Garden City Eats
It's always been Billy Qorri's dream to own a restaurant. But there was a time, not long after opening The Lemon Tree with his wife Isabella Bujor that he couldn't stand being in the kitchen of his Mediterranean bistro.
Qorri and Bujor adopted a vegan diet not long after becoming St. Catherines restaurateurs in 2015. Though they tried to please all palates by offering a mixed menu of plant-based and omnivorous dishes, Qorri was less than thrilled any time he had to fill a meaty order.
"When I was cooking half and half, I wasn't enjoying it. I wasn't comfortable serving what I didn't believe in anymore," Qorri recalls. "I thought ‘Why are you ordering lamb?' I saw the documentaries, I know how they were treated. I was irritated. I almost didn't want to cook at my restaurant anymore."
So in early 2018, the husband-and-wife team decided to put their money where their ethics were. They worked diligently for two months researching and testing recipes to make their calamari, tzatziki, feta, moussaka and chicken pitas entirely plant-based. In the process, they made The Lemon Tree St. Catharines' first vegan Mediterranean eatery.
In a city of 135,000 people, it might sound like a bit of an anomaly, maybe even doomed for failure, but St. Catharines was already supporting two vegan hot-spots, Rise Above and Beechwood Doughnuts. There was a vegan hot dog cart. And downtown pubs, pizzerias and dining rooms had expanded their plant-based offerings beyond a token garden salad and phoned-in pasta primavera. Some even created dedicated vegan menus for their plant-based patrons, while outside the restaurant scene at a vegan boxing club, no swings are ever taken in leather gloves.
Another vegan restaurant, this one doing Greek and Albanian favourites, fit right in. Qorri felt like he could breathe again at work when he dumped meat from the menu and people came from Niagara and beyond to take a seat at one of his tables. If anything was an anomaly, it was how this historically conservative, mid-sized, meat-and-potatoes city got so hungry for vegan food.
"We do have a lot here," says Laurie Morrison, co-founder of Niagara VegFest, one of the first vegan festivals in Ontario. "I go to a conference in Toronto every year and it's hard to find vegan options. I have to go four or five blocks before I find something."
So what makes the Garden City such a vibrant vegan city? Ask most people in the vegan community and the answer, without hesitation, is Marineland.
Not everybody loves the nearby Niagara Falls amusement park that's come under fire for keeping orcas, beluga whales, walruses, and dolphins in questionable captivity to entertain crowds.
The park is a beacon for animal-rights activists, particularly on Victoria Day weekend when Marineland opens for the season. Protests, going back almost a decade and attracting hundreds of people, have typically been organized by Niagara Action for Animals (NAfA), a local group advocating for animals and a compassionate society through education and outreach.
Encouraging veganism is also part of NAfA's mandate, and in those early days of Marineland protests, the group organized monthly vegan potlucks — events that connected animal rights with food for many, Morrison says.
Brock University in St. Catharines is also home to one of the only critical animal studies programs in Canada. It focuses on the role of animals in human societies, including "our ethical duty toward animals." Among the program's faculty is animal rights heavyweight John Sorenson, who's organized a series of activities encouraging community involvement since Brock's Department of Sociology started offering courses in the discipline in the 1990s.
Ultimately, though, that "small but strong activist community" needed a place to gather more regularly and ideally, it would be somewhere they could order anything on the menu.
So in 2010, then-vegan chef Kyle Paton opened Rise Above, a plant-based bakeshop whose calling card was donuts. Paton also organized regular pop-up vegan dinners at his downtown St. Catharines shop, located in an alleyway off James Street. He made meat-free meals exciting events for those dabbling in a cruelty-free lifestyle and created a place where longtime adopters finally felt at home.
The vegan community rallied around Paton and Rise Above, which became so popular, it moved to a larger and more prominent location on main drag St. Paul Street a year later to become a full-service restaurant.
The presence of this busy plant-based beacon didn't go unnoticed by the pubs and restaurants surrounding it. They may have scoffed at first, yet they couldn't help but pay attention when lineups formed at Rise Above or customers walked away from their joint for lack of quality vegan options and headed to Paton's instead.
"They would see how busy we were and say ‘Oh, that's where people are going. I wonder why?'" recalls Brian Gasbarini, Paton's head server who took over Rise Above in 2013. "I always encourage new and existing restaurants to have vegan options on their menu because if you don't have that option, people are just going to come here."
And they do come. When Gasbarini took over, he expanded the menu from a single card to a multi-page fold-out. The number of offerings increased significantly and included bigger portions of comforts, such as mac 'n' cheese, buffalo seitan, even a charcuterie board. It was all to dispell the myth that vegan food was limited and expensive. And to show it appeals to vegans and non-vegans alike.
"If we were only serving vegan customers then we're missing our mission to show non-vegans that they can have a vegan restaurant experience and not feel like anything was missing," he says. "We can't ban the customers we're trying to reach from coming in here. The ultimate goal is obviously to advocate veganism, to encourage it by making it enjoyable for people, more accessible and readily available. It's about creating a model or example to demonstrate what could be done with vegan food and challenge other restaurants, even the way people cook at home."
Rise Above, by way of being the first and being so successful, became the epicentre of vegan cuisine in St. Catharines and Niagara. The next offshoot was a dedicated donut shop, selling more of what made Rise Above such a star attraction in its early days.
It became logistically impossible for baker Shane Belanger to keep up with demand for his donuts by frying two at a time in Rise Above's functional, but cramped galley. In late 2014, he and partner Tayler Book worked diligently to get Beechwood Doughnuts ready to open in the new year.
It was just the two of them with the help of Belanger's sister. On Day 1, they figured they overshot when they baked 250 donuts. They sold out by noon with a lineup that was hundreds deep and stretched around the corner. "We sat down, had lunch and said, ‘I guess we're going to make more,'" Book recalls.
Such was the rhythm and flow to Beechwood Doughnuts' early days. They'd bake doughnuts, let fans know via social media what was available, and then deliver the news when they sold out for the day. It was no bigger disappointment than for those just rounding this side of the Golden Horseshoe from elsewhere in the GTA for a dozen of some of the biggest, most inventive scratch donuts, including cookie dough, coconut cream, Earl Grey or raspberry white chocolate cheesecake.
Three months in, they hired 15 staff to keep up with demand. Three years in, they moved to a larger location on St. Paul Street where they employ 23 and bake 4,000 donuts on their busiest day of the year, Easter Sunday.
"We had to grow pretty fast, which was unexpected," Book says. "Our expectations were pretty low. We thought if we can make $500 a month and keep living student life, that was good."
As with Rise Above, there were those who waited for Book and Belanger to fail. In 2016, some of those detractors took notice as the two were recognized as future leaders at Mayor Walter Sendzik's second state of the city address.
Buzzfeed put Beechwood Doughnuts on its list of 23 most delicious desserts to eat across Canada. And in October 2018, Beechwood Doughnuts joined Rise Above, The Lemon Tree and two other St. Catharines vegan-friendly eateries on a list of five essential spots to explore in the city, published on Bon Appetit's website.
It was sponsored content, written and paid for by Destination Canada and the Tourism Partnership of Niagara, but it generated twice as many clicks as any other Niagara story and was among the best-performing content in the entire campaign, which included posts about Toronto, Montreal, Ottawa and Vancouver.
That kind of attention is something on which Karen Doyle, the city's tourism marketing officer wants to build. "I don't necessarily have a marketing plan for vegan eateries and scenes, but because it's so strong in St. Catharines and given what we do have, I always highlight it in tourism offerings," Doyle says.
Much of the veganism-as-tourist-attraction groundwork may have already been laid by Morrison and her Niagara VegFest co-founder and partner, Keri Cronin. Niagara VegFest was one of the very few vegan festivals in Ontario when it launched in 2012. The MO was to build community and draw attention to the many layers of forgoing animal products in our kitchens and closets: health, the environment, worker rights and the treatment of animals.
"I wanted my community to understand and be welcome to ideas about plant-based diets," says Morrison, who was only transitioning to a vegan diet at the time.
About 1,300 people showed up to the inaugural Niagara VegFest, held in the city's multicultural centre downtown. They broke the fire code that day and the next year the event moved to more spacious Market Square. In subsequent years, as many 5,000 people passed through the gates to hear speakers such as Gene Baur from Farm Sanctuary, the largest farmed animal rescue organization in the U.S., and How Not to Die author Michael Greger. They ate vegan Big Macs, ice cream sandwiches, cupcakes and pizza. They listened to live music, drank beer and wine, and got to meet crafters, food artisans and others in the activist and animal rescue community.
A few years in, the event morphed into a weekend affair that included a vegan wine tour, collaboration with local restaurants on prix-fixe vegan menus and the municipality lending a theatre for a festival-endorsed documentary screening.
People of all diets — only about one-third were vegan — came from throughout Southern Ontario and nearby American states. Niagara VegFest had grown into one of the region's largest festivals. Meanwhile, vegan festivals started popping up in Buffalo, Hamilton, Guelph and Mississauga. Even Toronto's longtime vegetarian fête went entirely plant-based, though interest in Niagara's edition never dwindled despite the doubleedged sword of more vegan festival competition.
St. Catharines as vegan city is the "coalescing of a bunch of us doing things that were building on what others were doing," Morrison says. "With a vegan festival, we did it at the right time. Even though there are other festivals, we seemed to have a really good response and people wanted to come back."
Gasbarini would like to say it all makes the city unique, but "I don't want to focus on St. Catharines being a special case because it undermines that this can happen anywhere," he says.
Indeed, it can. South of St. Catharines, Welland, population 52,000, is now home to a busy full-serve vegan restaurant, Vegan Hippie Chick, which got its start at the St. Catharines Farmers' Market. Even small-town Beamsville in the heart of Niagara's farming community boasts the vegan Root 8. And the region's bedroom community of Fonthill has the quick-serve, plant-based Seeds.
"It just takes someone to take the initiative," Gasbarini says.
Someone such as Qorri and Bujor back at The Lemon Tree, who found root vegetables played an uncanny substitute for calamari, tofu could be transformed to briny feta cheese, and where the majority of its pre-vegan menu clientele came back when only compassion, rather than lamb, was being served.
"I'm so proud to be the change," Qorri, says. "I came from (Albania) where we eat a lot of meat. If I can change, anyone can."
The Lemon Tree
395 Ontario St., St. Catharines, Ont.
thelemontreebistro.com | 289.362.4000 | @thelemontree_bistro
Rise Above
120 St. Paul St., St. Catharines, Ont.
riseaboverestaurant.com | 289.362.2636 | @riseaboverestaurant
Beechwood Doughnuts
165 St. Paul St., St. Catharines, Ont.
beechwooddoughnuts.com | 905.682.6887 @beechwooddoughnuts
