CAYUGA—It’s been 15 years since Cayuga’s popular Twisted Lemon Restaurant and Boutique Inn first opened their doors on July 19, 2009. For owners Dan and Laurie Megna, it’s been the culmination of a lifetime’s worth of passion for food, service, and a fine eye for detail.
The pair first met at a restaurant in Oakville where they both worked.

“I was a young sous-chef in a French fine dining kitchen and she was a server,” recalled Dan.
As their relationship blossomed, the couple made the decision to bank on themselves, with a focus on the aspects of the service and food industries they loved, and jettisoning those elements they did not.
“It was really important for us to find a small town,” said Dan, citing a desire for their children to experience a slower pace of life rich in community values.
The couple found their home in Cayuga in 2006.
“This property came up and had all this cool history to it, and this huge 1,600 sq. ft great room. This was our home for the first couple of years we lived here,” said Dan.
Before opening the doors to Twisted Lemon, the pair got to know their community by offering private catering and cooking classes. Quickly embraced for their services, they found themselves stretched thin between their passion and their out-of-town jobs in the GTA.
“We were doing crazy hours and had to say to ourselves ‘what do we do now, do we grow, or fold’,” recalled Dan. “We decided to go all-in and build a restaurant in our house. We basically designed the restaurant in our living room. We did it with masking tape on the floor, mapped it all out at the end of the night with a glass of wine and a beer.”
He explained the philosophy behind their original vision for the restaurant: “We wanted to blow the lid off pretension. In our industry, when you hear the term ‘fine dining’, it comes with this expected level of pretension and hoity-toity-ness.”
He said that while friends in the community wished them well at the start, those well wishes were tempered with expectations that the harsh realities of the industry would see the doors close within a year.
“That was a lot of our fuel. A lot of the survival instinct you get in this business is through truly believing in yourself. If you don’t, you’ve already lost.”
While he called the past decade and a half a rollercoaster, he said the team behind Twisted Lemon’s success remain grateful and proud: “It still astonishes and fuels us to know we are getting new people every day.”
For a destination like Twisted Lemon, the pandemic was a uniquely challenging period where they “had to reinvent our business every week because the rules were changing, people’s mindsets were changing.”
It was Laurie who came up with a solution that helped carry the restaurant through those dark days. Her ‘Clarity’ branded cocktails, a shelf-stable beverage, became a popular social distancing tradition, with people ordering and then sharing the drinks via online happy hours.
The business is in good hands too, with the pair’s son, Rion, becoming a larger presence in the kitchen now.
“We truly are a close-knit family in Twisted Lemon,” said Dan. “There’s friction, but that’s all based on us embracing who we are as real people.… The people who are here are here because they want to be.”
The secret to Twisted Lemon’s menu is in the freshness of the ingredients, many of which are either grown in the Megna’s personal backyard garden (with many vegetables cycling in and out of bloom all season long under Laurie’s watchful eyes), or sourced from local farms, like Richardson’s and Snyder’s Sweet Corn.
“The integrity of respecting the ingredients makes the biggest difference on the final plate,” said Dan. “We try to source it from our local community as close to the building as possible. How grateful are we here in Haldimand that we have an unbelievable amount of purveyors.”
The restaurant was recently awarded Feast On certification, thanks to those local sourcing efforts, with over 60% of all ingredients used sourced in Ontario, and a large selection of Ontario craft beers and Ontario VQA wine by the glass.
“That’s huge when you think about the nuances of the menu,” said Dan.
The restaurant has also received a Hilton ‘Best Small to Medium-sized Business’ award and a Southwestern Ontario Tourism Corporation ‘Innovator of the Year Award’ recently for their Experiential Getaway Partnerships program. Guests at the restaurant or inn are provided with a booklet full of locally sourced ideas for a fun excursion – from brewery tours to wood-working classes, the booklet contains about 24 local experiences or products.
“This is something we are extremely proud of,” said Dan. “70% of our guests are from out of Haldimand County.… We knew we had an opportunity to help show people how incredible the community really is.”
He said that the pair don’t ask for anything from participating businesses, except, “Just deliver. Be yourselves, give these people an incredible experience.”
With 15 years under their belts, Dan said they are focused on a new goal – making Canada’s top 100 restaurant list. Despite all their success, they continue to focus on “putting our heads down and refining our small details.”
Dan thanked the community that has supported him and Laurie over the years.
“From the bottom of our hearts – thank you. We wouldn’t be here without the support that we have. We hope every one of our flavour junkies from day one to the current day has a memory that’s going to stick with them the rest of our lives. That’s why we do what we do.”