Food for Thought with Alex Bielak- Sips and Bites – Bumper Summer Crop Edition

Sips and Bites – Bumper summer crop edition

As I head off for a family holiday I thought I’d leave readers with a bumper, omnibus edition of Food for Thought, sharing some summer food and wine finds, and offering thanks to some friends and readers along the way.

I recently tried the recently-opened Amaya Express at 489 Brant St in Burlington. While it wasn’t very express when I visited (they were still working things out in the open kitchen), the service and the food were very good and dishes fairly priced. Their décor (unadorned pastel walls and barnboard) and menu are not what I’d call the traditional Indian we are all familiar with. “It is more a take on Indian street food, Indian with a twist!” said the friendly manager, Sachin, a member of the family that runs the Toronto-based Amaya food group.

My daughter – a butter chicken specialist – declared their version top notch: I loved the small pot of smoked

Food for Thought with Alex Bielak- Marie’s Menus – Going Social

Marie Pavone

Marie’s Menus – Going Social

I’m pleased to offer up the second serving stemming from my serendipitous discovery of food-related contestants participating in the Innovation Factory’s recent pitch contest. 

As she sits at my kitchen counter, Marie Pavone, runner-up in the hotly-contested event, is the epitome of poised charm. Trained as an engineer, the Ancaster mother of two, is cool, calm and in control. In fact, at times I feel like the one being quizzed: as she jots her own notes, she wants to know what my favourite restaurants are, and whether, as a food writer, I’d be interested in contributing to her potentially soon-to-be-revamped MenusOnly website which already has an average of 7000 unique visitors and 20,000 page views monthly.

I ask her to tell me about her pitch at Innovation Factory as I had had to leave before she got up on stage. She wants to give me some background first. She started the site about 7 years ago after a brainwave: about to go out to dinner after work with some friends, she Googled for a new place to go.

Finding navigating multiple websites and locating different menus time-consuming, she said to herself, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a website where all the menus were there for that city? That was when the idea was born.”

Pavone’s LinkedIN profile articulates her original intent succinctly. “My goal with MenusOnly.com is to

Food for Thought with Alex Bielak - How Green Does Your Garden Grow?

Dean Hall of Growing Green Hamilton

How Green does your Garden Grow?

Space in my last round-up column precluded going into detail about a serendipitous meeting with two food-related entrepreneurs at the Innovation Factory’s recent pitch contest. Since then I’ve interviewed each of these go-getting Hamiltonians, and this week am pleased to tell you about Growing Green Hamilton’s Dean Hale. (Look for my piece on Menusonly.com’s Marie Pavone in the next column).

Dean is a passionate believer in the square foot garden. As the name suggests, this concept, developed by Mel Bartholemew, is an intensive, compact grid-based system that can produce 5 times the yield of a conventional row garden. “A 4 x 4 square foot garden