MENNOMEX

 

While doing a little web-searching to learn more about Amish author David Kline, I came across The Amish Cook website and this wonderful picture of a restaurant in Aylmer, Ontario.  Kevin Williams writes:  

I have visited so many Amish and Mennonite food businesses through the years: bakeries, bulk food stores, candy-makers…but the above photo captures one of my favorite Amish country businesses: Menno-Mex on the eastern edge of Aylmer.  Aylmer is a tiny town but a bubbling cultural cauldron of plain…there is a large contingent of Russian-Mennonites with their European features and distinctive dress, an equally sizable community of traditional Old Order Amish, and still a bunch of Mexican Mennonites who have returned from south of the Rio Grande to live. It’s a community coursing with a “plain diversity” unseen elsewhere. Many of the Mexican Mennonites, fair-featured as they are, still crave the staples they grew up on.  It’s this group of returnees that was the inspiration behind Menno-Mex a store that sells typical plain food and wares alongside jalapenos, tamales, and Mazapan chocolates.  Truly a unique – and as the photo shows – colorful store to visit. 

SIGH, my one regret is not getting a recipe for caramel-walnut pie t from an Amish man in Aylmer.  He had offered to run inside to get it from his wife, but being in kind of a hurry I passed up on that…bet it was good!

More on David Kline later.....