Favourite local place to eat

 1. Juneberry
2. Never Better Coffee
3. Roughage Eatery / Sous Sol (tie)

Local breakfast and lunch restaurant Juneberry opened in July of 2020 as a collaboration between chef Scott Malcolmson, Marc Priestley, Kyle Matheson and Dana Cherski. Located in the Glenwood area, the restaurant has quickly become a favourite for dishes like fried baby potatoes, eggs benedict and Honduran balaedas.

Opening in the height of a pandemic was not their original plan, but they made it work. 

“We were grateful to open in that gap between lockdowns,” Cherski says. “We’d been planning to open for well over a year but hit a bunch of snags along the way.” 

While construction on their older building in the Glenwood area was full of surprises, they liked that Glenwood bridges the area between St. Vital and St. Boniface, and there were not many similar restaurants or places to visit in the area. 

Locality has always been key to the Juneberry team. All their design colours are inspired by Manitoba, as is the name for the restaurant itself. Juneberry is another name for Saskatoons, a berry grown and celebrated across Manitoba. 

Everything from their garlic aioli to the focaccia for the popular eggs benny is made in-house, Cherksi says, but what really made the restaurant special this summer was its staff. Most of the staff have been laid off due to the Code Red restrictions, but the Juneberry team hopes to hire them back as soon as possible. 

Since the lockdown, Juneberry has also adjusted their hours from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. to 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., in order to include a dinner menu with dishes like the oyster mushroom and kale pasta. 

“We’ve done our best pivot in these weird times that we are dealing with,” Cherski says. “It’s not what we’d envisioned, but it has been weird and good.”

Published in Volume 75, Number 12 of The Uniter (December 3, 2020)