Canada's healthiest restaurants: Jane's on the Common
This East Coast spot boasts a made-from-scratch menu
By Chris Johns
You wouldn’t know it today, but in 2003 when Jane Wright took over the eatery that would become her restaurant “jane’s on the common” in Halifax, it was, as she puts it, “just dripping in oil.” She’s not kidding when she says, “We’ve made some significant changes since then.”
Today, the bright, clean space with blackboard menu focuses on fresh comfort food made entirely from scratch. Many of Wright’s dishes, such as her steamed black bean stew and even the baked Nova Scotia apple with dried fruit and maple rum sauce, are gluten free. And she tries to live by the idea that “if a dish has more than four ingredients that you can’t pronounce, you shouldn’t eat it.”
That’s why her new takeout spot, which opened last year beside the restaurant, has the ingredients listed for each dish—and there’s not a diglutamate, a sorbate or a guanylate among them. 2394 Robie St., janesonthecommon.com
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Best Health Magazine, October 2009
My good friend from Canada sent this to me since I was recently diagnosed with Celiac Disease. Even though I wouldn't want to bruise my friend's best efforts, I was highly offended especially from a restaurant critic's point of view of putting a gluten free recipe in a widely read magazine that wouldn't have normally had gluten in it. As I have been researching what to eat and how to cook the adjustments of my diet I find it quite ironic that people put recipes in cook books that wouldn't normally have gluten in them and call it gluten free. It is almost an insult to my intelligence that I wouldn't normally know a chicken doesn't have wheat/gluten in it.
I am at this point strongly desirous for great gluten free recipes. It is hard to replace the under estimated wheat in our life, when wheat and other gluten grains are in almost everything we eat. In trying to replace $50-100 worth of products from my kitchen I was in debt for about $300-400 worth of products that I was unsure of how to use or cook/bake with.
I am sure this is a great restaurant and would have been great for you to print a bake good or sauce that actually had some other kind of flour in it that I would have liked to use. Thanks for a great bean soup.