A computer science grad brings a startup mindset to the kitchen

Three months into her first tech job, Zoya de Frias Lakhany, BCompSc 15, was already questioning whether she belonged.

“I needed something more challenging,” she says. “Working behind a computer, even though you talk to people, you’re missing a human element.”

Her mother, Maria-José de Frias, had spent years working towards a different kind of dream. After studying culinary arts at LaSalle College, she was ready to open a restaurant rooted in her upbringing in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).

When she asked her daughter to come aboard, de Frias Lakhany hesitated. But the more she engaged with the project, the more she recognized something familiar.

“I realized it was closer to a startup than it was to a restaurant,” she says. “No one knew what it would become. I had to create a product — and the demand for it.”

That product — Le Virunga — opened in Montreal’s Plateau-Mont-Royal neighbourhood in June 2016. Named after eastern DRC’s Virunga National Park, the restaurant draws on culinary traditions from across sub-Saharan Africa while sourcing ingredients from Quebec.

The concept was unlike anything Montreal had seen, and building an audience required patience. Even within the African diaspora, expectations were fixed, and the early years were spent slowly shifting those assumptions.

“People called in asking for grilled fish and rice, and we don’t make rice,” de Frias Lakhany recalls. “So, they’d ask, ‘What’s African about you?’”

On the right path

The undergraduate degree de Frias Lakhany had set aside proved to be more useful than she expected. At Concordia’s Gina Cody School of Engineering and Computer Science, she learned how to break down complex challenges, build structures and scale processes — skills she now applies at the restaurant.

As her mother pushes the creative vision, de Frias Lakhany figures out how to make it work.

“She’s like a customer who comes to you and says, ‘I want the moon,’” de Frias Lakhany says with a laugh. “As the tech analyst, I ask how I can get the moon — and if I can’t, I’ll get her the stars.”

For de Frias Lakhany, it’s her mission to find the solution. She credits former professors Armen Atoyan and Aiman Hanna for helping her to develop that problem-solving mindset, which was particularly reinforced in Hanna’s optimization course. She also took the Entrepreneurship: Launching Your Business (MANA 300) course at the John Molson School of Business as an elective, not knowing the impact it would have in the years to come.

“At the time, I used my mom’s idea for the class project,” she says. “It wasn’t Le Virunga yet, but it ended up being very close to what I eventually built.”

Looking back, de Frias Lakhany points to a community of sharp, driven classmates at Concordia — generous with their networks — for their camaraderie.

That foundation paid off in May 2025, when Le Virunga received a Michelin Recommended designation — the only African restaurant in Canada to earn the honour.

“We didn’t try to change who we are to be where we are today,” de Frias Lakhany says. “We are authentic to ourselves, to our values and our views of what we want to offer. When the Michelin list came out, it was like a tap on the shoulder that simply said, ‘You’re doing great.’”

That recognition comes at a meaningful moment: Le Virunga turns 10 this year. De Frias Lakhany describes the restaurant as her mother’s love letter to Montreal — expressing thanks to a city that welcomed them warmly. “She invites us into her home in kind,” says De Frias Lakhany. As for her own path from Concordia’s classrooms to the dining rooms of the Plateau, she has no regrets.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way.”