Macedonians at more than 20 per cent of the GTA's independent restaurants.

  11. 1978

    John and Dotsa Bitove found Canadian Macedonian Place; some sources give 1979.

  12. 1979

    VAC Developments is founded by the Hristovski family.

  13. 1983

    York County Quality Foods wins the Pearson Airport catering contract.

  14. 1984

    Tanas Jovanovski founds the Macedonia newspaper.

  15. 1989

    The Bitove Corporation is formed; John Bitove Sr. is appointed to the Order of Canada.

  16. 1991

    Knob Hill's Cambridge terminal opens as the "world's largest food store". Summer Fresh is founded, and so is this society.

  17. 1992

    The Canadian Macedonian Business and Professional Association and the Macedonian Canadian Medical Society are founded.

  18. 1993

    The NBA awards the Raptors to John Bitove Jr.'s group on 30 September.

  19. 1994

    Steve Stavro takes control of Maple Leaf Gardens Ltd.

  20. 1996

    Kosta Stanwyck founds Triple "A" Cheese with his sons Chris and Tom.

  21. 1999

    The Air Canada Centre opens under Stavro's chairmanship.

  22. 2000–01

    Knob Hill Farms closes; every debt and every employee is paid in full.

  23. 2002–05

    John Bitove Jr. founds Canadian Satellite Radio; XM launches in Canada.

  24. 2006

    Steve Stavro dies. The Macedonian Film Festival is founded.

  25. 2007

    This society republishes Men in White Aprons with the Restaurant Co-op and the Argiro family. Macedonia 2025 is founded.

  26. 2013

    Rumble is founded in Toronto by Chris Pavlovski.

  27. 2015

    John Bitove Sr. dies; Mobilicity is sold to Rogers.

  28. 2019

    Kosta Stanwyck, at 89, buys the Macedonian Mermaid Motel in Wasaga Beach.

  29. 2020–23

    Jordan Bitove acquires Torstar and becomes sole owner and publisher of the Toronto Star.

  30. 2022

    Rumble lists on the Nasdaq. John Bitove Jr. enters the Canadian Basketball Hall of Fame.

  31. 2024

    Canadian Macedonian Place's ReImagine Gala honours Susan Niczowski and raises $825,000.

  32. 2025

    Chris Pavlovski becomes a billionaire. A Canadian Macedonian Chamber of Commerce begins organising.

  33. 2026

    The Patrician Grill closes after seventy years. This directory is compiled.

The businesses that came first

Closed, remembered, and part of why the rest of this directory exists.

  • The Java Shoppe

    Coffee shops · North York (Toronto)

    Closed 1960s (absorbed into later ventures)

    A fourteen-stool coffee counter opened by a teenaged John Bitove Sr. — with Dotsa beside him — became five locations by 1962 and the seed of the largest private...

    Macedonian connection: The fourteen-stool coffee shop where the Bitove empire began; John Sr. was the Toronto-born son of immigrants from Gabresh.

    Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bitove_Sr.

  • The Toronto Raptors — the Bitove founding

    Professional basketball · Toronto

    Closed Bitove sold his stake in 1996–97

    On 30 September 1993 the NBA awarded Toronto its expansion franchise to a bid led by 33-year-old John Bitove Jr., who named the team the Raptors, served as its...

    Macedonian connection: The NBA came to Canada because John Bitove Jr. — grandson of Gabresh immigrants — won the expansion bid.

    Sources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bitove

  • Toronto Travel Advantage — Danny Ry

    Travel agency · Toronto

    The society's news archive preserves the scene: a community charity evening, a 'lucky draw' of prizes donated by Macedonian businesses, and the grand prize — a...

    Macedonian connection: A community travel agency remembered in the society's archive as donor of the grand prize — a Florida trip — at a Macedonian charity evening.

    Sources: https://macedonianhistory.ca/news/macedonian-kolede-costume-ball — Society news archive — the Kolede ball, whose grand prize Danny Ry and Toronto Travel Advantage donated

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Organisations & media

The churches, associations and publications the community's business life has always run through. Listed for reference, not as businesses.

Churches

0 of 8 shown

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Associations & institutions

0 of 16 shown

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Media

0 of 6 shown

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A volunteer reads everything that arrives here. Nothing is published automatically, and a removal request is honoured without argument.

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So a volunteer can write back if something needs asking. It is never shown on the website.

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If you are not sure, say so — a volunteer will check. A guess is harder to correct than a blank.

An owner, a founder, a family story — whatever you know.

One web address per line. A newspaper piece, the business’s own site, a community newsletter — at least one.

Address, telephone, website, when it opened, who runs it — whatever you have.

Compiled from public sources. Inclusion is not an endorsement; corrections and removal requests are honoured without argument.