Owner and chef, Mary’s African Cuisine, Seaport Farmers’ Market, 1209 Marginal Road and Noblemay Catering Mary Nkrumah has been cooking for over 15 years— taking notes from her mother, a caterer, and then studying culinary at home in Ghana—but for the last seven she’s made a name for herself and her dishes in Halifax. After […]
Food
Jessica Best
Baker The Canteen, 66 Octherloney Street “It’s meditative. I think it’s one of the most refined things you can do,” Jessica Best says about baking. “I feel like the measure of a really good baker is consistency in everything you take out of the oven.” Best’s crusty sourdough is, in a lot of ways, a […]
Kellye Robertson
Assistant brewmaster Garrison Brewing Company, 1149 Marginal Road “At the end of the day being able to create something that you put in a glass and see someone really enjoy—it’s a pretty gratifying thing,” says Kellye Robertson, who, while still studying brewmaster and brewery management in Niagara, won Garrison’s Ultimate Brew-Off in 2013 and landed […]
Kelly Neil
Photographer and food stylist kellyneil.com In just over five years, Kelly Neil has come out of seemingly nowhere to become one of Nova Scotia’s favourite food photographers. “I am fuelled by learning,” she says. “I don’t have any formal training and every time I pick up my camera, set up lights, move a piece of pasta […]
Lauren Marshall
Chef de cuisine, enVie, 5775 Charles Street You could call Lauren Marshall a Top Chef contestant. A vegan chef. A teacher. A holistic nutritional consultant. There are a lot of things that make her an incredibly creative force in Halifax’s food scene, but she’s not into labels. “What I love about what I do is […]
Lia Rinaldo
Managing director Devour! The Food Film Festival As a teenager, Lia Rinaldo got a job at the legendary Wormwoods Dog & Monkey Cinema, which led to the Atlantic Film Festival. “All of a sudden I blinked and 20 years had passed. It was a life in film and I never really planned on it,” she […]
Run this town
This time last year, Time published a cover feature titled Gods of Food that came under major fire, and rightly so, for its serious lack of women. It’s “pantheon” listed 13 “gods,” nine of which were men or groups of men, and its international chef family tree was 100 percent pure dude. In response, Eater […]
Lil MacPherson
Owner The Wooden Monkey, 1707 Grafton Street and 40 Alderney Drive “It was an a-ha moment,” Lil MacPherson says. When Hurricane Juan struck Nova Scotia, a storm of concerns about food security hit her hard. “To me the very foundation of business, life, a province, a country is to make sure you have enough food […]
Amber MacLean
Manager and server Morris East, 620 Nine Mile Drive A lot of people say that the secret ingredient to any great recipe is love, but for Jennie Dobbs and her Morris East restaurants, the secret to greatness just might to be Amber MacLean. With a decade of experience as a server under her belt, MacLean […]
Liz Ingram-Chambers
Owner and manager, Le Bistro by Liz, 1333 South Park Street Liz Ingram-Chambers gets emotional when she talks about Le Bistro. “It’s my way of taking care of people, my way of making people happy.” After entering the scene as a server in college, she fell for the industry and the relationships she built with […]
Ami Goto
Owner and chef Dharma Sushi, 1476 Argyle Street Ami Goto was hired as a server at Dharma Sushi five days after she arrived from Japan in 1998. It was her first foray into restaurant life and, in the beginning, just a way to pay her bills. Flash forward a few years and her boss, Hideki […]
Sheena Clark & Kathy Cooper-MacDonald
Owners, Made With Local, madewithlocal.ca It didn’t take long for co-workers/gym buddies Sheena Clark and Kathy Cooper-MacDonald to take their friendship to the next level and become badass business parters, snowballing their “wouldn’t it be cool if” idea into Made with Local. They’ve gone from making granola bars for farmers’ markets in lobster pots in […]

