The Twisted Lemon

It’s a busy Saturday night at the Twisted Lemon, an award-winning restaurant in the picturesque town of Cayuga, Ontario. All burners are ablaze. Chef Dan Megna and his staff are putting the finishing touches on a stuffed rack of lamb when a young boy runs in. Dan stops what he’s doing to pick up the child, plants a big kiss on his cheek and says goodnight.

“It doesn’t matter how busy we are. I am so grateful for that moment,” Dan says the next day, when the restaurant is closed and he gets to play full-time dad. “Knowing that as hard as we work and as stressful as it gets, the kids are here. It’s the greatest feeling in the world.”

Passion and love of family are what drive Dan and his wife, Laurie Lilliman. An uncompromised commitment to fresh local cuisine is what’s made their restaurant a success. And it’s the Twisted Lemon’s very unusual location that allows both the restaurant and the family to thrive.

The couple — both with extensive experience in the hospitality industry — was operating a fast-growing catering business out of the home they share with their son, Rion, 3, and Laurie’s two daughters, Jaclyn, 12, and Rawny, 14. After they had to turn down a big function, they decided it was time to take the next step. Over a glass of wine, they made the decision to open a restaurant — in their living room.

“We knew if we were going to do this, we’d have to do it our way and go forward with 100 percent conviction,” Laurie says.

It was just a matter of getting everyone else in the family comfortable with the idea. “We sat down with the girls and said, ‘OK, fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be very unusual, and it’s going to get messy.’”

As Jaclyn recalls: “At first, I thought, ‘It’s just a restaurant — they’re just going to be over there working and then come back home and stuff.’ Boy, was I wrong! But after awhile, we kind of got used to it, and we made it work.”

Making it work meant renovating the entire home, a former church on a corner lot two blocks from the mighty Grand River. They divided the new restaurant from their private living quarters and converted Rawny’s bedroom into a living room, all while Laurie and Dan were caring for a newborn. “We didn’t sleep,” says Laurie.

If that wasn’t stressful enough, the family had a film crew from the Food Network Canada show “The Opener” filming their every move in the days leading up to the moment they made their first dollar as a restaurant. Host David Adjey, a former personal chef for Dan Aykroyd and competitor on “Iron Chef America,” ultimately pushed them in the right direction, encouraging them to be “militant about being local.”

“He made us own our dream,” says Laurie. “By day three or four, you can see Dan’s attitude change to ‘this is our home and our dream, and this is who we are.’ And I am so grateful for the advertising and exposure we got.”

With its emphasis on fresh local ingredients and a commitment to quality cuisine in a relaxed atmosphere, the Twisted Lemon has quickly attracted a following from as far away as Toronto and the United States. The locavore concept firmly put small-town Cayuga on the culinary map, shining a spotlight on the area’s bounty, from the local lamb to the basil, rosemary, dill and peppermint grown in Dan’s own garden.

It’s not to say the path to their success has been easy, especially at the beginning. “It was one of the craziest things we ever imagined,” Dan says. “But we all came out holding hands. It was a really cool scenario.”

The key was keeping an eye on what Laurie calls the crystal ball. She pauses while setting the dinner table in the family’s small eat-in kitchen. Over the sound of kitchen appliances whirring, phones ringing, the girls singing and Rion playing with his trucks on the floor, she explains.

“Everyone, regardless of what they do, has their own balls in the air. Everybody’s juggling rubber balls, and then there’s that crystal ball — your health, your family, your close friends, the stuff that is the most important to focus on. The other balls will bounce, but the crystal ball won’t. If you lose your job, you can get another one. If this whole thing falls apart, it’s not the worst thing that could happen. We’ll be together as a family.”

And on this Sunday afternoon, the restaurant on the other side of the wall is quiet, giving the entire family an opportunity to gather around their own table for a meal together and enjoy each other’s company.

Rawny’s Greek Salad

(All vegetables are rough chopped. Amounts of each can vary.)

Ingredients
Cucumber, with skin on
Tomatoes
Red onion
Black olives
Red, yellow and orange peppers
Feta cheese
Fresh oregano
White or red wine vinegar
Olive oil
Kosher salt
Freshly cracked pepper

Toss together all vegetables and olives and top with feta cheese and oregano. Serve the salad naked and set out salt and pepper and bottles of wine vinegar and olive oil for dinner guests to dress the salad themselves. »